Update on Moodle outages at UCR Extension

UCR Extension's Moodle site was scheduled to be unavailable for several days in both November and December while some work was done on the network infrastructure here. The November outage has been cancelled, leaving December 19th - 23rd as the only time in the near future that the system will be unavailable.

Most online courses are text-based - no surprise

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a short article discussing a recent report on online learning done by Eduventures. Despite all the excitement about new technologies, most classes lag behind in terms of innovation. That should surprise no one, especially not anyone who has used Blackboard, Moodle or any other CMS.

But when it came to technology, the Eduventures survey found that the widely used tools are email, text discussions that don't happen in real time, physical textbooks, and word and pdf documents.

We've got plenty of courses where these are the only tools being used, and some courses where it's the textbook email, and text discussions only.

PDF conversion tools

Creating PDFs is easy if you are using a Mac since it's part of the operating system, but on Windows you have a few more options. Robin Good's Master New Media site has a summary of free PDF conversion tools -- Convert To PDF: Guide To The Best Free Online PDF Conversion Tools.

Using Elluminate from Moodle

We recently added the Elluminate plugin to our Moodle installation at UCR Extension. This makes it easy to schedule a live session in Elluminate inside your Moodle course with the benefit that your students don't have to login again once they click the link to go to Elluminate.

Step by step instructions on using the Elluminate plugin (PDF).

Open Courseware

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about Open Courseware and online learning. They point out that while free access to quality learning materials is a great idea, few people are going to go through these materials just for the joy of learning. Most people need some kind of credentials. The bigger issue is cost -- open courses cost money to develop and put online, and in bad economic times, that money has dried up. The future of open courseware using the current model doesn't look good.

Personally, while I like the idea of being able to find quality course materials and use them freely, much of the stuff I've seen from Open Courseware sites has not been very usable. Sure, it's free, but I am not clear on who really benefits from these efforts. Putting your courses online may serve as a recruiting tool or generate good publicity, but do these materials really get used by others? That's what's unclear to me. The UK Open University's Open Learn effort provides courses in a variety of formats, including as Moodle archives. This makes it very easy to put the courses online, but even so, the motivation to go through such courses has to be high for anyone to really make use of them. The Chronicle does detail a few people who have found some of the Open Courseware videos useful as supplements to other courses. Maybe this is an effective way to use them.

Evaluating Online High School

Online schools in K-12 are growing fast and they raise new issues for college admission counselors. Chronicle.com has an interesting article about some of the challenges involved in determining quality in online programs, although not much in the way of answers. The comments about the article are equally interesting. The issues of cheating and rigor are mentioned and these are two of the same issues I have concerns about with regard to online courses at UC Riverside Extension. I think answers are easier to find when it comes to rigor. There are solutions for some of the cheating concerns (proctored tests), but that doesn't cover everything. On the other hand, similar issues exist for face to face courses, so the discussion shouldn't be limited to online courses.

Elluminate plugin for Moodle

We did a little testing with the Moodle plugin for Elluminate this week. The plugin doesn't do too much, but the two things it does should make it much more convenient to use Elluminate as part of a Moodle course. We currently use Elluminate for a small number of live online/webcast courses, but the plugin won't be used for those since they typically meet once a week for 10 weeks and are best scheduled all at once. The Moodle plugin allows you to schedule a single Elluminate session and creates a link which doesn't require students to login again. That makes it great for adding online office hours or live chats or presentations to a Moodle course. The instructor can set up the session at any time.

The next step will be helping instructors use Elluminate in ways that go beyond the lecture format and take advantage of some of the collaborative features –– the whiteboard and application sharing.

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.