conducting some research about Moodle

conducting some research about Moodle

by nicola franklin -
Number of replies: 9

hello everyone and thank you in advance for any responses you may have to the following ...

i am a teacher conducting some research for a post-grad paper i am writing about VLEs. i am using my college as a case study for how Moodle is being implemented but would like to hear from other teachers about how students want to use the platform.

i was wondering if anyone would have any thoughts about increasing student autonomy and personalisation in Moodle?

the philosophy of the Moodle platform is very obviously one of equality and of sharing (social constructivism etc). however, this currently appears to be more about the teachers/coders sharing tactics rather than providing the learners with a space to contribute their own ideas about how they would like to learn or how the platform could be adapted to meet their individual learning needs.

having conducted interviews with my students about how they would like to use Moodle, they have come up with lots of ideas but i am not sure if Moodle has the capabilities to give them what they want.

i would love to know if anyone else has conducted any similar research asking the students how they want to learn and how Moodle can be used to facilitate this

i would also love to know what you think the future of Moodle is.

thanks smile

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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by A. T. Wyatt -
Greetings, Nicola!

It would be nice to get a synopsis of what your students said they would like to see! That would provide some context for the discussion.

I have heard about individual and group student forums, wikis, and glossaries. There is blogging. There are people who use Moodle along with Mahara and Google apps.

For myself, I merge a number of different services. Moodle provides the structure and the record-keeping capabilities as well as serving as my repository of content. I use many Google apps to provide the "student-owned" space for each course participant to begin building a personal learning environment. One of my friends uses Mahara, where students can build "views" and store artifacts in a similar fashion.

I have not done any formal research on this, so an outline of what you did would be useful to me as I am quite interested in the topic. If you haven't already, you might look at recent writing by Graham Attwell and Steve Wheeler, both of whom have done some work in the area of personal learning environments and how that can and cannot exist with typical virtual learning environments.

atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by nicola franklin -

thanks so much for these suggestions - have just had a very quick look at the Attwell and Wheeler work on Personal Learning Environments and what they are saying seems to be exactly what my students have been telling me! so good to know i'm not living in a fantasy land, but that there is already alot of work being done, papers written and conferences on PLEs that are already running.

web 3.0 and an increasing focus on everyone as learners not just those in formal education is an exciting and liberating thought.

i can also certainly see smart tech being increasingly used as the access point of information as well as the site of sharing knowledge and demonstrating skills and knowledge for assessment purposes.

all these possibilities go beyond current ideals of; personalised learning, differentiation, inclusion, learner choice and the opening up of opportunity for life long learning - the future is exciting and has a great deal to offer in terms of making education more accessible, more relevant and more engaging!

the question now is - does Moodle have any intention of creating a PLE platform which could run in tandem with the VLE? could it plug in to pre-exisiting Moodle pages created by an institution? is Moodle smart-phone compatible? is Moodle going to give students more control?

thanks again for the very helpful input - i appreciate it smile

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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by Ravishankar Somasundaram -
Dear Nicola franklin,

As rightly said, you would not only be providing some grounds for communication to happen here, but you will also be doing us a favor to improve moodle by sharing students aggregated views on how they want to learn.


~ ~ ~ Peace - Ravishankar Somasundaram ~ ~ ~
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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by nicola franklin -

thank you for your swift replies!

firstly i should say that the responses from the interviews with students are specific to my college and therefore some of the things they have said are only relevant in that context, although, similarities may be true of other colleges.

  • the variety of subjects and course structures means that each course page on Moodle is organised differently. also, different subjects use Moodle innovatively, other departments use it as a glorified library, some don't use it at all. there is too much disparity and there is an obvious lack of encouragement for teachers to use it in a subject specific way.
  • it doesn't function like other web-pages they are familiar with, it is too 'clunky' - the aesthetic style adopted by the college is grey and boring and not something we can change. 'scroll-of-death' is also common on some course pages - although some courses use the pages in a more stream-lined way -which is good
  • Moodle is one more disconnected source of information for them (there are currently 6 different access points for students to retrieve on-line information about their studies) these include: e.mail, a web based register/attendance/messaging system, a server with windows file sharing, the college internet and intranet pages and Moodle. none of them are linked or present a cohesive 'branded' look.
  • students really like quizes and forums but would like more reasons to visit the pages on a regular basis. it is still teacher led and is accessed when they are told to do so or when they have nowhere else to go - they would like it to be more inviting of exploration and more fun
  •  they don't feel like they have any more ownership over their learning than they have had in the past, only that they can access resources at more convenient times.
  • they would like to use Moodle in the same way they use Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr as part of their daily routine and from a more personalised perspective where a wide variety of people, activites, resources, discussions are accessible to them from their own profile page which they can customise.

current debates about formal/informal learning, ICT in the classroom, the way students think and interact in ways which don't suit 'old' style teaching, personalised learning, 'every child matters', meeting learning styles etc etc are all areas i will be discussing - the aim is to acknowledge what is already said about VLEs from a technical, teacher and policy perspective and then focus entirely on how the students want to learn using platforms such as Moodle - they are the 'end-user' after all!

thanks for your thoughts smile

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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by Sandy Pittendrigh -
Excellent critisisms.
I agree with many of these points.

RE> each course is looks different
At one 2-year school (I heard about this at a
conference) that has 15,000 online students,
each course is built by a team. The team leader
creates no content. He or she is the content editor. Once their job is done, the course is turned over to the IT Dept, which reworks the pages so they follow the rules of a "common look and feel."

RE> "Scroll to death"
I only use Moodle for assignment descriptions, in
order to keep the klunky pages as short as possible. Each such assignment has links that point
to pages on an external website, created by me,
that have the real resource information, much like
an electronic textbook. My e-textbook knows how
to capture the address of the page the user jumped
over from, so they can return to the right Moodle page as needed.

RE> One more disconnected source, etc....
....this is the way the new world order works

RE> Want Moodle to be like Facebook.
Don't know what to say about that one.
Facebook is for kids. In the college context, education is for adults. But kids are part of the picture. Rather than making Moodle more like Facebook, it might make sense to use some separate social networking software as an add-on appendage to Moodle.
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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by Ravishankar Somasundaram -
Dear Nicola franklin,

Interesting feedbacks, I am able to put all of those points except for the last one under "How Effectively the admin/teacher utilizes moodle" by finding interesting ways within the environment.

When students say like facebook/ twitter, i think they mean, they want a differentiation between their fellow students.

The main factor a VLE makes disappear in most situations is the competition between students and the motivation factor involved.

You can try by filling this gap first and then see the response.

For example: if a student scores above xx marks in a quiz or gets rated xx number of times as useful/ gets above xx number of votes for the reply he posted, you can award him some badges(Assign him to a specific group which carry a logo, so that what ever the user does within the site henceforth, the logo appears below his picture [a live implementation is in moodle.org]) to differentiate from others.

People who have badges have some elevated privileges within the forum (like moderator may be)

This is just my opinion from analysis done so far.

And above mentioned is just one of many ways for filling the gap which i was talking about.

And let me know if this helped.


~ ~ ~ Peace - Ravishankar Somasundaram ~ ~ ~
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In reply to nicola franklin

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by Bryan Williams -
If you were able to be in Austin TX here is the US next week, at the Austin MoodleMoot August 2nd and 3rd, you would hear first hand what the future of Moodle may look like as well as what Moodle 2.0 features address your questions. This is the topic of a keynote that will be delivered live by Martin Dougiamas, the creator and lead developer of Moodle. The organizers are considering making an Adobe Connect webinar of this event so some may join and ask questions.
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In reply to Bryan Williams

Re: conducting some research about Moodle

by Frances Bell -
Is the keynote being streamed or videoed - if so where?
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