Intermediate Moodle workshop

Who is this for?

We’ll be covering groups and discussion forums and talking about working with submitting & grading assignments online. We can also cover how senior seminars can profitably use Moodle.

When & Where?

Friday January 7th, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm with an hour for lunch.
PC Lab in the Bolling Centre. Refreshments and lunch in the Richmond room

Topics

Here I’ll set up some temporary courses so that faculty can enroll both as students in a course and be the instructor for a course. This way you can see what happens from both teacher and student perspectives.

• Working with groups.
  • How groups work in Moodle
  • Switching on groups
  • Using Choice activity to allow students to choose a group to join
  • Setting up groups & members.
• Discussion forums.
  • Types of forum
  • Forums and groups
  • Using forum to extend class discussions - faculty experiences (any volunteers to talk about this?)
  • Grading student entries.
• Submitting assignments online & grading online.
  • Benefits
  • Revising papers
  • Inline journal entries
  • Grading online. Student view of grades. Downloading as Excel spreadsheet.
• Organising your course online. Benefits / drawbacks.
• Senior seminars online with Moodle.
  • Students as teachers. Joint research courses with student / faculty working together. Aletha Stahl’s experience.

Basic Moodle workshop

Who is this for?

Moodle workshop for newcomers to Moodle and faculty who’d like to review basic material. You will set up, configure and add content to your own Moodle course so come prepared with a course syllabus. There will be time where faculty can share their experiences of using Moodle with a class and offer advice and tips.

When & Where?

Thursday January 6th, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm with an hour for lunch.
PC Lab in the Bolling Centre. Refreshments and lunch in the Richmond room

Preparation

1. Bring the syllabus of the course you want to host on Moodle as a Word document (or html page). You can either put it on your home network drive (H:) or on a floppy. You will use the syllabus to create the ‘home page’ for your Moodle course.
2. Email me (markp) the name and id (eg Advanced Modern Dance, AWPE331) of the course you want to put onto Moodle so that I can create the course ahead of time for you to work on in class. You can easily change this during the workshop.
3. Log in to the Moodle site moodle.earlham.edu (exit immediately after you log in) so that you are registered with the Moodle system and I will then be able to make you the teacher of the course I create for you.

Topics

The order of these can be changed to suit circumstances. If we don’t have time to cover creating Acrobat (pdf) files we’ll do this in the next day’s session.

Getting Started

• What is Course Management. Why Moodle?
• Setting up a course:
  • weekly type
  • topics type
  • other course settings
• How students enroll (enrollment key)
• View mode / Edit mode

Adding Content

• Setting out the syllabus on the main page
  • using Label activity to add syllabus pieces with HTMLArea
  • uploading and including graphics in the syllabus display
  • using tab feature of Firefox to streamline working on the course home page
• Adding Resources
  • uploading files into the Moodle file system
  • choosing a file as a Resource
  • moving Resources around on the home page
  • referencing Resources from syllabus or assignment activities.
• Overview of other Moodle activities
  • assignment and journals

Moodle and your students

• Customizing the Moodle display that students see.
  • hiding and revealing course components.
  • how students see the course - two ways to mimic what students can see (View Mode / Login as student).
• Navigating around Moodle
  • display single week, jump directly to section or resource.

Other associated topics

• Creating Acrobat resources
  • scanning tips for low file sizes
  • print to pdf.
• Moodle & Powerpoint. Some issues, tips and solutions.

Faculty experiences

• Ask questions and discuss techniques with faculty who have used Moodle already with a class

Attendees

Annie Bandy
Barb Jurasek
Brent Smith
Corinne Diebel
Dave Leeper
Fonsie Guilaran
Kari Kalve
Kathy Taylor
Kevin Miles
Lori Watson
Mark Van Buskirk
Matthew Price
Neal Baker
Peter Blair
Sandra Mendes
Stephanie Crumley-Effinger
Yukiko Kuramoto
Wes Miller

Poetry & politics (Span 354)

Chris Swafford-Smith.

24 students pre-registered + 2 from Manchester.
Class sessions in Bolling Multimedia room for live view to Manchester

Moodle

• Discussion Forums
• Assignments
• Grading ?
• Reading
  • background material
  • important names, concepts, political figures

? have a T.A to monitor discussion forums

M.T Blog

• regular Journal
• Writing group
  • Poetry analysis
  • creative poetry

Video link

• class sessions (record to digital video?)
• group of students from Manchest & EC - use Video & chat for group meetings

classes at 2:30 - 4 pm Mon / Thurs according to following schedule:

week	day	date	month	class	comments
1	Mon	31	Jan	none	intro to Moodle and Blog
1	Thurs	3	Feb	class begins
2	Mon	7	Feb	class
2	Thurs	10	Feb	no class
3	Mon	14	Feb	class
3	Thurs	17	Feb	class
4	Mon	21	Feb	class
4	Thurs	24	Feb	class
5	Mon	28	Feb	no class
5	Thurs	3	March	no class
6	Mon	7	March	class
6	Thurs	10	March	class
7	Mon	14	March	class
7	Thurs	17	March	class
8	Mon	21	March	no class
8	Thurs	24	March	no class
9	Mon	28	March	no class
9	Thurs	31	March	no class
10	Mon	4	April	class
10	Thurs	7	April	class
11	Mon	11	April	class
11	Thurs	14	April	last class

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In this course, we will study how poetic expression has frequently been a forum for personal and social engagement with socio-political events in the Spanish-speaking world, and specifically discuss how literary, protest, pacifist and resistance discourses evolve, both as subject of study and as object of reflection and exaltation in Hispanic poetry. One of our goals is to understand how the act of writing poetry can equip poets and readers to resist, subvert, reconcile and recover from acts of violence. Our analytical methodologies will include Postcolonial, Feminist, Cultural and Peace Studies theories. This course is taught in Spanish.

Preliminary course particulars:

1. Readings will be organized thematically.
2. In class, students will be required to:
   1. Participate actively in all classes;
   2. Be responsible for a variety of daily assignments;
3. In addition to our meeting times, students will be required to:
   1. Watch/listen to a variety of video and audio tapes;
   2. Maintain an electronic journal;
   3. Write and turn in 15 pages of papers (both reflective and research);
   4. Complete and document an outside-the-class group public project;
   5. Complete 2 take-home exams.

Poesía y Política

En este curso estudiaremos cómo la expresión poética ha funcionado a menudo de foro y vehículo de protesta, en resistencia, y de recuperación socio-sicológica para la voz, tanto privada como pública, del pueblo hispano-parlante. Estudiaremos específicamente la evolución de los discursos literarios, de protesta, pacifistas y resistentes cómo sujeto poético y objeto de exaltación en la poesía hispánica. Una de nuestras metas es intentar comprender cómo el acto de escribir poesía puede armarles a poetas y a lectores para poder resistirse a, subvertir, y recobrarse de actos de violencia. Nuestras perspectivas método-teóricas incluyen el Pos-Colonialismo, Feminismo, y Estudios Culturales y Para la Paz. Se enseñará la clase en español.

Moodle tips for convenience

• Use Firefox
• See exactly what you have just done looks like to a student.

---

• Use Firefox - open two tabs to your moodle course.
  This is especially convenient when adding text and activities to the main Outline/Topics page.
  • Add the Activity (eg Assignment or Forum) and supporting resources first (I indent the resource links with —> so that it’s more obvious what they are) [graphic]
  • Now, in the second tab, add a label describing the work you want students to do. Here you can have links automatically generated to the activities you refer to. [graphic]. However the links have to be called exactly the same name which can be hard to remember. So with the Label edit in the first tab and the outline page open in the second tab you can copy & paste the Activity name across.
• Test out what the activity looks like to a student -
  go to people : participants, open a user’s ‘given name’ and click on ‘login as’. UYou will now be logged in as that user so be careful. Here you can check her grades or whatever.
  Convenient to do this in Internet Exploder.

Quizzing

Some very nice features:

• Can have mulitple attempts
• questions and answers suffled each time (cannot predict which order they’ll appear)
• with multiple attempts can build on last one or start afresh
• with multiple attempts can use highest grade or average grade.
• short answer questions possible
• easy to embed graphics

Moodle survey of Students

I asked faculty in the following classes if I could use the FAST online assessment tool to survey the students in their classes for their opinions about moodle.
Survey web site

Division: Natural Sciences
Faculty	Course Id	Course Name	number students
Brent Smith	BIO 455	Population & community Ecology	16
Brent / Jon Branstrator	ENPR 111	Environmental Science	54
Jennifer Ziebarth	MATH 420	Abstract Algebra	11
Jennifer Ziebarth	MATH 180	Calculus A	37
—
Division: Social Sciences
Kathy Milar	PSYCH 342	Experimental Psychology	47
Michael Jackson	PSYCH 351	Qualitative research Methods	21
Mark Pearson	MGMT 110	Info Tech & Soc	22
—
Division: Fine Arts
Julia May	ART 382	Art of the Americas	39
Julia May	ART 282	Survey of Western Art	40
—
Division: Humanities
Micelle Patterson	HIST 121	US to 1865	41
Sandrine Sanos	ES	History modern anit-semetism	18
total			346

Applied CS student groups : Moodle

Students needed for:

• Ploughshares grant

I usually have a student worker funded by the Ploughshares grant in the spring. This would involve some Moodle/Sakai work (Sakai being the ‘other’ CMS and Java based), but also techie stuff with serving streaming video and supporting the video over IP connections to the other P’shares campuses.

• Moodle Programmers Group

Issues

• Current situation with regard to Course Management Systems - Moodle Sakai
• Current situation with regard to Webdb

Tasks

1. learn php
2. suss out Moodle module architecture
3. suss out direction Moodle’s taking
4. establish an area of need and how that can be addressed by changes to the Moodle system. Eg, Assessment module.
5. confer with Moodle community about need
6. get down and do it
7. continue with Ford Knight research Spring 06 (hopefully)

Integration efforts

• Integrate some Moodle functions with Webdb - eg assignment due alarms.
• Integrate Moodle with SunOne calendaring.

Tools

• individual Blog to record progress
• group wiki to swap code and info