I recently had an interesting discussion with a colleague about accessibility in online learning and I was inspired to make this table listing some aspects of accessibility for online course designers and developers to consider.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Making Moodle pages that are accessible site wide
If you'd like to add 'global' pages on your Moodle site that you can access anywhere, you might find the options in this post useful. These are the options I know of - I won't be surprised if there are more!
Option 1. As part of courses open to guests: You could create a course on your site that is open to guest access, and you could make pages and put publicly accessible resources here (as a kind of repository). The trouble is when you link to any page or resource here, the user will be taken to a completely different part of your Moodle site and this might break the user experience. The user might drift into the course with all the publicly accessible stuff and wonder what it's all about!
Option 2. Using the Main Menu block: On your site homepage add the 'Main Menu' block. Within this block you can add not just pages but any Moodle resource or activity that your site supports! I don't want my users to see the block itself on their homepage so I edit the block-level permissions to make it invisible to students and other roles. This does not affect the visibility of the pages I create in this block. I copy the URL and put it anywhere I like. And they appear neatly as 'Home -> Site pages -> Page title' in the breadcrumb without the confusingly long trail as in option 1.
Option 3. Using the Static Pages plugin: This plugin adds a feature to the Site Administration menu to let you create and maintain static pages. It's great but for one problem: spaces are not supported in the page title. So you are constrained to use one-word titles like 'FAQ' and 'contact', or you need to add hyphens/underscores between words in the title, which ends up looking weird in big font when the page is published.
Option 4. Adding a page directly on the site homepage: If you enable the setting 'include a topic section' in the Front Page settings of your site, you can add any resource or activity directly in the main section of your Moodle site homepage just as if it were a course section. I think the Label resource is particularly useful for the site homepage: with the right design or CSS you can add visually appealing content on the homepage. If you add any other resource/activity such as a page, the homepage develops a course-like character that you might not like!
Option 1. As part of courses open to guests: You could create a course on your site that is open to guest access, and you could make pages and put publicly accessible resources here (as a kind of repository). The trouble is when you link to any page or resource here, the user will be taken to a completely different part of your Moodle site and this might break the user experience. The user might drift into the course with all the publicly accessible stuff and wonder what it's all about!
Option 2. Using the Main Menu block: On your site homepage add the 'Main Menu' block. Within this block you can add not just pages but any Moodle resource or activity that your site supports! I don't want my users to see the block itself on their homepage so I edit the block-level permissions to make it invisible to students and other roles. This does not affect the visibility of the pages I create in this block. I copy the URL and put it anywhere I like. And they appear neatly as 'Home -> Site pages -> Page title' in the breadcrumb without the confusingly long trail as in option 1.
Option 3. Using the Static Pages plugin: This plugin adds a feature to the Site Administration menu to let you create and maintain static pages. It's great but for one problem: spaces are not supported in the page title. So you are constrained to use one-word titles like 'FAQ' and 'contact', or you need to add hyphens/underscores between words in the title, which ends up looking weird in big font when the page is published.
Option 4. Adding a page directly on the site homepage: If you enable the setting 'include a topic section' in the Front Page settings of your site, you can add any resource or activity directly in the main section of your Moodle site homepage just as if it were a course section. I think the Label resource is particularly useful for the site homepage: with the right design or CSS you can add visually appealing content on the homepage. If you add any other resource/activity such as a page, the homepage develops a course-like character that you might not like!
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Free Moodle test site with Bitnami and AWS
As a Moodler at a nonprofit I like to know how I can run a complete Moodle site on a low budget if I need to experiment. MoodleCloud is great to try stuff at the course creation level but it does not come with full rights for site admins. I'm a Moodle site admin, not a system admin, so I'm not too particular about server access.
A couple of weeks back I started on a project at work to make our Moodle site more visually appealing. I wanted to show prototypes as we went along without disturbing our production site, and I remembered that Bitnami has a Moodle stack. I opted for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) option as it seemed to offer the cheapest monthly price. Then I found out that I could sign up for the AWS Free Tier which offers 750 hours per month of compute time free of cost for 12 months! A month can have a maximum of 744 hours so I figured I should be able to run one Moodle 'instance' on the AWS Free Tier nonstop.
The process of setting up a Moodle instance on AWS through Bitnami was a bit intricate and I got stuck at the point of copying in the access key ID from my AWS account into my Bitnami account. There was something weird about the form field on Bitnami where I had to put in the access key ID. But soon it was a happy ending and I was lord of my own Moodle site in an obscure corner of the internet :)
Now I'm looking forward to tinkering on this site free of cost for up to a year!
A couple of weeks back I started on a project at work to make our Moodle site more visually appealing. I wanted to show prototypes as we went along without disturbing our production site, and I remembered that Bitnami has a Moodle stack. I opted for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) option as it seemed to offer the cheapest monthly price. Then I found out that I could sign up for the AWS Free Tier which offers 750 hours per month of compute time free of cost for 12 months! A month can have a maximum of 744 hours so I figured I should be able to run one Moodle 'instance' on the AWS Free Tier nonstop.
The process of setting up a Moodle instance on AWS through Bitnami was a bit intricate and I got stuck at the point of copying in the access key ID from my AWS account into my Bitnami account. There was something weird about the form field on Bitnami where I had to put in the access key ID. But soon it was a happy ending and I was lord of my own Moodle site in an obscure corner of the internet :)
Now I'm looking forward to tinkering on this site free of cost for up to a year!
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Moodling in 2017
It's that time again when I reflect on my Moodle experiences in the past year!
- Last January I tinkered with the Moodle database for the first time soon after taking the MoodleBites MySQL Reporting course. My goal was to get a count of the number of forum posts that received 'useful' ratings. I posted a query and a solution on the Moodle community forums, and my friend Farhan posted a better solution in the same thread. I've not yet got a chance to try out his solution though.
- In February I was busy revising a research article I'd written with my colleagues. We had submitted the article to a journal a few months before and we got a load of reviewers' comments. I thought the revised article would again be peer-reviewed so it was a huge relief when it was accepted a couple of days after we submitted it. The article, titled 'A MOOC approach for training researchers in developing countries', was published in the March 2017 issue of Open Praxis.
- May and June are the hottest months of the year in south India, where I live, but luckily I had some travel to take my mind off the weather. I went to Hyderabad to speak at ICT4D 2017 (Hyderabad was also hot though!) and made two trips to Tanzania to conduct training-of-trainers workshops for university lecturers interested in running the AuthorAID online course locally.
Thrilled to represent @INASPinfo at #ICT4D2017 to give an instructional talk based on our #MOOC success in #globaldev setting @authoraid pic.twitter.com/KuVTFEBGw9— ravi (@RaviMurugesan) May 15, 2017
The ODL Tower of Tanzania Open Uni is an imposing sight. Excited to be here to facilitate an @authoraid workshop! #Moodle #OER @INASPinfo pic.twitter.com/j9IgruWd7t— Ravi Murugesan (@RaviMurugesan) May 22, 2017
- I was inspired to look at the AuthorAID online course through a new lens after attending a scholarly commons workshop at Indiana University Bloomington in July, and I wrote this piece: Can an online course be a commons?
- In August my colleague Andy Nobes and I were invited to give a talk based on our Open Praxis paper at a webinar series run by e/merge Africa. We had a really engaged audience who asked a lot of questions!
- Last year we ran two AuthorAID MOOCs on our usual schedule: one in summer and one in autumn. Before the second one I had some time to make the course materials compatible with the Moodle Mobile app, and it was less work than I thought it would be. The course lessons are made with eXeLearning and I only had to change the theme for mobile compatibility. The core activities were of two kinds: quizzes and writing activities including peer assessment. Moodle Quiz is compatible with the app (even the offline feature of the app) but Moodle Workshop (for peer assessment activities) isn't compatible yet. Still, it was great to see that most of the course materials work well in the app! We got some nice feedback from the learners too :)
It really is great, and I love the doc that gives instructions on how to use the Moodle Mobile app, thanks! #phdlife— Bonita Squires (@bonitasquires) October 3, 2017
- After another exciting year of Moodling, it was unfortunate that I couldn't attend the MoodleMoot in Mumbai that took place in December. But I'm happy that my friends Farhan and Michelle, two of the most high-profile Moodlers in India, were part of it. Martin (the founder of Moodle) even went to Michelle's school! I'll sign off with the video he made:
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Is Moodle good for MOOCs? Let's inspect the question first.
Last week I had the pleasure of being a speaker in a webinar organised by eMerge Africa. My colleague and I spoke about MOOCs in the African context based on our experience running such courses on our Moodle site. During the lively chat one of the participants popped this question: 'Is Moodle good for MOOCs?' I didn't quite know what to say and I didn't want to start writing a 'yes, but...' response. Later I realised that the problem lies in the syntax of the question: 'Is X good for Y?' is not the best way to figure out the means to an end if the 'end' or goal is simplified or woolly to begin with.
Let's consider the Y in this case: MOOCs. What's a MOOC? A course with a large number of learners? Fine. What's this course about? What is this course made of - what kind of content and activities? What taxonomy levels do the learning objectives map to? What is the nature of student-student and student-teacher interaction? How will student work be evaluated, and how will the course itself be evaluated? Then, what does a 'large number of learners' mean? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? We need answers to all these questions and more to make the Y concrete. After that we can take up the question 'Is Moodle good for MOOCs?', and there's a good chance you'll find that it is!
Let's consider the Y in this case: MOOCs. What's a MOOC? A course with a large number of learners? Fine. What's this course about? What is this course made of - what kind of content and activities? What taxonomy levels do the learning objectives map to? What is the nature of student-student and student-teacher interaction? How will student work be evaluated, and how will the course itself be evaluated? Then, what does a 'large number of learners' mean? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? We need answers to all these questions and more to make the Y concrete. After that we can take up the question 'Is Moodle good for MOOCs?', and there's a good chance you'll find that it is!
Monday, August 28, 2017
Prevent automatic linking in Moodle
Do you (1) have auto-linking enabled on your Moodle site, (2) want to keep it enabled for a given resource or activity, and (3) want to prevent the auto-linking in specific places within this resource/activity?
I use Moodle 3.1 and the advice on this page about adding a span element with the nolink tag did not work for me: https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Autolinking
Sadly, the additional tips given here also did not work: https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Nolink_tags
The web address that I wanted to display as plain text rather than as a link kept appearing as a link. Argh!
So I looked for a generic HTML way (not Moodle specific) to prevent auto-linking and came upon this thread: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119801/allow-suppression-of-automatic-linking-of-web-addresses
Phew, problem solved.
You just have to add the <nolink> tag after the http bit of a web address, eg, http<nolink>://www.google.com/
I use Moodle 3.1 and the advice on this page about adding a span element with the nolink tag did not work for me: https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Autolinking
Sadly, the additional tips given here also did not work: https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Nolink_tags
The web address that I wanted to display as plain text rather than as a link kept appearing as a link. Argh!
So I looked for a generic HTML way (not Moodle specific) to prevent auto-linking and came upon this thread: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119801/allow-suppression-of-automatic-linking-of-web-addresses
Phew, problem solved.
You just have to add the <nolink> tag after the http bit of a web address, eg, http<nolink>://www.google.com/
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
A commoning experience because of my Moodle work
Recently I wrote a post on the Commons Patterns blog about whether an online course can be a commons. Check it out...
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