Moodle in English

Hello there,

as I said, really useful, thanks for this.

My response now follows:

1. You don't need more PHP developers you need more designers:

-I think this is already in place: Stuart L is with Moodle at the mo........

'If Moodle takes the advice of a similar UX designer they will be able to produce a highly usable Moodle that works for all sectors of the community'.

-What does this mean? Learners aged across the age-range of education or just HE?....does this include primary/secondary schools/FE?Having generic management system expertise is great-what about knowledge of the epistemological, ontological and contextual differences for L&T across educational age-groups that use Moodle globally? Sounds a bit narrow to me.  Perhaps see (just one example of many) what others in the community (share) are up to too:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=226791

2. Follow the Market leaders of social media

Social media is adopted by people because it is easy and enjoyable to use. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ are used because they have the user interface right.

-Certainly not an ignored factor, on all fronts (dev/L&T/and so on). Agree with Marcus-yep inspirational stuff, but student data must always be a core consideration and related privacy issues, see an example of just some of the related threads from the Moodle.org community:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=255236

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=197229

Our tutors deserve an interface that is intuitive so that they can focus on teaching and not Moodle course administration.

-Agree, and I like the admin separation idea. How this is translated across global educational practices remains to be outlined in more detail for it to work for me. Reason being, could run risk of an infrastructure where hierarchical powers end up dominating L&T instead of learner needs.

3. Focus on Moodle core functionality

Moodle core needs to be consolidated because the core of Moodle still isn't as good as it should be, including many of the "social constructivist” activity modules.

-Eh? Can you unpick this a bit more please? I get the consolidation bit...of course (perhaps a number of items could become hybridised into the one feature-and I have told HQ about this-linked with their Tracker system, but the educational-philosophical/pedagogical design of Moodle needs to be 'applied' during L&T...this kit doesn't do it for you and I am sure that text-book teaching and learning whether face-to-face or 'bespoke online' (not sure I get the difference between the book feature already in place, imho) will always run risk of a didactic approach-whether we like it or not-the students will lead that pathway for sure. And, there is nothing worse than students churning out regurgitated efforts-with the odd word change from such texts, which in turn reflects a complete lack of understanding and application of knowledge.

It should not spend time focusing on non-core features such as messaging and further integrations.

Fair point, how things are prioritised? I know Moodle HQ juggle that-all the time and rely on the community at Moodle.org, Conferences, Moots and research to inform decisions too...(hope you manage to spread the word there at Sussex, about the gradebook survey ;).

Remember, the core Moodle function for the core of Moodle adopters is to make it easy for non-technical teachers to create online content and activities from which students can learn.

-I am sorry Paolo, do forgive me here, tongue in cheek: 'ya don't say?' :0)

4. Consider Moodle courses as a bespoke textbook

At all levels of education, teachers refer to textbooks. The strength of systems like Moodle is that the non-technical teachers can create their own online textbooks, specifically for the curriculum they intend to cover.

Textbooks usually include activities to complete at the end of the chapter. In VLEs like Moodle, the activities they set can be varied, social and dynamic - more so than activities in a traditional textbook.

Martin D commented that our Moodle courses were just like the Book module. My reply is:

"Yes, and this is no surprise - we consider Moodle courses to be online textbooks tailored to the needs of the course's curriculum”

-I can only conclude this is context bound....not come across this before...and I am sure Martin would have said so otherwise (He gets to hear a lot about Moodle (LOL!).But nice ideas if they work, of course can only praise your innovation.

5. Navigation needs to be clear and clean

See my response for 4.

I am inclined to say this is all context bound, mind you we have colleagues here from Glasgow, OU, Wales, England and Ireland.....they might disagree with me in terms of the UK slant I am presenting here.

6. Stop the proliferation of configuration variables

However, until Moodle is really an industry standard VLE/LMS, we need to keep focused on the core functionality and core user groups.

-Yes, I would agree with the need for more of a focus on accessibility in core, but I disagree that Moodle is not an educational- industry LMS, and standardising it too much defeats the object, sounds like you are talking about BB, in my experience of using both.

7. Moodle course administration needs to be improved

See my response for 2.

8. Make it easy to make content

We changed the interface in line with social media platforms so teachers intuitively create content-rich courses for their students.

-Nice touch, like and agree with all this section for 8.

9. Have notifications

Ditto, nice touch for section 9.

10. Create a Moodle Lite

Again, really lovely ideas here, which sound effective.

with my kind regards,

Dawn

andragogy/pedagogy - pedagogy refers to children, andragogy to adults. At least thats what the notes from my Masters course say

Agree Matt.

D

I can understand the reason why people want to use Moodle as a textbook (that's what I'm doing). It is easy and how most of us learnt. I like how Moodle has been trying to break this model but without alienating new and existing users.

I just came back from 4 days of (climate change) activism training and the facilitation technique used is more like the social constructionist approach. Nearly everything were activities. They taught us a bit then with that little knowledge we did an activity and we kept on building on top of that and practising everything. We did brainstorming (mindmaps, popcorn, lists, etc), pair-sharing, role-playing, etc, and energisers to stay at the optimum learning mindset. Even with a dry topic like climate science there were a lot of activities for everyone to express what they heard to deeply understand it.

This type of learning can be moved online but it can be hard to facilitate activities when everyone is not online at once and trust can be hard to establish when you cannot see people.

The company I work for are creating 'text book' resources for students to use and the classes are more to actively learn the material then for the teacher to say what is in the book. For us Moodle is to be used as a delivery system for the resources. Hopefully in the future when we finalise the resources and classes, then we can make Moodle more of an active learning experience. But at the moment it is just a text book

The thing I find with many options is that it's stuff administrators and course creators should see, but are often lower down the tree. I guess that roles are highly configurable for this, but time consuming to tweak for every eventuality. 

Re: "6. Stop the proliferation of configuration variables There is a tendency among developers to offer every possible configuration option they can think of."

To counter this argument/give the other side, I think it's important to take into consideration those who want to cultivate more autonomous, responsible learners and give them more control over their learning environment. Particularly with capabilities/permissions, it's nice to be able to create detailed profiles to give learners exactly the levels of autonomy and control they need to work collaboratively and responsibly.

Also, with grading and feedback; there are so many different theories/approaches to formative and summative assessment that educators need as much flexibility as they can get in order to serve learners' needs. In some contexts you may need rather traditional, conservative grading systems but in others you may need to allow learners to grade themselves and each other. For example, John Hattie's research has identified self-grading as one of the strongest strategies for increasing learning gains. Should we have options that give learners access to edit part or all of their course grade book? Probably.

But yes, there are some things that more than likely don't need to be options and probably should be managed in other ways. The thing is not to ignore educators and practitioners on the margins who may not have as loud a voice as the more conservative traditionalists.

Just my €0.02

Hi Dan,

Then put them behind an "advanced settings" button as some pages already do. I would hate to limit what more advanced users can do in order to appeal to new users, or those who are not particularly interested / engaged.

Indeed it is, but on the flip side poor usability could be its downfall.

There are not many comparisons online between Moodle and another not quite so open LMS, I think I found four. These documents related to vendor competition / product selection.

Each of them conducted trials of rival LMS systems (some including Moodle Partners) with groups of staff and students. In every case I found (granted a very small sample in the public domain) Moodle was not the LMS chosen. In short, organisations with a decent budget who weight usability highly in the selection process seem (again based on limited information) to be going elsewhere. Not only that, they are paying more money to go there.

I have seen the 80/20 rule used to describe Moodle on more than one occasion, something along the lines of:

"80% of users use 20% of the features"

What this other LMS seems to have done, and what Paolo seems to suggest above is to focus more effort on that 20%. The 20% everyone uses. The 20% that wins a vendor competition process.

I suggested something along these lines in a previous discussion with Stuart Lamour (sorry can't find the discussion link at the moment and it was a minor point in a much fuller discussion about a different topic anyway!) - mainly relating to the fact that Moodle as a whole supports everything from Primary Schools through Higher Education to WorkPlace Training (as well as so many other purposes).

A benefit might be that you could even have a setup such as this:

1. Core Basic - very lite Moodle

2. Standard package of plugins for:

    Primary School

    Secondary School

    Tertiary Education

    Adult Education

(for those familiar with Linux, something along the lines of tasksel - in functionality if not in its user interface!)

3. Other people could make their own suggested collections of plugins e.g. Moodle Flavours, but starting from a lighter base

4. Full Moodle with all the standard plugins installed (e.g. Moodle as it is now)

5. Administrators would still be free to add or remove individual plugins as they want to create a Moodle tailored to the requirements of their own institution

My biggest concern would be to make sure that the average Primary school IT coordinator or small business user (or even small University academic department with their own Moodle instance) is not put off using Moodle by thinking 'well the core only does that and then you have to add.....' One of the big selling points of Moodle as I see it right now is that it does so much for so many people out-of-the-box. This DOES add complexity, but the trick will be to find a way to minimise that complexity, but maintain the flexibility and power it provides to such a wide range of users.

Re: BTW, I've seen a few articles about how to configure Moodle and courses so that they're "lighter."

Could you please post links to these articles? Or maybe someone with the expertise can summarize what can be done during and after the installation to make Moodle "lighter", that will require less resources from the server and would run faster?

http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/elearningteam/2014/05/08/recommendations-for-moodle-hq/

Some great discussion here - thanks everyone for their input. Here are some more points based on the discussion so far:

A Moodle course should be considered a bespoke textbook for a number of reasons. One, tutors appreciate having a reference to something they are familiar so they know what they are creating. Two, textbooks include activities. Three, those activities can involve (and expect) social engagement.

I am not completely opposed to the idea of hiding the complexity from users rather than losing it, however the advanced button doesn't cut it. As a side, one small improvement we made at Sussex was to put our submit button at the top of the page, so the tutor doesn't have to scroll through all the options unless they want to. We also highlight the field that the mouse is on (forum introduction in the image below).