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/

Eportfolios in Engineering – Advantages and Disadvantages

Recently, John Fielke talked to us about his experiences with using e-portfolios in his course ‘Computer Techniques’. This posting will highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages John found when using PebblePad with his first year engineering students.

Using PebblePad as a webfolio tool with engineering students - Advantages and Disadvantages.

Advantages:
I chose to use PebblePad as a tool for the students to use to submit their computer models and drawings. The year before, we used AssignIT where the students put all their work into one zip file and uploaded it into AssignIT, producing a series of files for assessment. By using PebblePad, I was looking at linking those files together with a bit of reflection from the students about how they completed the assigned tasks. AssignIT requires all of the student’s work to be bundled into one zip file and submitted as one file. I have used this twice now with large files and on both occasions, AssignIT has crashed as the students were submitting these very large files at the same time. PebblePad not only allows multiple smaller files to be uploaded, the students can upload these files gradually each week.

I used the profiler tool to get the students to look at their work and reflect on their learning outcomes by answering a series of questions. The profiler tool is a dynamic, real time resource so we can look at the students’ work and provide immediate feedback, and allow the students to act on this feedback prior to their work being assessed. In addition, it can actually make marking very easy because work can be assessed as it is submitted rather than in a block at the end of the course.

Students saw growth in their knowledge

Another advantage is file preservation. If the students upload their work regularly, they reduce the risks of losing files or having their files corrupted.

Students can create a personal page with a photo of themselves, a few of their aspirations and a some personal background allowing academics to get know the students on a personal level and not just their name and ID number. If webfolios are used across multiple courses, the students can just call up this page into each course webfolio.

Disadvantages:

To utilise some of PebblePad’s features the students need to upload their work regularly, but many were reluctant to do this. Few students took the opportunity to respond to the feedback we provided and make changes to their work before it was formally assessed.

Some students did not understand the importance of sending their work to the gateway. We also had the issue of students thinking they could use the one webfolio for two courses resulting in some students sending work to the wrong gateway.

PebblePad is an interesting repository for work but the way it is structured, asset tracking and asset finding is not very user friendly. Asset management issues included students deleting files and breaking links between files, or updating a file and not updating the hyperlinks resulting in missing files. All we see is what students link to their webfolio, not the work that they have uploaded into PebblePad. Additionally, some students compressed their work up in file formats not able to be opened by the university computers. The students needed to resubmit in the correct zip file format. We held a session on webfolio development but less than half the students attended that session. The students who attended the session found it much easier than those who did not.

In hindsight, I realise that I should have asked the students to submit a single zip file each week and post a reflective comment about that week’s work rather than submitting up to 10 files for a week. Accessing multiple files is very time consuming in PebblePad.

A passionate group of students absolutely disliked PebblePad as it was either too difficult to use or too simplistic in its capabilities. Others wanted to personalise it to the limits that other web authoring software allows. PebblePad did not easily allow this. The other drawback of PebblePad is that we were looking at engineering drawings and whilst it allows viewing of jpegs their resolution was not high enough for us to read these drawings very clearly and individual files had to be opened in a series of cascading menus to view their work and this became quite time consuming.

Future Directions

Some of the improvements that could be made to Pebble Pad are to give it a corporate UniSA rather than a primary school feel. I would like to see it re-badged, corporatised and the PebblePad name removed. The interfaces, the fonts and low-tech look of it do not appeal to engineering students.

I still think that e-portfolios are a good learning tool for the students and they integrate and roll everything in together. The students have a record of their learning, which they can reflect on if they want to. My advice to other academics would be to get on board and use some of these developments that the university is resourcing and not try to do these things on your own, but have the corporate body backing you. After my experience with PebblePad this year, I would love to use some form of effective, interactive, feedback providing, reflective online submission method in the future.

Eportfolios in Engineering

Today, John Fielke will be talking to us about his experiences with using e-portfolios in his course ‘Computer Techniques’, which is one of eight core courses common to all of The University of South Australia’s Bachelor of Engineering degrees.

Dr. Fielke identified three interesting areas that arose from his experience with using e-portfolios, or webfolios, for the first time in 2009 in his Computer Techniques course.

The use of online formative feedback for students using webfolios

PebblePad is a ‘real time’ webfolio tool, which allows academics to review students’ work and provide formative feedback. During my Computer Techniques course I gave my students feedback and then allowed them to update their work. However, very few students took up this opportunity. I suppose the students could be helped to see the benefits of the provision of this type of formative feedback if marks were allocated for the use of the feedback, but it is still up to the students to decide if they want to use to take advantage of this.

Using the Profiler tool in PebblePad to assist students to reflect on his/her development of the UniSA Graduate Qualities

Another part of PebblePad that I used was the profiler tool where I got the students to reflect on their learning outcomes. The profiler offered the opportunity for me to ask students questions and I tailored these to allow the students to reflect on the university’s graduate qualities. For example, I asked questions about their background knowledge of computer-aided engineering drawing before the course, and then I asked them to rate their knowledge after the course.

The profiler tool not only provides information about the students, but also allows the students to reflect on their own development. For example, I asked the students to rate the effectiveness of their learning in specific learning environments such as the computer practicals or the lectures. This allowed the students to acknowledge that they did learn differently in different modes. The best part of the profile is that you see this in real time as the students are working on it and you can use the reporting function to find out where everyone is up to at a specific time.

Students reflected on their modes of learning

The students might be inclined to put off their thinking about the graduate qualities until they near graduation, however, presenting a series of questions that they have to answer about their current personal development makes them reflect on this and helps them to think very clearly about the skills they are developing even at this early stage of their studies.

Self-assessment using the Profile tool in PebblePad
I also used the profiler tool to ask the students to reflect on their effort and learning in the course, and predict their grades. I was surprised at the number of students that self-rated themselves quite low and identified that they did not put a huge effort into the course. They included many comments to justify why this was the case. Some students did think they deserved a HD, whereas other students thought they deserved a C and suggested that they had understood most of the course but had a few difficulties here and there. Some self- rated themselves as a P2 and commented that they did not try too hard, but thought they had done enough to scrape over the line. A couple of students rated themselves as an F and explained that they had not had the time to put the effort into the course. I was very surprised at how accurately they predicted their grades, probably within one grade. It really showed to me that the students do acknowledge the amount of work they put in and they do aim for a grade. They are not all after a HD for an assignment, they might like it but in reality, they are just going to do enough work to get the grade they are aiming for.

It was very easy using the profiler tool. The reporting function allows quick and easy access to information provided by the students. However, there is so much functionality in PebblePad that we still have not used.