Moodling in 2016

About a year back I wrote my first 'annual review' of my adventures with Moodle. Now it's time to write one for 2016!

• Last January preparations for the first MoodleMoot in India were in full swing and I was invited to be one of the speakers. Here's my Storify of the event.
• In April the second AuthorAID MOOC in research writing got off to a start with a record number of participants.

  Latest research writing course pass 3000 starters as @RaviMurugesan & Joanna @askawild explain @INASPinfo's MOOCs pic.twitter.com/uDTtm5Uv4C

  — Philip (@PhilipHorgan) April 4, 2016

• In May I went to Dar es Salaam to facilitate a 3-day workshop for AuthorAID partners, and Moodle was high on the agenda.
• The day I got back from Dar es Salaam I was on a Moodle conference! This was iMoot 2016, the annual online Moodle conference. My talk was about how to implement formative assessment using Moodle quiz.
• From May to June I was involved in running a new online course on INASP Moodle for librarians in developing countries. My colleague Joanna later spoke about this course at PCF8 in Malaysia and we wrote a paper about it.
• Early in July I went to Mumbai to run a Moodle workshop at Adhyayan, a company with the noble mission of improving the quality of leadership and learning in schools. It was wonderful to see the team coming up with innovative ideas to use their Moodle site.
• In August I facilitated a workshop for an AuthorAID partner institution in Sri Lanka to help them include a Moodle component in their support programme for researchers. I went there again in October and was delighted to see them in action.

  Asela the facilitator of the @authoraid research writing programme @ColomboUni explains their Moodle site and sets up writing groups pic.twitter.com/nCGJieHw41

  — Ravi Murugesan (@RaviMurugesan) October 13, 2016

• In September I spent a couple of weeks in the US and made a trip to UW-Madison, my alma mater, where I met Erica Hagen who is a keen Moodler. We spoke about the joys of using Moodle but I was sad to hear that UW is moving from Moodle to Canvas.
• Soon after returning from the US I got ready for the third AuthorAID MOOC in research writing. I was at the INASP office in Oxford the day the course started, and Andy and I shot a welcome video standing together. For other courses we typically do this as a Google Hangout recording, with him in Oxford and me somewhere in India (I've been a little mobile lately).
• In November it was time for more online conferences - I spoke at the mini iMoot and gave a remote talk for OpenCon Ranchi. Both talks were about Moodle and MOOCs. Then I went to Vietnam to run a workshop for an AuthorAID partner institution, and they made a plan to run an AuthorAID online course on their own Moodle site.

  Designing online #learning for #researchers at Thai Nguyen University at today's training of trainers with @RaviMurugesan #inaspVN pic.twitter.com/L4LZMZBjlG

  — Jennifer Chapin (@jennifer_chapin) November 25, 2016

  Meanwhile, a poster I'd co-authored with Yaba College of Technology in Nigeria was presented at PCF8. 

  See @dbeloved's poster at #pcf8 to find out how his team ran an @authoraid online course in proposal writing for #TVET practitioners @COL4D

  — Ravi Murugesan (@RaviMurugesan) November 29, 2016

• In December I went to Dar es Salaam again for the annual AuthorAID project meeting, where I chatted about Moodle with our partner institutions in Dodoma and Dar es Salaam and presented updates to the AuthorAID team and partners on our MOOCs.

  @RaviMurugesan &@andy_nobes talking about the AuthorAID MOOC 2015 #AuthorAID2016 pic.twitter.com/3RYneLTXdI

  — Ismael Kimirei (@IKimirei) December 13, 2016

  And the second AuthorAID course run by Yaba College came to an end.

  Thumbs Up @RaviMurugesan for the collaboration. You rock! Thanks to the @INASPinfo @authoraid team for leading the way. https://t.co/9drhkzqb56

  — John T. Okewole (@dbeloved) December 22, 2016

• I had a learning itch to scratch last year - I really wanted to start exploring the treasure-trove of data in the Moodle database. The Moodle site I administer has thousands of users and we've run three MOOCs. There's a lot of data behind the front-end reports that were calling out to me. So I took the MoodleBites MySQL reporting course from HRDNZ through October and November. I have to say it wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be, but I did learn enough about the Moodle database to start getting my hands dirty with analysing forum ratings.

2016 was certainly an eventful year! Let's see what 2017 brings :-)

Getting to grips with the Moodle database

I've been a Moodler for many years and my work has been very much at the front end: web-based site administration, course creation and online facilitation. Every now and then, I do data analysis using Moodle reports and offer Moodle support to AuthorAID partner institutions. I've had a lot to do in each of these areas and I've been happily busy. But I had a nagging feeling about operating only on the surface of Moodle. So I decided to take the plunge into the world of databases with the unique 'MySQL Reporting for Moodle' course offered by HRDNZ, a Moodle Partner in New Zealand. I completed this course a couple of months back and I might write a course review at some point. For now let me just say that the main thing I got out of the course was an awareness and appreciation of the Moodle database.

Today I had the opportunity to work on the database of the Moodle site I administer. With more than 18,000 users and courses going back to 2011, it's not a small database. My goal was to get data related to forum ratings in a particular course, eg, how many posts were rated 'useful', which users received ratings, and which users gave ratings. The only way to do this, as far as I know, is to work with the Moodle database. There are no front-end reports that give you this information.

I actually made a post on a Moodle community forum yesterday asking for help, and today I posted a solution. It's not a detailed solution and definitely not the best. I'm sure there's a better way to do the whole thing using SQL queries. But for those who don't know SQL -- and those like me who have a smattering but would rather stick to CSV data for the moment -- my solution might be useful. Take a look if you're interested.

How the Wisconsin Idea inspires me in my edtech work

I'm a proud Badger. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an MS degree in electrical engineering about ten years back. It was quite a struggle as I opted to do research in a field I knew little about (don't ask why) and I was on the wrong side of 'publish or perish' for a few years. But one benefit of my relatively long stay at UW-Madison was the gradual assimilation of the Wisconsin Idea. You can read about it on Wikipedia and this is my favourite excerpt:

'Van Hise declared that he would "never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state". Today that belief permeates the UW System's work, fostering close working relationships within the state, throughout the country, and around the world.'

I was a teaching assistant for many semesters at UW, but I wouldn't have guessed then that education and edtech would become a big part of my career. Anyway, I'm not surprised. I was training to be an engineer but I was always a better teacher. The engineering side of my education has however been a boon for what I do with the 'tech' part of edtech and stuff like data analysis. But more than that, it's the Wisconsin Idea that I look to for inspiration.

I work in a capacity building context in international development, and lately I've been supporting some teams at universities in Ghana, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Vietnam use Moodle. They have different aspirations and varying levels of Moodle proficiency, but they all have one thing in common: they can see how a learning platform like Moodle can expand access to learning and networking opportunities for people at their university and beyond, in their region or even nation. Moodle is open source software and there's generally an IT person in the teams I work with. I tell them that how well they use Moodle is a matter of their own commitment, both on the technical side and pedagogical side. They can easily scale up to a level of supporting a few thousand students without needing very specialized support. That's good news for universities in developing countries where there's usually not a lot of money to go around.

I think open source edtech like Moodle and the Wisconsin Idea go hand in hand for the kind of work I do. They're both about breaking down geographical barriers to education. Living in India - far away from both Wisconsin and Australia (where the Moodle headquarters is) - I can feel the effect of both.

A Twitter conversation that reveals what open source is all about

Yesterday I tweeted a very minor complaint about exporting data from Moodle. Then this happened:

In case you didn't know, Martin is the founder of Moodle and the lead developer. Moodle is easily one of the world's most popular online learning platforms, with millions of registered installations.

When was the last time your comment about a trivial problem with something so big was picked up by the person who originally made that thing and nudged you to do something to help fix it?

THIS is what open source is all about. Any major open source software application is built by and for a community for people, who can - among many things - report bugs and suggest ideas, all of which are catalogued in an open, conversational space.

Of course, the software code being openly available under an open source license like GNU GPL is the defining aspect of any open source application, and I cringe whenever I hear people referring to free web-based tools as 'open source'. But open source is also about a community of people who share a passion, and it's about everyone in the community having a voice and the means to make a difference.

PS. I've reported this bug in the Moodle Tracker.

Coming full circle: Medium of instruction from colonial to post-colonial times in Tamil Nadu

This post is not about Moodle but about something else I'm passionate about: language. I work with people in different countries, and sometimes I get asked if I studied English at school in India. I used to find this question funny until I began to consider it in a post-colonial context.

My mother's parents were born in the 1920s in the Madras Presidency of British India, and they went to schools where the medium of instruction was English (that is, the language in which all subjects are taught). By the time India gained independence in 1947, they were young adults with high fluency in English. They had their first child - my mother - a few years later, and many others followed. None of them studied in English. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, my mother's generation in this part of the country went to schools where the medium of instruction was usually Tamil, the dominant language of the post-independence Madras state (which later became Tamil Nadu in a further division of Indian states along linguistic lines). English was simply a subject at school with not much relevance to daily life. It was however still the medium of instruction at university, and my parents, like most people at that time, struggled to adapt to the change from Tamil to English.

Why wasn't university education offered in Tamil? Some courses were, but I suppose it would have been an impractical project to translate entire bodies of knowledge into Tamil. With the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965, the importance of English as a 'link language' in the nation was strengthened. Indians have always been migrants to lands abroad, and it must have been obvious all the while that any international prospects for one's life and career hinged on English skills.

So it was perhaps natural that English would re-enter schools in a big way. My brother and I studied in English-medium schools in the 80s and 90, and this was completely normal for a middle-class Indian family. There was no question of studying in a Tamil-medium school. Such schools were considered to be rundown places of education run by the government for the poor, who aspired to send their children to English schools.

But Tamil is in no danger. It is a language with a long written history spanning 2,000 years. The Tamils are fiercely proud of their linguistic identity to the point of offending people from other parts of India, even if they can only use English to make their point.

XML template for creating entries to import into Moodle Glossary

Let's say you want to write a bunch of entries for a Glossary on your Moodle and you want to do this offline -- not directly on your Moodle. In that case the best course of action is to create an XML file with all the entries and import it into a Glossary.

Here's an XML template that you might like to use. It also contains an example of an entry including hyperlinks (you have to use &lt, &gt and &quot in place of <, > and ", respectively).

To create your own entries, copy the lines between <ENTRY> and </ENTRY>. The tags after </DEFINITION> need a binary input: 0 or 1. I'm not sure what <FORMAT> means but I don't think there's any harm keeping this and the last one - <TEACHERENTRY> - as 1. The other three tags match the below settings which you'll see when you try to add a new Glossary entry in Moodle. If they're not self-explanatory see this page.

PS. This post has been featured in Moodlenews!

List of emoticons in Moodle

Depending on the cultural and digital literacy context in which you work, you may find that people use emoticons very well, awkwardly, or not at all. If you'd like to promote the use of emoticons in your Moodle courses, here's a handy reference:

Emoticon	Meaning	Characters to type