I work as an e-Learning Systems Developer at Southampton City College, UK. We migrated from Blackboard to Moodle in the summer of 2007.
Early on we hit the same challenges as other Colleges and Universities namely, how do you motivate staff and highlight the solid merits of Moodle inside and outside of the classroom?
We decided early on that you can't manage what you can't measure, so we set about trying to measure and bench mark our Moodle courses.
My manager John Savage hit on the idea of giving our courses Gold, Silver, Bronze or In Development medals based on moodle course content and student usage.
You can find a full description of what we consider to be a Gold, Silver and Bronze course in the accompanying screen shots (gsb_explained-linked-from-block.png). In a nut shell though. A bronze course is a repository style course with handouts, presentations and a scheme of work, a silver course also includes interactive material (NLN Learning objects, embedded video etc). A gold course has all of the above but is collaborative with students contributing to the content of the course (forums, glossaries, wikis etc). An "In Development" course falls short of a bronze course. Obviously you can't apply this rule to every course. A social course based around a forum can be an excellent tool for a teacher. Our system is intended to drive up usage of Citybit (our moodle) via clear guidelines and pinch of healthy competition amongst teaching and support staff.
I've written a couple of blocks which make the bench marking system visible from inside Moodle. My plan is to release the blocks to the Moodle community after half-term (late October). The blocks are too specific to our College at the moment. A bit of tweaking will sort that though.
The Moodle bench marking system which we've spent many hours discussing and developing is really helping drive our e-Learning agenda forward. Its lead to competition amongst teaching staff "I want a gold medal course, how do I get there?" is a common enquiry we get now-a-days. It also provides managers the abilty to be able to set SMART targets in Teachers appraisals - "Achieve a Silver course in Citybit before the end of the academic year". From a senior managers point of view the Principal and others can see a picture of success across the whole College and also by department. Most importantly though, thousands of students at College are benefiting from high quality support material and activities via Moodle.
Please take a look at some screenshots of the blocks and pages I've written. I hope to be releasing the blocks very soon. Hope you find this useful.
