Moodle Evaluation : Field Botany spring '04

Field Botany 350 is an upper level biology course and was taught by Brent Smith in the spring of 2004. One can see from what follows that even though Brent had very little instruction on using Moodle he was able to use the CMS in a simple but effective way which enhanced the course.

Two other simple web based instructional items were created and used with great effect:

1. 

   The Species Reference Library comprised web pages associated with seven field sites each of which presented in tabular form digital photographs of all the plant species present at that location. In the index at the top of the page were links to each of the species but the photographs themselves were unlabelled apart from a rollover "title" (see graphic) this system served as an effective aide memoire.

   Janet Russell created the Dreamweaver template that Brent used to add digital photos of new species to the library.

    
2. The Hot Potatoes quizzing tool was used to create a number of "flash card" type quizzes to help students memorize species and family names for the vast number of plants. For example, the flower quiz included digital photos of most of the flowers they had to identify. (see graphic)
    

Student opinions about the use of Moodle in the course were surveyed using an online assessment tool hosted at Free Assessment Tool Summary site (use password biol350 to take the survey). 13 students out of 15 in the class completed the survey.

Brent used Moodle in a simple but effective way:

• Since he planned to use Moodle as a central location for online resources he changed the format of the course from Weekly format to Topics format ( Administration —> Settings : Weekly format | Social format | Topics format). Having clicked the "Turn editing on" button he merely clicked the Edit summary icon to give the new topic a title. (see graphic)
   
• The Add pulldown menu was used to upload a resource to the appropriate topic. Resources were in the form of MS Word documents, MS Powerpoint presentations, and in the case of the Species Reference Library topic, links to the associated web pages (see above).
   
• Whenever he added a new resource Brent also added a new topic to the News forum (essentially the same as an announcements board) which described the resource he had just uploaded (see graphic on left). A summary of Latest news and Recent activity is always present on the main page so that keeping track of what he had done was not a problem (a nice management feature).
   
• Moreover, every time Brent uploaded a new resource and added an announcement to the News forum each student in the class would receive an email message with the announcement text he had written. This was because each student participant was automatically subscribed to the News forum and therefore automatically received new postings by email. Thus students could never claim that they didn't know that a new resource had been uploaded.

The table below presents the questions asked (together with the options for the multiple choice question) and the totals responding for each category.

Q10. Which aspect / feature of Moodle did you like the best? The least?

Q11. Can you think of other ways that Moodle could be used to enhance the course further?

Q12. Any other comments?

Questions 1 through 9 are displayed here as charts (generated using MS Excel):

The survey was very representative with 13 of the 15 students in the class responding.

Only a single student expressed any discomfort in using computers in general (Q 1) - this also has a bearing on responses to other questions - and most of the students seemed to be very comfortable with using computers. One would hope that this was so in an upper level class.

Almost two thirds of the class (8 students from 15) had used a Course Management System in a different class (Q 2); 5 had used CHEF and 3 had used Course Compass. 7 of these 8 students agreed that Moodle was better and 1 strongly agreed (Q 3).This, of course, is a highly subjective rating but we can at least draw the conclusion that students found Moodle as user-friendly or more so than the other course management systems which they had used, including the commercial Blackboard-based Course Compass. Thus in Q 4 all the students agreed that Moodle was easy to use (including the non-comfortable student) and a large proportion (38%) were in strong agreement.

The use of Moodle in this class can be deemed very successful; all students agreed that Moodle was used effectively by the teacher, and 30% agreed strongly (Q 5).

The class did not have a formal session to learn Moodle (despite the errant answers to Q 6) but the vast majority of students concluded that they didn't need any instruction (Q 7); even the student who was uncomfortable with using computers (from Q1) did not indicate that he/she needed an overview or in-depth session. Here again, the ease of use was apparent.

Finally, nearly 70% of the class thought that the way that Moodle was used in this course greatly enhanced their learning and 30% found it useful but not essential (Q 8). This also included the student who was uncomfortable with computers.

Two major conclusions can be drawn :

1. The use of Moodle was very successful in this class (Q 5 & Q 8). This can be attributed less to Moodle itself than to the consistent, simple and creative way it was used by the teacher.
2. Students found Moodle easy to use (Q 4) and subjectively as good as, if not better than, other Course Management Systems (Q 3). Moreover, even though none of the students had any formal instruction on how to use Moodle they felt that it was so easy to use that they didn't need any instruction (Q 7).

These conclusions are borne out by the written responses. The features of Moodle students liked the best (Q 10) were not Moodle features at all; they were aspects of the resources which the teacher uploaded (Species Reference Library, Powerpoint presentations, etc). This indicates that Moodle was invisible to the student user which can only be described as a Good Thing. The only apparent negative aspect (from Q 10 & Q 12) was the reliability of the system providing the Moodle service; there was understandable frustration when Moodle was not available because of system problems. Finally, the written responses would indicate that students seemed to desire more practice quizzes (Q 11), although when asked whether the practice quizzes were helpful 31% were lukewarm (Q 9); however, most students strongly agreed that they were helpful (38%). Parenthetically, Hot Potatoes was used to generate the quizzes rather than the quiz feature of Moodle since this was what Mark knew how use; the upcoming version 1.3 of Moodle integrates Hot Potato quizzes into Moodle so that the grades get transferred into the system.