Recommendations for Introducing Moodle to an Institution

Recommendations for Introducing Moodle to an Institution

by Anthony Borrow -
Number of replies: 3
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First, it has been far too long since I have been active on the Moodle forums but it feels very good to be back. I have sorely missed interacting with so many of my Moodle mates. The demands of a new work assignment pulled me away from Moodle far more than I wished.

A friend of mine is helping to introduce Moodle to an institution of higher education. He reached out to me to get my input on best practices or recommendations that I might have for them as they get started. I figured a number of institutions may be implementing Moodle for the first time so this may be a good time to get some input from others who have experience doing so.  I would imagine that there must have been a variety of presentations at MoodleMoots over the years touching on this topic.

Essentially, my question is: What guiding principles help an institution to be most successful with Moodle? Based on my limited experience, I will briefly summarize what I shared with my friend but would welcome hearing what other insights folks have to share or any resources, articles, presentations, etc. that they found helpful when they began working with Moodle.

  1. Encourage active collaboration - The Moodle community is more powerful than the software. Get faculty involved in the Moodle community. Invite faculty to share their successes and failures and encourage complaining so that sticking points can be addressed promptly.
  2. Patience - Moodle is a multi-faceted tool with a plethora of options. To avoid feeling overwhelmed I have encouraged faculties to learn about one piece at a time by starting with what they believe will be most helpful to them for their particular course. Then when they have some confidence with that one piece they can explore other tools.
  3. Experience the joy of learning - Treat learning Moodle similar to how one might learn a new language. Work on developing vocabulary but have fun exploring what you can do with it. Expect that you may make some mistakes, share those mistakes with others, and then learn from them. I recall encouraging some faculty who struggled with technology in general to invite a student to assist them in learning how to do things. After all, we are all learners. Managing expectations, taking the pressure off of the instructor for having to be the expert on all things, etc. helps to keep learning fun.  In fact, I shared with my friend that I cannot recall a single time of helping with a hands-on tutorial session at a Moot when I myself did not learn something about Moodle.
Those were some of my initial thoughts but I would love to hear what others have discovered from their experiences.

Peace - Anthony

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In reply to Anthony Borrow

Re: Recommendations for Introducing Moodle to an Institution

by Tim Hunt -
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Welcome back Anthony smile

I think you need to focus on the teachers (assuming that teachers are going to be building their own courses). When are you expecting them to do that? (Do you need to free up some time.) As they are doing that, how are they going to know what to do? Do you need some sort of just-in-time support, if so, how? Also, as much as possible, you want the teachers focussing on the teaching and learning, not the technology, but they have to understand what the technology can do for them.

Finally, have the teachers been in the position of being a student in an online course? (They almost certainly have been students in traditional lecture courses.) How can they experience models of good practice? (Clearly everyone should take a year out and study an Open University course wink)

Finally, make sure you speak their language. I have been using the name of the Moodle role (Teacher), but that is probably not how they think of themselves. How can you get into their world?
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Recommendations for Introducing Moodle to an Institution

by Mary Cooch -
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Hello Anthony! I would definitely second Tim's comment about getting them to do an online course as a student,and preferably a Moodle one. It's part of the structure of the Learn Moodle MOOC we've been running twice yearly since 2013 (although at the moment it is slightly different as it is self-paced and ongoing, for a few weeks more anyway) New Moodlers experience online studies as a student in order better to devise activities as teachers.
And indeed yes, use of language appropriate to them is important too. I remember being invited to a school to introduce them to Moodle and I did a whole 45 minutes intro to Moodle and how great it was going to be for them and at the end I asked for any questions. One woman put her hand up and asked shyly "Excuse me but what is Moodle?" and her friend nudged her and said "It's the VLE". Now - she was embarrassed because she felt she should have realised, but in fact, the error was mine in that I never thought to ask them what terminology they used.
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In reply to Anthony Borrow

Re: Recommendations for Introducing Moodle to an Institution

by Richard Jones -
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Hi Anthony

Welcome back!  Love your points, here are what I might call some prerequisites.  Caveat: these are coloured by personal experience (which may not be relevant to your colleague).

Do you have full leadership buy-in on what you are aiming to do (most of the peers you have to influence won't care what you are trying to do unless you have this).

Do you have sufficient technical support and the backing of the IT Dept (this can be a major problem in some institutions where they wield disproportionate power).

And Strategies

Don't neglect the power of teachers teaching teachers (as opposed to external experts) - events like mini-conferences within an organisation can be very powerful motivators - your lecturers will value and trust their colleagues view/experience more).  This, I guess, is related to your points 2 and 3.

Have your audits and surveys in place so you can measure and report  on progress with data!

Tie in the use of the technology with a suitable pedagogic frame work (which hopefully already exists in the organisation).  Make the connections explicit.

I'll take a risk by pointing out that several years ago now I did contribute a book to this site: https://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=55&rid=6091.  It may or may not have some value to your colleague as it deals with schools and Moodle at version 2.5.

Cheers

Richard


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