Tag Archives: Moodle

Content Management Systems, course management systems, eLearning, freedom, innovation, Moodle, Open Source Movement, software development

Legal Sense: CMS Edition

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This one is even more exciting than the SecondLife statement.

After the announcement that the USPTO was reexamining its patents in a case against open source course management software, Blackboard incorporated is announcing that it is specifically not going to use its patents to sue open source and other non-commercial providers of course management software.

From a message sent to users of Blackboard’s products and relayed by the Moodle community.

I am writing to share some exciting news about a patent pledge Blackboard is making today to the open source and home-grown course management community.  We are announcing a legally-binding, irrevocable, world-wide pledge not to assert any of our issued or pending patents related to course management systems or transaction systems against the use, development or support of any open source or home-grown course management systems.

This is a major victory. Not only for developers of Moodle, Sakai, ATutor, Elgg, and Bodington course- and content-management solutions, but for anyone involved in the open and free-as-in-speech approach to education, research, technology, and law.

Even more so than in Microsoft’s case, Blackboard is making the most logical decision it could make. Makes perfect business sense: they’re generating goodwill, encouraging the world’s leading eLearning communities, and putting themselves in a Google-like “do no evil” position in the general public’s opinion. Also makes perfect legal sense as they’re acknowledging that the law is really there to protect them against misappropriation of their ideas by commercial competitors and not to crush innovation.

A small step for a corporation … a giant step for freedomkind.

Academia, collaborative learning, Content Management Systems, course management systems, Education, educational technology, eLearning, Ethnography, Facebook, Learning, Moodle, profiles, ramblings, social networking, students, Teaching

Moodle and Collaborative Learning

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Something I just posted on a forum about the Moodle course management system.

Using Moodle: Thinking Through Groups

Here are some comments and observations about the “Groups” interface (where an instructor can put participants in distinct groups) and other group-related features in Moodle.
I’m currently teaching a smallish ethnomusicology seminar and a large (170 students) introductory course in cultural anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. I decided to get my intro students to work as teams on an ethnography project. It’s the first time in my (still relatively young) career that I’m getting students to do teamwork. Yes, it’s a challenge. Moodle has made it both easier and more difficult, IMHO.
Several of these are probably common feature requests from Moodle users and I’m not enough of a coder to implement any of those ideas. These comments also include “pie in the sky,” wacky, wishful thinking, “you gotta be kidding” thoughts about the potential of Moodle’s group-related features. Please excuse the craziness but don’t worry, it’s not contagious.
I’m using “instructor” for my role as the course creator and “participants” or “students” to refer to the people the instructor is putting in groups.

Observations, Comments

  • Listing participants by first name is inconvenient for large university classes. I would like to be able to sort students as I wish, as in the Participants list.
  • In large courses, it’s difficult to select participants who aren’t in any group yet. I understand that the interface is meant to make it possible for participants to be in multiple groups. But I believe it’s common for the instructor to be putting all students in separate groups. In such a case, it’d be so much easier to have the left-hand list of participants hide the ones which are already in a group and only show participants who still need to be put in groups. With 250 participants, scrolling that list back and forth has been very inconvenient.
  • The Participants and Groups sections overlap in function, IMHO. Maybe they could be merged. This would be especially useful in terms of messages. While searching for participants by group, selecting them, and adding them as recipients for a message works, it becomes quite cumbersome after a while.
  • When I click on a participant’s name in the left-hand list, I expect to be able to see to which team(s) this participant belongs.
  • I can select multiple participants in the left and right columns but I can’t select multiple groups to temporarily merge teams. This could be useful, especially while sending messages.
  • Several students seemed a bit puzzled about finding their groupmates. There could be a “group” section for students where they could not only see links to their groupmates’ profiles but also manage a kind of group profile.
  • It’s still somewhat unclear to me how Moodle handles groups. For instance, what does group visibility (separate or visible) mean for journal entries?
  • Maybe they can but I haven’t noticed how group participants may change the group’s name. That would be useful. Especially if they can add some information (available to the rest of the class or only to the instructor) about their group. Something like a group profile. In fact, it could summarize the profiles from all of the group’s members in one page (visibility to students as an option).

Feature Requests

  • In a way, it would be possible to work with groups as if they were individual participants. For instance, we could give grades to a group as a whole and have those grades show up in the group participants’ grade list. Or we could have one-click messaging for a group as a whole, directly from the Participants list.
  • It would be useful to be able to create a new group with selected students instead of having to prepare the groups in advance.
  • It could be neat to have both a group name and a unique group ID, especially with relatively large numbers of groups (I have about 40).
  • The number of participants in a team is very useful data and it helped me rebuild teams which had lost members during “drop and add.” Such data could be put in the interface so that the instructor can sort groups by numbers of participants.
  • Drag-and-drop (through AJAX) would be much more convenient than the current method for adding participants to groups. I guess this one is in the official plans but I want to voice my support for it! wink
  • It could be useful to be able to upload and download CSV or tab-delimited files with all the team information. The data might be available with grades or some such but it’d be very useful to download a grouped list of participants directly from the group interface. It would also be quite efficient to create groups in, say, Excel and be able to implement those groups in Moodle with a simple upload.
  • There might be a group building tutorial but I haven’t seen it in obvious places. Given the fact that the Moodle community is full of experienced instructors, that tutorial could have some advice about good grouping practices, maybe with some links to pedagogical issues.
  • There might be a group building tutorial but I haven’t seen it in obvious places. Given the fact that the Moodle community is full of experienced instructors, that tutorial could have some advice about good grouping practices, maybe with some links to pedagogical issues.
  • I haven’t checked if it might be available already but it’d be useful to have grouped Reports. I don’t want to monitor the activities of most of my students but it’d be useful to know if at least one group member is accessing Moodle frequently.
  • According to many people, it’s usually best for the instructor to create the groups, and it’s what I did. Yet, I wonder if there’s a way for students to create their own groups. If there is, I haven’t noticed it and my students haven’t either. (Maybe it’s a setting…)

Would These Work?

  • There could be a feature which would divide the course up into randomized teams automatically. I eventually used Lab Partners to create random teams that I then grouped in Moodle. It didn’t take me that long but it’s a bit error-prone and cumbersome. Fortunately, my teams will remain stable during the semester.
  • This one may seem like a far-fetched idea but it would be great to have more information about participants while we’re forming the teams. For instance, there could be a database field for majors or even MBTI results. Then, one could combine teams based on theavailable data. Of course, it’s beyond the purpose of Moodle and can probably be done in Excel, but it’s much easier to have everything in the same place.
  • I will have students assess the participation of their teammates. For a while, I was looking at the Workshop module as a way to implement this in Moodle. I ended up deciding on the use of a custom-made peer-assessment system (built at my university) but it could be an interesting feature of Moodle groups.
  • This might sound crazy but I imagine a way for groups to have their own Moodle subsection. We keep talking about peer-teaching and such and I can’t imagine a better than to have students create and manage their own mini-course. One major benefit would be to improve the interface, IMHO. The main Moodle section for the course would contain all the public information and activities. All the “separate groups” activities and material would appear in “group mode.” Students could then understand very clearly what is visible to everyone in the course and what is meant for their subsection only. In separate sections of a course taught by the same instructor (or, in fact, by different instructors) it could also have amazing benefits. I seem to recall something like this instructor-section idea being discussed for a future version of Moodle. But the Moodle take could also have a student-focused structure. Of course, this should not have to go all the way to the Moodle administrator and instructors should be able to create these subsections themselves. But, if at all doable, it would help Moodle leapfrog Sakai (which does handle course sections).
  • I pretty much like the notion of a “session” or “workspace,” which might be the reason why I tend to separate a student’s participation in the course as a whole (through the main Moodle interface for a course) from a student’s participation in a specific team (through a subsection of the Moodle site for the course). So this might be idiosyncratic (and lunatic) but I’m getting a very clear idea of how this might all work. After all, the granularity of “a course” is both too large (“coarse?” wink ) and too fine for many of our needs. Any “course” could become something of a “metacourse” and the structure could be somewhat recursive.
  • Participants could have profiles to be shared only with their groupmates. As it stands, I think the scope of Moodle profiles is system-wide (students have the same profile for all of the courses they take at the same institution, but not for courses they might take on other Moodle installations). Having group-only profiles would be interesting as students manage their relationship with teammates.
  • Another crazy idea: groups working a bit like social networking sites (e.g. Facebook). You get “friends” with whom you can share “stuff” (images, comments, chats, etc.). Those groups can go beyond the limits of a single course so that you would use it as a way to communicate with people at school. The group could even have a public persona beyond the school and publish some information about itself and its projects. Moodle could then serve as a website-creator for students. To make it wackier, students could even maintain some of these contacts after they leave the school.
  • Or Moodle could somehow have links to Facebook profiles.

Ok, I’m really going overboard. It’s just that I really love Moodle and want it to do everything at the same time. Using groups has opened up a whole new side of Moodle for me and I find myself thinking out loud a lot.

Apple, Blogger (Blogspot), cellphones, DRM, Facebook, Google, iPod, Moodle, predictions, smartphones, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

Web 2.1 or Internet 7.0?

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Speaking of Web technologies getting together to create tomorrow’s Web. It’s all about puzzles.

It’s really not that hard to visualize the completed picture of a Web 2.1 puzzle merging most of the advantages from the main Web 2.0 players: Facebook meets YouTube, Wikipedia meets WordPress, PodShow meets Digg, Flickr meets SecondLife… Smaller players like Moodle and GarageBand are likely to have a huge impact in the long run, but the first steps have more to do with the biggest pieces of the puzzle.

In fact, if I were to take a bet on the near future of the user-driven Web, I’d say Google is the one institution with most of the important pieces of the puzzle. Google owns YouTube, JotSpot, MeasureMap, Writely, SketchUp, Blogger, etc. They have also developed important services and features like Gmail and Google Maps. In many ways, their management seems clueful enough. Their “do no evil” stance has helped them maintain much of the goodwill toward them on the part of geeks. They understand the value of the Web. And they have a fair amount of money on hand.

Because of all of this, Google is, IMHO, the most likely group to solve the puzzle of redesigning the Web. To pull it off, though, they might need to get their act together in terms of organizing their different services and features.

On the other hand, there’s an off-Web puzzle that might be more important. Internet 7.0 needs not be Web 3.0 and the Web may become less important in terms of digital life. Though I don’t own a cell phone myself, a lot of people are surely betting on cell phones for the future of digital life. AFAIK, there are more cell phone users than Internet users in the world and cell phones generate quite a bit of revenue to a lot of people. The connection between cell phones and the Net goes beyond moblogging, VoIP, IM, and music downloads. It’s not hard to envision a setup combining the advantages of a smartphone (à la Tréo or Blackberry) with those of a media device like the Apple iPod, Creative Zen, or Microsoft Zune. Sure, there’s the matter of the form factor difference between smartphones and portable media players. But the device could easily have two parts. The important thing here is not to have a single device doing everything but having a way to integrate all of these features together, without the use of a laptop or desktop computer.

There are other pieces to that second puzzle: MVNOs, voice navigation, flash memory, portable games, Linux, P2P, mesh networks, media outlets, DRM-freedom, etc. And it’s difficult to tell who has the most of those pieces. Sony would be a good bet but they have messed up on too many occasions recently to be trusted with such a thing as a digital life vision. Apple fans like myself would hope that the computer company has a good chance at shaking things up with its rumored phone, but it’s hard to tell if they are willing to listen to consumers instead of WIPO member corporations.

It’s also difficult to predict which scenario is likely to happen first, if both scenarios will merge, if we will instead see a Web 2.0 burst, etc.

Puzzling.

academic models, constructivism, course management systems, humour, Moodle, pedagogy, Québec, relativism, Spoofs, teaching and learning

Teaching Reforms and Humour

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A funny spoof (in French) on education reforms in Quebec since 1960.
L’enseignement à travers les époques – 🙂 & < – by adamsofineti

The “current” buzzphrase in Quebec is «approche par compétences», which could roughly be described as a “performance-oriented approach to learning” or, somewhat more generally, “objective-oriented learning.” The main conceptual tools used in this approach come from socio-constructivism, at least officially.

It’s never a good strategy to make fun of colleagues but I can help but be amazed by how a conference presentation on «approche par compétences» manages to not say anything substantial on the subject. Here’s an iTunes link to that presentation. I’m sure professor Marie-Françoise Legendre is a very thoughtful scholar and that this MP3 version of her talk doesn’t do justice to her presentation, but there’s something about some of these approaches which just, honestly, makes me laugh.

Funnily enough, my father was trained by Jean Piaget who is sometimes associated with constructivist approaches to learning. (In fact, my relativistic/holistic approach to life and anthropology probably relates very directly to some indirect influences from Piaget.) And my favourite Course Management System, Moodle, mentions (social) constructivism and constructionism in its philosophy statement. Many of the pedagogical principles labeled by those buzzphrases are widely accepted and I do personally tend to accept them. At the same time, some pedagogical practises allegedly based on these principles seems almost absurd to me and several colleagues.

An interesting situation, if not a rare one.

academic podcasting, course management systems, democracy, Digital Life, folkloristics, geek culture, language ideology, Moodle, online publishing, Québec, tolerance, Web 2.0, writing style

Early October Quickies

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Actually, they’re more like late September links, but still…

Is that Disparate enough for you? 😉

Academia, academic institutions, academic models, Anthropology, Concordia, course management systems, cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, Moodle, ramblings, Spoofs, Teaching

Getting My Fix

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It’s that time of year. Leaves aren’t even falling but classes have started at most academic institutions. Problem is, for me, didn’t get courses to teach this semester. Grrr!
And this is where teaching is “addictive.” No, not like drugs, gambling, WoW, or even pornography. But like Clodhoppers. It just feels right. Or it’s the hype… 😉

Ah, that rush you get from teaching!

Those who haven’t taught can’t really know how it feels. In fact, it’s quite possible that some people who do teach are not feeling it. But once you do feel it, you just want more. Despite all the obstacles. And we all know there’s a lot of obstacles in a teacher’s path! From abuse to social stigma, from grading to excuses… None of it matters. You may tell yourself that you just need one more class to teach, one is never enough.

To make matters worse, every class is different. You think that the next one will be so troublesome that you will run away from teaching but that’s exactly the time when you’re getting the ideal class and you forget all of your resolutions about avoiding the downward spiral of teaching.

Next thing you know, you want to bring a soapbox to the street and teach perfect strangers about the benefits of ethnography or the cultural significance of food. But it doesn’t even stop there. You take a look back at material you prepared for previous semesters and you want to expand them to serve as a basis for “open-source” textbooks. Or you look at your roster for a future semester in awe at the diversity of the student body: from accountancy through women’s studies, from exercise science through biochemistry, from film studies through human relations. And that’s when it becomes really tricky. You can just imagine how fun it’ll be to teach them about uxorilocality, tribes, and friendship. You can almost hear their objections to issues of globalization and ethnicity. You want to reach out to them and prepare reading material to get them started before you even meet. So you go online to your course management system and look at its newest features (if you’re lucky and are using an exceedingly good system like Moodle, Claroline, or Sakai instead of an evil system like Bl*ckb**rd or W*bCT).

What’s worse, you start blogging about the joys of teaching. At night. With no other purpose than getting your fix.

Ah, well…

Academia, academic institutions, academic models, academic podcasting, Apple, course management systems, eLearning, iPod, Moodle

Lecturecasts (Podcast Lectures, Lecture Podcasts)

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UPDATE: Purchased an iRiver H120 jukebox/recorder.

Was commenting on Tama Leaver‘s post about watching his own lecture videos on a fifth-generation iPod. There’s a lot of room for experimentation with these methods and technologies.

Apple is well-positioned in this sphere, actually. Its iLife and iWork suites can integrate content in different formats, some of which might actually work on the iPod (Keynote to Quicktime H.264, GarageBand to AAC enhanced podcast). Furthermore, Apple has this iTunes U project for hosted and protected podcast content. Not to mention the obvious point about Apple’s iPod success. Don’t have the necessary material to try it out but it should be relatively simple to create full-featured lecture podcasts using these tools. In fact, there’s already a product out meant to simply this integration (can’t try it out myself, unfortunately).
With at least three microphones for iPod 5G coming out Real Soon Now (XtremeMac’s MicroMemo, Belkin’s TuneTalk, and Griffin’s iTalkPro), life can become quite fun indeed for those of us who’d like to “lecturecast.” It’s an even better time to turn to academic podcasting with so many podcasting projects springing up at such diverse institutions as IUSB, Duke, UdeM, Brandeis, and IUB. The open-source course management system Moodle now supports podcasts. So does Sakai, the free/open knowledge management project. Of course, educational podcasting isn’t new. But it’s gaining steam.