Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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.

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.

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 .

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) .

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about Open Courseware and online learning. They point out that while f ree 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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 tu...

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.