Some facts and figures:
- 4419 people started the course and of these, 52% were awarded a Learn Moodle 3.8 participant badge for posting in a forum.
- A record 1166 certificates of completion were awarded for completing all 32 activities - that's 26% of people who started the course!
- 38% of participants chose to progress through the course one week at a time, while 62% chose to see all the activities at once.
- In the final feedback activity, 43% of participants answered that they used the Learn Moodle app for accessing the course.
What we did well:
Completion numbers!
In terms of completion, this MOOC was the most successful so far, and we are delighted that so many participants who logged in went on to obtain the completer badge and certificate.Although a bug MDL-67747 prevented us doing it this time, we hope in future MOOCs to increase completion further by making use of Moodle’s Insights feature, where teachers are alerted to students who have not been participating so they can send them a message of encouragement.
Alternative live sessions
In previous MOOCs we have offered participants the choice between different times for our live BBB sessions. The most popular option has always been around 16:00 UTC, but that always excludes some participants. This time, instead of offering a choice, we decided to set three different times for our three live sessions. This resulted in very enjoyable sessions with participants from different parts of the world, whom we would not otherwise have met.
H5P experiences
Moodle 3.8 includes the option to embed H5P interactive content and we included some activities for participants both to try and to reuse in their own practice courses. Some great discussions took place about H5P and we look forward to greater use of H5P in our next MOOC.
More training
Each time we run the Learn Moodle Basics MOOC , we are asked if there will be an Admin Basics MOOC. This time, we were happy to announce a self-paced, non-facilitated Admin Basics MOOC which became available at the end of the Learn Moodle Basics MOOC. We hope it will be useful to any beginner, non-technical Moodle administrators, particularly new MoodleCloud admins.
How we can improve:
Supporting languages other than English
The videos have English transcripts which are available to download and read, but we would love it if the videos themselves were translated into more languages. Currently the Learn Moodle 3.8 Basics playlist has subtitles in Spanish, Greek and French. If you are reading this and you’re a native speaker of a language other than these, please read our page on Translating Moodle video subtitles and help us increase the reach of these videos.
Additionally, we’re going to “pin” a help forum thread in Spanish at the top of the Any questions? Forum to make it easily visible to Spanish speakers, and will do the same if other groups would like a place to discuss in their own language too.
Thanks to:
Five participants received “Learn Moodle Basics helper” badges for their invaluable support in the MOOC. Thanks to John Bennett for being our “doorman” welcoming every single participant to the course for several years running. Thanks to Hart Wilson, Sandy Jackson, Visvanath Ratnaweera and also to Joost Elsoff for monitoring the forums and responding to queries.
Other regular MOOC participants are also appreciated and valued - please come again!
Bug fixes
One of the benefits of running a large-scale MOOC with the latest version of Moodle (and with keen-eyed participants!) is that it highlights bugs and improvements that developers can work on. Here are some of the bugs recently reported or confirmed, and we’re pleased to see that one has already been fixed.
- MDL-67610 Forum read tracking includes private replies
- MDL-67721 No ‘View grades’ button with single simple discussion - fixed in Moodle 3.8.2!
- MDL-67747 Unable to select all users for action following an insight report
- MDL-64625 Odd display of book TOC in IE/Edge
- MDL-58495 Workshop is always present on dashboard if submission/assessment deadlines are set
- MOBILE-3346 Not possible to see your own workshop feedback in the App