Add, Delete and move Blocks in Moodle

Moodle's blocks are a great feature. They allow you to customize the look and functionality of your course home page. There are also times when you may not want blocks on your course page. These step by step instructions (PDF) explain how to add, delete and move blocks in Moodle.

Moodle Course Layout Diagram

PDF file showing the layout of part of a typical Moodle course with various items labeled.

ScreenSteps 2.5

I've been using ScreenSteps 2.5 for all of my step by step instructions. It has a few more editing tools which make it even more useful. Now that I can add text to the screenshots, there is rarely a need to go outside of the program. 

I was really surprised to learn that ScreenSteps is developed with Runtime Revolution, the HyperCard-like scripting language. It just shows how much you can do with a toolkit like that. Initially I thought ScreenSteps was not very Mac-like in terms of the interface, but those issues are really tied to what is available with Revolution.

Set up your Moodle course

This PDF file covers the steps involved in setting up a basic Moodle course.

Tracking in Moodle forums

Tracking is a feature in Moodle forums which will highlight unread forum messages so you can easily see what is new to you. You can turn tracking on and off for individual forums, but in order to use it, you must first turn it on in your profile. Instructors have the option of turning tracking on or off or making it optional for each forum they create in a course. This means if your instructor turns off tracking, you won't be able to track posts in a forum. The default setting is optional, so each student can decide whether or not to track posts.

If you turn on tracking for a forum and you are also subscribed to that forum (receiving copies of posts via email), you will notice that posts you've been emailed will be marked as read once you return to the forum in Moodle. There is no communication between the email message and Moodle –– as long as you are sent the post via email, Moodle will mark it as read. If you aren't going to read forum posts via email, you may want to turn off any subscriptions so you can use the tracking feature.

Step by step PDF file.

Moodle Help at UCR Extension

We have moved all of our Moodle instructional materials onto our Moodle site in a course accessible to any instructor or student with access to our site. The materials include short videos and PDF files. I'm making the PDF files available here to anyone who would like to use them. Some of the instructions may be specific to Moodle at UCR Extension, but most are general and will apply to any installation of Moodle 1.9x.

Future of Cyberlearning presentation

Christine Borgman's presentation from this week's EduCause conference is available online as a combination video and presentation recorded with Mediasite. The quality is impressive -- I can get just as much out of the presentation at my desk as I would have sitting in the auditorium. The title is the Future of Cyberlearning and it is based on the recent NSF report with the same name. Professor Borgman was the chair of the committee which produced the report. They present an exciting future for technology and learning, but I have two sons who are students in a school district that bans all electronic devices, so as enthusiastic as I am about the power of technology to enhance all aspects of learning, I'm a little skeptical about the impact it might make in schools. The same story has been told too many times already and despite lots of examples of success, there are too many examples of non-use. 

Download Moodle courses from the Open University

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a course as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, they can be modified and re-used as you like.

The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. Just download the complete course, upload it to your Moodle installa

tion, click Restore and now the course is ready to be modified 

or offered as-is. I was able to add a couple of courses to Moodle pretty easily this way and I think there are some very good ones among the hundreds available on the Open University OpenLearn website.

New books on online learning coming from Jossey Bass

I really like the books in the Jossey-Bass series on Online Teaching and Learning. There are two books coming out this fall/winter -- Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: The Power of the Read-Write Web by James A. West and Margaret L. West, and Assessing the Online Learner: Resources and Strategies for Faculty by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt. Both sound good to me and you can download a sample chapter from each at the website.

Shorter lectures for online courses

I always recommend using shorter lectures for online classes, and that seems to be the trend. The Chronicle of Higher Education says that many online instructors who record their lectures have found that 20 minute segments work well. It's a different situation in the face to face classroom, but even so, I know that I am not usually spellbound by long presentations unless the speaker is well-organized and has prepared their presentation well. With podcasts, the ones I listen to most frequently are around 30 minutes long, or if they are longer, I listen to them in two sessions. 

SketchCast

If you are looking for a different way to add a presentation to your blog or online class, SketchCast might be worth a look. It is a browser-based tool which allows you to record your drawings or text and record audio along with what you are putting in SketchCast window. The videos are hosted on the SketchCast site, so you can easily embed them into your site. Here's the demo:

Changes to login procedure for Blackboard users

We have had a large number of calls recently from UCR Extension students related to login problems at ilearn.ucr.edu. Almost all students and instructors should be using the CAS login button and not the iLearn Community Users login (which was used in the past).

Some accounts (like mine) will continue to work with the iLearn Community Users button, but this is a temporary situation. Eventually, everyone will login using the CAS Login button.

So, if you have unexpected problems logging in, make sure you are using the CAS Login button. If you have already tried to login using the iLearn Community Users button, you may need to switch browsers or clear your browser cache in order for the CAS Login to work.

Issuu

Issuu is similar to iPaper in functionality and ease of use, at least for creating documents. Here's what it looks like. You only get to see the small version here. To read the full size document you have to go to the Issuu site. I'm not sure I like that:

iPaper

iPaper looks like a nice way to add documents to your site. Here is an example using the document I wrote up on Blogging with Blackboard. The quality is similar to PDF and the reader doesn't have to download anything. The viewing options are pretty nice, with a page view and fullscreen mode. The slowest part is converting your documents since that is happening on their server. I'd like a local application to do the conversion to speed things up:

Read this doc on Scribd: Using Blogs