Using videoconferencing in the classroom

An interesting article about incorporating guest speakers into classrooms using Skype or a virtual classroom tool (Adobe Connect) and a new Skype service for educators to trade tips and tricks, called "Skype in the classroom."
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Question-for-Professors-/126073/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

(Thanks to Alistair for this link)

Moodle tool guide is 'the cat's pyjamas'

Overwhelmed with the tools available to you in learnonline (Moodle)?


A simple 1 page colour-coded guide is available - that summarises what each of the common Moodle tools can do, and rates the tools for different teaching and learning purposes (author: Joyce Seitzinger) 



http://www.cats-pyjamas.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/MoodleToolGuideforTeachers_May2010_JS.pdf

Moodle @ UniSA

Interview with David Cropley, Associate Professor in Engineering Innovation, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia.

Assoc. Prof. David Cropley has been using Moodle for one of his Masters Degree in Military System’s courses this year and has given Moodle two thumbs up. He was one of the first at UniSA to use Moodle and began exploring the software on the recommendation of a colleague who had experienced success with Moodle. Whilst discovering what Moodle could do for his students and colleagues, Assoc. Prof. Cropley learned that UniSA were also looking at Moodle to replace the current, yet ageing, UniSAnet.

His decision to use Moodle was based on a colleague’s suggestion that it seemed to do a good job. “Once I started to look into it a little bit more, I found it certainly offered more useful features compared to UniSAnet that would help to meet our goals. It probably does a better job than UniSAnet in facilitating the student interaction and getting them to be more involved in participating in the things that are going on each week.”Assoc. Prof. David Cropley currently has completed one delivery on his first Moodle course, with a second course now underway. Development of further courses is ongoing with two more coming on board next year. Twelve months from now the full complement of eight courses should have a Moodle homepage.

“I certainly think it is easier to use than UniSAnet and it is more user-friendly from my point of view. It is easier to sit down, log on to it and do the things I need to do in terms of looking at the discussion forums and quizzes. It is certainly straight forward to use and did not take a lot of time to become reasonably conversant with Moodle. It has not created such an overhead that you think that it is too hard to use. It has always been easy enough to use or quick and easy enough to work out problems, so I have always been encouraged to keep using it.”

When quizzed about his top five features of Moodle, Assoc. Prof. David Cropley suggested the calendar was particularly useful for keeping students organised and on track. “The calendar feature alerts the students to milestones during the course. I think it can result in better learning outcomes if you give the students a slightly rigid structure.” Additionally he liked the quizzes and forums as these provided formative assessment which could be recorded in the Grade Book. “I could just leave it and then wait for the end of semester to tally it all up.”

He found the groups and groupings somewhat tricky to use but thought it was very useful as course participants included not only award students but also a small number of professional development people and it made it possible to create two views of the homepage. “It proved to be fantastically useful because we created one website and the users did not know that they were seeing something different from other people. Once I had worked out the structure of the groups and groupings it made it very easy to have two very separate customers but one webpage. That was very efficient for us.”

Assoc. Prof. David Cropley believed that it was a bit early to assess the success of the introduction of Moodle to his Masters Degree courses but believed that results he had seen so far were encouraging and that the students’ reactions had been very positive. “I would say that the comments that I have had from the students have endorsed the fact that they have found this flexible and they are able to fit it around their full time work”.

He is looking forward to continuing his association with Moodle over the next twelve months as he and his colleagues develop Moodle homepages for all eight courses. “The more I have used it, the happier I have become with it. It is proving to be flexible and doing everything we want it to do. I can’t say anything bad about it”.

Tools for teaching maths and other hard sciences

Some ideas for how to engage students of mathematics and hard sciences using online tools are shared in this feature article from the eLearn magazine by Maria Andersen.
http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=97-1

They include:

• tablet computers with equation writer
• video recording and editing
• jing screen capture that staff and students can use
• training for equation writing software
• free synchronous spaces for collaboration - even when you are not there
• using publisher resources
• toys like Wolfram - The Wolfram Demonstration and Wolfram Alpha
• videos of experts
• emulations of graphic calulators

Moodle Quizzes with Romeo Marian

We are using online quizzes in one of our courses at the moment, MFET 5022, Total Quality Management. We have students who are local, on campus, and we have them all around the world. Using Moodle quizzes allows us to have a remote presence. We can give the same attention to all students wherever they are.

I think the quizzes are very good for an analytical course where you can chop the course into pieces and questions can have specific answers, i.e. there is a set link between inputs and outputs. The questions can be varied and can be written in a way to allow students to apply reasoning. However, this would not work as well with synthetic courses, something like a design course for example – where the problems are open ended and have infinite combinations of solutions. I see this as a limitation. But this is a tool and there is no such thing as a universal tool. We have to use it where it fits best.

Once the system is up and running, it is self sustaining, you have to spend less and less time on development. I have not got there yet. My estimates are that I will need to do about ten deliveries to break even. I have three so far.

I set up a practice quiz which students can attempt as many times as they like. Every two weeks they have a topic summary quiz, followed later by a larger quiz which covers three topics. The structure of the marking – quizzes have a small overall contribution toward the final mark – permits quick and painless feedback, indicating areas needing further revision or extra study. Then at the end of the semester they have a final in-class exam. The subjectivity in the course is removed. The marks are automatically and instantly awarded. It’s a brutally honest system. To avoid academic dishonesty, with a handful of students taking the tests for their colleagues, the questions are randomly chosen from a test bank, with the questions and answers shuffled.

Advantages
I’m using quizzes to avoid technical issues and to ensure fairness. It’s the computer that does the tricks so I cannot be accused of unfairness, and this is a big advantage. Once it is set up, the marking virtually disappears. You just press a button to collect the marks at the end. All students are treated the same, regardless of whether they are locally or remotely located. The reaction from my students was fairly good. I got good results or better back from them in the CEIs when compared with the more traditional face-to-face delivery of the course.

Advice for colleagues
I would advise colleagues that if they have time to use online quizzes, they should go ahead, but beware. It takes a lot of work to set it up; it is work for the future. Once it is up and running, however, it saves you time. The time commitment is then reduced to ongoing maintenance. It is a huge job that you have to be aware of from the beginning. I knew it was big but I did not realise it was so huge. It is not really something you could do just to see if it works. It will not save any time in the short term.

Future directions
I started delivering this course, face to face about 5 years ago and based on historical data I expected 24 students, but ended up with 94. This resulted in 70kg of marking – and this is not a joke! This was the point where I thought something had to be done. It took me 4 years to find the instrument. Now I am left with only marking the final exam, which is really just ticks and crosses – multiple choice questions. That only takes me about 6 minutes per paper.
I do not know if there will be another course that I will modify this way because it is a huge amount of work. I do not see myself doing this again for at least a couple of years. It is new technology and we can only anticipate its evolution. There are probably other possibilities that we will discover in the future.

Getting ready to Moodle

We will start the conversion of 5% of our courses (~25 in ITEE) to Moodle very shortly - ready for teaching in Study period 2 2010 [the final decision on which courses these will be in our Division is in the hands of the Deans T&L - Brenton].

To start you thinking about Moodle and its functionality - here is a movie (2 min 45) that explains the bits of Moodle using lego.



There are also the Using Moodle book (this is what I used to build my first moodle course).

I am really impressed with the increased awareness of social presence within the Moodle environment that I am currently trialling with students. You know who the particpants are, when they are online, where they have been, where the unread discussion forums are - it really feels alive. I am hopeful that this change to Moodle will convince more teachers to use the online environment as a way to engage students in their learning.

Online conferences

Last weekend I participated in the MERLOT conference (Multimedia educational resource for learning online and teaching) in San Jose in California - but as a remote delegate. This meant that I

• joined in to live keynote sessions using virtual classroom software (Elluminate) with a web cam on the speaker and the slides interacting via chat
• participated in smaller breakout sessions interacting via chat and voice, and
• created my Second Life alter-ego Eliamber Keger to get to some sessions in Second Life learning spaces
• have access to recordings of the main sessions, as well as other resources.

Main problem - time difference - the sessions ran from 12 midnight to 9 am. I was okay the first night but reverted to recorded sessions afterwards.

I noticed that there is another online conference coming up that is relevant to our Division - the International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering (CISSE 09). Fully online on December 4 - 12, 2009.

Find out more here http://cisse2009online.org/