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”.

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.

A conversation with Peter Kentish about Moodle quizzes

I cornered Peter Kentish recently, gave him coffee, a comfy chair with a cushion and asked him to recount  some of his experiences about using Moodle quizzes to share with our readers. 

Q: How come you are using Moodle Quizzes now?

It all started in 2007 when the new common first year in engineering began. I had always taught my old Engineering Materials course with a cohort of 60-70 students using 6-7 multiple choice and text-based questions but now, with the new common first year core course it was going to be 200! There was no way I was going to be able to do all that marking! I knew  that the quiz approach had worked well for motivating my students to learn consistently in this course so I asked for an automated system to help me mark these tests. 

It wasn't the first time I had asked for an automated assessment system. The UniSAnet team tried several times but were quite frustrated in their efforts to create an in-house 

online assessment tool and resorted to trialling the Moodle version. I was one of 2 people who were allowed to use this environment and test it for the University. 

How do you use it?

I run 6 tests during the study period for this course. For each these there is actually a pair of quizzes. The first is a practice (non-assessable) one that students can attempt as many times as they like, find out which they got right or wrong and also what the right answer is. Then there is an assessable version that counts for grades.  There about 30-35 items in the assessable one and 15 or so in the practice version. 

A screen grab from the Moodle quiz environment

 

Students do the assessable quizzes in a computer pool during their tutorial time. I set the time the quiz is open for and a password - I make these up so they are different for each tutorial class. When all the classes have finished taking the test I send them their results which have been automatically marked. 

What has it been like using Moodle quizzes?

The system itself has been quite good - robust.  There have been virtually no bugs in the system - just one that hasn't been solved. This has no negative effects provided you are aware of it.

Like most things there are positives and negatives - there has been a lot of time setting up the database of questions, but the time saved with the auto marking has more than made up for it - particularly as I am now in the second year. The benefit will continue for future years as less time is required in maintaining the database.

How do you come up with your questions?

When I first started I had my old questions that needed to be entered into my database which took a long time. Now, when I want to set up a test I create a shell for it (setting the time and password for the class) and select the questions I want from my database. Each year I choose different questions. I also use the random shuffling functionality - my selected questions are presented in a different order and answer options are also in different order for each student (this shuffling feature can be turned off). 

Also, at tutorials I get ideas for questions where the content is applied to problems and write new questions to add to my database. This is good as I really want to test students application of knowledge rather than recall of memorised facts.  

Also, tutorials are not assessed directly, so to motivate students to engage with the tutorial activities I warn them that a certain amount of the quiz items are going to come from the tutorials so they need to do this work (i.e. memorisation of facts will not be enough to be successful - you are not very good as an engineer if you are not able to apply knowledge to solve problems!)

An example of a question from a practice quiz

What do the students think?

They generally like MCQ best - they think they have an advantage as the right answer is there they just need to find it.  For the first practice quiz there were over 958 attempts - some students attempted it 15 times, others not at all. The average mark for the test was about 70%. 

Even though the students were advised that quiz 2 would be more complex than the first, the number of attempts on the practice test did decrease to 795 -probably because the students have more competing interests or they have been lulled into a false sense of security from test 1. The average mark for this second test, which was more difficult,  was  lower - around 60%. 

Moodle curious?

When I first found out the Moodle was a real contender for our new online learning platform a few years ago I thought it would be good to see what it was like. 

My first exploration was edna - which offers free sites for educators as well as the opportunity to reach out to others in online groups - and uses Moodle for its environment. I had to make an application and after a day or two I was given approval to play in my own spot. To be honest I never got very far  - it wasn't intuitve (for a lass grown up on UniSAnet)  and I could never find the time to do the training course (although they offered a few times). 

This 1 minute movie gives an overview of the groups. 

This year I have now done the 2 day training and am able to author. The environment is very flat - all on one page - which is odd.

The stunning thing for me was the online assessment options available - with marks going straight into the system. It will be ultimately make the early assessment of student learning much easier, faster, better. 

I have started my first site (another 6-8 weeks before it will be finished as still preparing content). It is planned to be one that will be the basis for some of the ICUP modules (you can import and export easily out of Moodle). It is  on a tiny development server (slow performance) but it is enough for the experiment. 

There are still many decisions to be made for the new environment which will start going live in 2010 - e.g. will AssignIT stay or will we use the Gradebook in Moodle? What e-portfolio tool will we integrate? If its PebblePad what about the gateways??? What will we call it? (it won't be Moodle). 

But this is in the hands of others.... 

By the way, they are planning a progressive transfer; 5% first, then 30 % by another time etc... All done by the end of 2011 with UniSAnet switched off. 

Diana