Category: CMS/LMS

Are students breaking the Bb habit?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Every semester, students go to Blackboard looking for my class. Of course, my class is not in Blackboard. If you’re one of my online students, it’s in Moodle. Not the college’s Moodle, but my Moodle. If you’re at San Elijo, the class is in a Ning (well, and in the classroom).

Nevertheless, all of us deviants have a Bb class assigned to us, even if it’s not visible to students. We are supposed to create links from there to where we want students to go, acknowledging that students use Bb like a portal. When I chaired the technology committee, I agreed this was a good idea, mostly because I was doing it anyway, so now we’re all supposed to do it.

So every semester, I erase all the Bb menu buttons so students won’t get confused — they can only click on my info page, and it opens in a new window to eject them from Bb.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a number of students always enter their class through Blackboard — they are unaware that the class is actually somewhere else. As I’ve commented elsewhere, even if they know it’s another site, they still call any class website “Blackboard” or “the blackboard”.

Well, this semester I forgot to make the Blackboard shells I’d set up available to students. It was an honest mistake. I did set them up, which takes some time, so obviously I meant to do it. I thought I had done it.

But yesterday I got an email from a student. You see, I have huge wait lists of people wanting to get in to very full classes. So if a student doesn’t “show up” at the site on the first day, I email them. Of course, I have already emailed all students via our enrollment system the week before, pointing them to the right place. This student didn’t get that email, but today got the one where I said I’d have to drop him if he didn’t show.

He wrote me that he went to Blackboard, but the class wasn’t there, so he asked at “registration” and they said wait, it will open. So it wasn’t fair of me to drop him.

Bad on so many levels! Totally understandable that it wouldn’t occur to him the class might be elsewhere, but he asked at “registration”. He obviously hadn’t gone anywhere else at the college’s website — we have many pages for the online class information, all of which are linked properly to my classes. We have a call-in Student Helpdesk. But all he had was my second email, which he happened to discover on the third day of class.

Here’s the strange thing. He was the only one. I swear, I had received only two other emails from students who couldn’t find my class, and that was because they had gone to the college’s Moodle installation instead of mine. This is out of 160 online students!

In other words, 99.38% of students found their class without using Blackboard. Despite this student’s brief distress (don’t worry — I tell them I’m dropping them but I always wait awhile so long as it doesn’t affect their record — he’s fine), that stat is amazing to me. It means they did use the website, or did check their email, or didn’t make assumptions, or just found their way like they would on campus when looking for their classroom. Only one other student had even mentioned the course not being in Blackboard.

There is hope.

Blackboard as Kleenex

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

In recent conversations with Mike Bogle, I’ve stumbled on the idea that a lot of students, and online teaching novices, are using the word “Blackboard” when what they mean is “web learning stuff”.

It’s become like Kleenex, at one time the top brand of facial tissue in the U.S. People say “hand me a Kleenex” instead of “hand me a tissue”. The brand has become synonymous with the generic item.

My evidence is that students often say things like “I posted in the Blackboard”, when my class is actually located in Ning or Moodle. I find it interesting that they know what “posted” means, but not where they’ve posted. It’s all just the web, a Narnia that exists somewhere behind their computer screen. If their other teachers have referred to their course being in Blackboard, that must be where the online courses live, back there behind the fur coats amd the ads for enhancing male potency.

I’m sure this would thrill Blackboard, though it annoys the hell out of me, and folks like Mike, a leader in applying technology to the problems of pedagogy, who’s being called “the Blackboard guy”. I frequently have novice faculty approach me and tell me they’re getting into online teaching, so they’re going to take a Blackboard workshop, and where do they sign up for one?

I am always shocked no matter how often this occurs. I never know where to start. Do I first mention that they need to decide what they want to accomplish, then look at technology? point out there are many other systems (and non-systems) they can use? point out that POT doesn’t do “training” but we are delighted to help with their pedagogical needs?

Instead, I think I should try to figure out what they mean by “Blackboard”. Then I’ll probably need a Kleenex.

Cobbled CMS Part I

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Despite what I may have said in my last post, I am attempting to take the two things I need and use them linked from a class website for my on-site History 103 class this semester.

I need a few information pages with links (the syllabus, the homework instructions, the grading policies) and two special features: a gradebook and a place where students can post their historical theses and, for those more advanced in their work, the evidence they discovered.


Flickr CC

I began yesterday with Engrade for the gradebook and PBWorks for the wiki.

This required some preparation. I wanted students to have the same password for each, and for signing in to be easy for them. On Engrade, it appeared that to I had to put in everyone with a “engrade-lmlane-xxxxx” password, with xxxxx being unique digits. I chose the digits from within their student ID numbers, not using the whole number so we’d still have privacy protection.

In PBWorks, I set up Classroom Accounts because I didn’t want to use their emails, and I wanted to set the passwords the same as for Engrade. Problems immediately arose. I could not see a list of names with passwords (only “Classroom Account”) after I entered all the students (tech support said this should have been emailed to me, but it wasn’t). Every time I tried to add a student (some added late) it made me say how many, then considered the new folks as the only list, so again I couldn’t print a list with the passwords.

As I continued to work, I had some assumptions that carried over from PBWiki, which I had used a couple of years ago with great success. But things had changed. I could no longer back things up without a Premium Account. So although I had promised students they could not erase everyone’s theses by mistake because I could put them back again, I couldn’t guarantee that. In addition, I couldn’t seem to list things by User. In fact, there were very few settings in Users I could change. It began to occur to me that a wiki wasn’t the best tool for what I wanted anyway, and if log-in was difficult, why not use something else?

So I looked at Wetpaint and Ning. Rejecting Ning initially because of the ads, I went to Wetpaint and two nasty things emerged: no more ad-free education accounts (as of August 11!) and I couldn’t remove the many tabs (“photos”, “video”) making it look very social. Ning let me remove the tabs and set things up as posting forums, so I’ll try a private Ning for this.

Then back to Engrade. At first I was angry and thought to give it up, but now I’ve decided we’ll keep working with it. It turns out that the “engrade-lmlane-xxxxx” thing is just for students to sign up the first time. They can then change their name and password to whatever they want. But then I had an email from a student who couldn’t get in, so today we used Gtalk to troubleshoot together. It turned into an hour of me doing tech support because Engrade is so busy trying to protect the student, that they prevent me from seeing (and thus changing) her username or password. All I could change was the access code, but then it wouldn’t take the same email address. Workaround was to keep adding more accounts for her — ick. I’ll keep going with it anyway and see what happens.

To be continued…

A Space for Learning (or The Value of Doing Things Half-Assed)

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This post’s inspirations: George Siemens’ post Change That Prevents Real Change and the EdTech Posse podcast 5.6 from June (with Howard Rheingold), plus the fact that my colleague Jim Sullivan, our POT expert at blogging with students, is now using a Ning for his class.

George Siemens was concerned that online textbooks weren’t going far enough. His target was Flat World Knowledge, which offers textbooks in a restricted online format for free, and charges for printing or audio. This “tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole.” What ought to happen, Siemens argues, is change for the sake of principle rather than convenience, change that is more visionary. Ultimately he acknowledges arrangements like FWK’s as marking “[s]taged or transitional change”.

I now consider myself, having taken Siemens’ and Downes’ first online Connectivism course (which I blogged in great detail) and reading extensively, to be pretty familiar with the visionary goal of open, connected learning. I certainly use it myself everyday, as a learner. But I have had less success adapting it to teaching. Students resist for many of the reasons discussed in the EdTech Posse podcast, including their K-12 “training”, their desire for a more dictatorial class structure, the feeling they aren’t getting their money’s worth, the belief that the teacher isn’t really teaching, a marked absence of expected skills (bookmarking, RSS feeds), etc.

I’ve put this all together into a moderate position.

[If you know me, you may not think of me as moderate about anything. I eat chocolate to excess, get very passionate about things, and in the U.S. I am a political radical. Of course, in Europe, where they have real political parties, and in the CCK08 course itself, I am clearly in favor of moderation. Also as a historian: if one source says this, and another says the opposite, the truth is likely in between. I find myself these days, in the middle of my life, spending a lot of time defending the middle.]

Adding some online elements to a regular class is like creating those free online textbooks where you have to pay to have it in a traditional format. It’s a half-assed approach. I’ve done it continually with my classes (except for the one semester of History 101 which ended with only 40% of students still enrolled). It’s what most of our faculty do, and it is for principled reasons — to expand students’ horizons and take advantage of the wealth of information and tools available now via the internet.

In the face of all the wonderful, extraordinary thinking about open education (including this recent conference) I should be embarrassed to say that 80% of my classes still use a closed system, a CMS (course management system) — currently it’s Moodle. There are many arguments against these “closed silos” (a term coined by Brian Lamb and Michelle Lamberson). I’ve used most of them myself to argue for cobbling together ones own system. I’ve written articles on how to tame a CMS, get away from a CMS, subvert your CMS. And yet, I’m still using a CMS. Why?

Because sometimes half-assed is good.

The reasons I’ve always presented for why I use a CMS (copyrighted material behind a password a la the TEACH Act, and a gradebook integrated with assignments) may be only half the story. The other half, I think now, involves what currently concerns Howard Rheingold about student attention. (Here is his Attention 101 mini-lecture, where he explains his rules in class — how laptops may be used, etc.). Some instructors try to limit laptop use in an on-site class, because students spend their time doing things other than paying attention to the class. (I recall that I once saw a student watching skateboarding videos on YouTube instead of listening to the lecture I was evaluating.) I am aware of myself checking email and doing other things during meetings and conference presentations. Last year I told students with laptops they had to take notes and post them. I wasn’t comfortable with that. During the EdTech Posse podcast, Rheingold recalled how he watched over a student’s shoulder one time as the student used the internet to check email and do other things during a lecture. But he also Googled terms that came up in the talk, and bookmarked pertinent items.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Koshyk

I now think that in an online class, this is what a closed system provides: FOCUS. Artificial, controlled focus with only a half-assed nod to open education.

Perhaps just a “class homepage” (like I’m using in my on-site History 103 class this semester) does something similar, but nothing says “this is the class” like a closed place which requires a password. Jim’s English 202 Ning is a closed Facebook, a social networking environment enclosed in the class itself. The message is clear.

Everyone whines about how to control all this influx of information on the web. How do we limit our input to what’s really important? pare down information to what matters to us? hold back the tide of continuous partial attention? make time for what’s real? And as teachers, how do we prevent “creepy treehouses”, invading students’ social space?

The closed course has a solution in its a message: this is where you work, not entertain yourself. Where your social contacts are for the purpose of learning. Where whatever other tools are available (RSS feeds, posting boards, Twitter), this marks the spot where you show your learning. That is its true value, not just as a screen behind which we hide, but as a filter.

Thus do I now justify my resistance to leaving a closed system for my fully online classes. It’s not that I want to hide my stuff. I don’t — it’s all CC licensed and is actually on the open web anyway, just linked from the system. It’s not that I need the gradebook.

It’s that I need to define a space as Just for Learning.

Moodle forum updating

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I had noticed this before, and am still trying to figure it out. I have many forums (single simple discussion) set up in Moodle, and I am updating them all for fall. When I use Edit and change the title as well as the post, the new title appears, but the old title is still the same on the breadcrumbs path above:

I had a complaint today about forum changes not being saved, and I wonder if the two are connected. Back in Moodle 1.8 I posted this issue at Moodle.org but got no response. I still find it an odd bug, if that’s what it is. The only workaround seems to be to use the “Update this Forum” button instead of “Edit” at the bottom of the post.

Upgrading Discussion

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

Last year, for my onsite class, I used Moodle’s glossary function to have students create an annotated art collection. Although I used it occasionally in lecture, the outcomes for its use were not very clear — we were mostly just experimenting with the technology. I liked what students found to post, though, and what they said about their items.

For some time in my Moodle discussion forums, I’ve been using a two-step system. Each week has its own forum in the simple format. I post a visual or video prompt, asking a very open question such as “how does this connect to our reading this week?” They are required to make their first post by Wednesday midnight. I come in on Thursday, summarize the discussion, and take it to the next level through quoting them and asking questions designed to deepen the discussion. They have till Sunday night to respond.

A couple of weeks ago, I explained what I do in an Elluminate session for our Program for Online Teaching. The visuals aren’t the point here, but an excerpt from the session should provide an idea of what I’m doing:

http://lisahistory.net/media/discussionelluminate5.mov

As I mention, students are assessed on their discussion performance twice during the semester, at the half-way point and at the end, each for 10% of the grade. They do a self-assessment based on the rubric (for example), and I assign points to that. This semester, on both the self-assessments and the end-of-semester class evaluation, a few students were saying what’s become a typical discussion complaint. They felt that the students who got there before them had already “said everything” so they didn’t have much to say.

Now remember, I’ve designed the prompts to be so open that having someone else say what you were going to say shouldn’t even be possible. And, of course, a number of students didn’t return each week for the analytical part of the discussion. And yet, they felt this way.

My own dissatisfaction with discussion has been different; it isn’t about management or what they’ve said. I not only enjoyed their posts, but my bi-weekly summarizing and guidance system was highly efficient. Their self-assessments were usually dead-on, and they appreciated the opportunity to do them.

Photo credit: exzombie at Flickr

My problem was that discussion seemed text-heavy and overly directed. We call it discussion, but of course everyone is typing. A number of students were writing when writing didn’t seem to be their thing. Some students did post images, which I encouraged, and some linked to other kinds of resources. Sometimes discussions got very lively, with (civil) disagreements and connections to modern events. But these things seemed to happen by chance rather than as part of my instructional design. Discussion just wasn’t broad enough, visual enough, connective enough, exciting enough, for me. There wasn’t enough sense of students discovering things on their own, constructing something. I wanted something constructivist, like my art gallery glossary had been, but directed in a way that enabled me to guide effectively in alignment with the course goals.

Plus, I’ve been sensitive for awhile that, although my assignments are very open and let students work on things in different ways, I do not have alternatives built in. In other words, you can’t either take the quiz or do a project. I have felt unable to individualize assignments and grading this way because I have so many students.

Today a possible redesign occurred to me. I’d keep all my prompts (I do like them, after all), but the assignment would be different. Instead of commenting textually, students will have options. They can post an image, audio or video clip, and just briefly explain how it’s connected to the original prompt, or add their own connection to someone else’s item. In other words, we’d be collecting evidence related to that week’s topic (this is possible because my online West and US classes focus on the modern era, so there’s lots of stuff available). Students who like text could post excerpts from historical documents instead of something aural or visual.

Then, for the second part of the week, they’d need to select several of the pieces of evidence that have been posted, and construct some kind of theme or thesis tying them together, in their own way, to say something about the era. This is the historical skill I spend all semester cultivating anyway, gradually getting them to construct and prove historical theses, in a way that allows for lots of mistakes and re-doing. And as I’m doing now, I can guide more specifically early on in the class, and more loosely later on.

This new design would create several benefits:

  • More work for them, less for me — this is one of my mantras, because their learning should result from their own practice of skills and reflection on material (as Stephen Downes has noted, that’s their job).
  • Themes would be introduced earlier — the gradual approach I’ve been using of starting with facts, then moving slowly into interpretation and themes, did not allow enough thesis practice — this will.
  • Options and choices — students who are visual can post images and videos, aural folks can post audio files, text learners can post text, so more learning styles are reached and a wider variety of evidence is collected.
  • Tech-savviness would be encouraged — students often either have very few web skills or don’t use them much for learning, so this might help them practice.

So that leaves me a few things to do:

  • Change the instructions for each forum.
  • Create tutorials on how to add images, audio and video to the forums.
  • Update the FAQ to point to these tutorials.

Overall, this should be a good change. I want to focus more anyway on designing for openness inside a Course Management System, and I think this will be a good start. The wonderful resources on the web can be searched, posted and repurposed, even though the class is offered in a CMS. And that’s worth doing for all sorts of reasons….

Leading Horses: notes on helping, failing and peeking

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I do some shocking things to help my students succeed:

  • Questions in advance: all multiple-choice quiz questions are available in advance, with two tries to check your score.
    But, I have students who don’t use them.
  • Late work accepted: All quizzes and assignments are accepted up to a week late for partial credit. For on-site classes, homework may be turned in as a replacement for the quiz for partial credit.
    But, I have students who don’t avail themselves of this and get 0 points.
  • Samples posted: each quiz is followed by real-life examples from the exams of current students.
    But, I have students who don’t read them.
  • Help available: each class features both an extensive FAQ and a Help forum open to all.
    But, I have students who write things like “I couldn’t find this cartoon at the website, so I can’t answer the question”.
  • Access to me: via IM, email, Messages, etc.
    But, I have students who don’t contact me all semester.
  • Shout-outs and encouragement: in every discussion forum, I summarize and note the contributions of particular individuals.
    But, I have students who don’t read my posts.
  • Self-assessments and rubrics: instead of just assigning participation points, students write self-assessments comparing their own performance to that of the rubric, on which I base my grade.
    But, I have students who don’t do it, or do it as if there were no rubric, or tell me what they think they should get in the class because of all the effort they feel they put into it.

So, some of them fail. I figure that among the various rights I ascribe to them is the right to fail. I’m trying to get past the point where I think every failure of theirs is because I did something wrong.

leading horse

Flickr photo by NeuralVibrance

It’s interesting to note that, over twenty years, I have experimented with many different methods, from the bizarrely open to the strict instructivist. I’ve done this both for myself, because I take pride in my work, and to increase student success. BUT the result in terms of assessments and drop-out rate is almost invariable. My retention and “success” statistics rarely shift over the long term, but my more open methods have created less stress for me and certainly more opportunities for students, if they take advantage of them.

Last week, an instructor wrote me, distressed because students who weren’t enrolled till fall were getting into this semester’s course to look at the tests (Moodle has a self-enrollment system). I discovered in the documentation that you can change your “enrolment key” to prevent this, and currently enrolled students won’t be affected, so I sent out a message to all Moodlers. Then I started to go through this semester’s courses to put in a code on all my classes (I don’t use one).

Then it occurred to me. As with all the other things I’ve done, it won’t make much difference. If a student from next semester sees the tests, they will face two sections. One is multiple-choice, where I already give the questions in advance anyone, and the other is essay, which I won’t grade, obviously. If they look at the sample essays I’ve posted, then try to copy and paste them, I’ll probably recognize them because they are the ones I selected as examples. If they use the samples to create their own, they’ll learn something anyway. I took the enrollment keys back off.

I was told once about a professor who had a huge test bank of multiple-choice questions, which he vigorously protected. He figured, as many do, that prevention of cheating could best be accomplished by having a huge test bank so students rarely got the same questions. The very day he got up to 1,000 questions in the test bank, he found a printed copy of all of the questions left behind at a student’s desk. At first he was angry. Then it occurred to him that if a student actually studied all 1,000 questions, they were learning anyway, so what the heck? I remember that story all the time to remind me what I’m trying to do, whether the students choose to fail or succeed, sideways or otherwise.

Oh goodie: extra credit in Moodle 1.9

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

It’s that extra credit time of the semester, and here’s my workflow.

To add an extra credit assignment to a class, I first create an Assignment (offline) called EC. I select the maximum points (5) as the Grade, then select the category I use for graded items (mine is called Graded). I save.

Then I click on Grades (Grader Report) and be sure to “Turn editing on”. I click Control (writing hand) for that item, scroll to the bottom, and under “extra credit” put the total maximum points (5). That adds a column to the Gradebook in which I can manually enter the points and any comments, and add that number of points without affecting anyone else’s grades.

Seem unnecessarily cumbersome? Yup, to me too.

Why an LMS?

Lisa M Lane 12 Comments

There is a good discussion going on at Mike Bogle’s Tech Ticker blog about Learning Management Systems, which began with Mike going through a three-day Blackboard training.

As people divide along the issue of whether an LMS should be required in a college setting, this discussion has touched on whether such systems are a good idea. On the surface, it seems that trendy, tech-savvy people come down on the NO side, because they see LMSs as closed silos (a term I believe originated with Brian Lamb), trapping content rather than being sharing and open, while stodgy, fearful people come down in favor of having an LMS, and the worst of these want them required.

Of course, it’s not that simple. As I noted in comments on Mike’s blog, I am against the LMS at the gut level. I do not like the idea of content being trapped, or of instruction not taking advantage of the openness of the web for learning. I totally see the advantages of blogs, wikis, public participation discourse, the democratization of learning itself.

And yet, at this moment, I continue to use a CMS (sorry, I can’t keep up the term “LMS” — these systems are not meant to manage learning, but rather classes). At the moment, I use Moodle.

At MiraCosta (at least for now) we have one CMS (Blackboard) fully supported while the other two (Moodle and ETUDES-NG) rely on external hosts. We are not required to use any of them.

We have people who:
– don’t want to use a CMS
– do want to use a CMS, but are cool with what others do
– want our college to have only one CMS
– want our college to have only Blackboard
– want our college to have only Blackboard and everyone must use it

The ones who don’t want to use a CMS are seen as hopelessly trendy, achieving technological proficiencies reserved for only the few. Those who use one quietly are likely in the majority. Those who want us to have only one CMS present service arguments: it’s easier institutionally to have just one system. It’s easier for, well, management. So far, however, we have not confronted forces demanding that we use it, rather it’s a more subtle availability of services that guides our faculty toward using Blackboard. A number of faculty have assumed they are required to use BB — they have no idea it isn’t mandated.

From my perspective, the choice of CMS, and the choice of whether to use one at all, is a clear issue of academic freedom, particularly as such systems guide faculty into particular pedagogies. Countless times I have seen innovative classroom instruction translate into stodgy text-based crap because faculty faced with the CMS just start plugging in .doc documents. But that’s another story.

I began teaching online before there were such things as Course Management Systems, teaching myself HTML and downloading historical images from wherever I could find them, doing all grading by the “new” electronic mail. I refused to use our first CMS (Blackboard) until such time as it allowed me to change all its buttons so they could point to external URLs, making other websites and open tools usable inside the system.

As they have advanced, these CMSs have developed ever more features designed to “trap” our content into the system. But so long as they retain the ability to point to whatever you want on the web, we can sidestep the bear-traps and use the system as a mere shell, linking to wherever we want and having our students use more open methods of learning. That way, even if a system is mandated, we can completely subvert the process and retain the freedom to teach the way we want.

What’s out there on the web is not only more open, it’s more creative and can motivate students to higher levels of achievement. So why am I still using a closed silo at all? I use a CMS for the following reasons:

1. The gradebook.
Online gradebooks like Engrade may be an effective substitute. Some faculty are under the impression that FERPA requires all grades be kept private. Actually, only the final grade is private (the “grade on record”) according to the Supreme Court.

2. Copyright.
Despite wonderful progress such as the TEACH Act, it still appears to be necessary to “hide” copyrighted material behind a password, so that its Fair Use is limited to those enrolled in the class. The way around that, of course, is to only use my own or Creative Commons materials, or to get copyright clearance. My pedagogy makes such an undertaking unfeasible.

Those two things are all I need a CMS for, and I’m no longer sure about the first one.

Thus I come down on the side of, as usual, subversive methods developed in the interest of pedagogical integrity. I understand Mike’s concern that this may be a bit much for novice instructors, and I’m hoping the answer is to continue leading them to the web, encouraging participation in online communities, helping them realize the exciting things they can do outside the system, and showing them how to change those buttons.

The Unbearable Absence of Tags

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Moodle, alas, doesn’t get tagging. And it hurts that much more because I myself am only beginning to understand its power, and I like my course management system to be, well, a little ahead of me.

You can tag Moodle forum posts and search for the tags in forums, which is great, but you can’t tag resources. And the Program for Online Teaching site has lots of resources, with more being added every month. These resources are for online teachers, and include audio podcasts, videos of our workshops, links, advice, papers, forums.

As the main page of the site, divided into helpful areas like “Moodle House”, “Workshops” and “Archives”, has become more and more full, the system has become more confusing and useless. Want to get to that Elluminate recording where Robert Kelley shows cool things with pdf files? Is that an Archive or a Workshop or a Podcast? What about that Brainstorming workshop – was it recorded on video? And I keep hearing about this online teaching checklist – where can I get one?

Tags, obviously, are the answer here. Every resource should be tagged so it’s searchable. No can do, says Moodle. Oh, except in the Glossary. The Glossary has keywords, and categories.

I’ve used the Glossary before with students. I had them create an art gallery for my Western Civ online. It was pretty cool, although some students put in huge images that threatened to crash everything, and no one seemed to reference it on tests. So today I began adding to a Glossary all the resources scattered throughout the site, using keywords and searching. I showed it tonight on our Third Thursday Elluminate session.

My only misgiving is that this is still closed, inside a CMS. My glossary will never export in any meaningful way. And feature-wise, it’s pretty weak. I wanted to post a Zoho Show, and a Zoho Notebook, that went with a workshop. But Zoho’s iframe code wouldn’t work in the Glossary (I understand it should, but apparently Moodle 1.9 has some iframe issues in labels, and I’d say here too). But I got the audio and video in, and the index will be searchable. The main page will go from a mess to something meaningful, where faculty can access information. And that, I think, will be worth it.

OK, the new class format

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I decided to try an interactive syllabus, linked to graded activities in Moodle. My special thanks to the Moodle fairy (Mary Cooch) and Andrew Field for showing me, via Twitter, how to have a standard web page syllabus that links to Moodle exercises without hiding them and making them inaccessible. I almost had to give up the interactive syllabus as soon as I thought of it, but when I tweeted my despair, these two came through with this great suggestion.

As a result, the main page in Moodle is really focused:

Clicking on the Interactive Syllabus brings up one internal web page with everything linked from it:

They will have to bring something to class each day, and write a lot. For Mondays, they have typed homework, plus must post the thesis from that homework before class. At first I tried Assignments for that, but it didn’t let them see each other’s theses. Since thesis writing is a major historical skill, I want that more transparent. So I did it in Forums, one for each week, simple format. Then I’ll rate them using the same ratings I use for homework anyway. Because my default on my site lets students rate posts, I used the Override function for each forum to Prohibit students from “Rate posts” and “View any ratings”. That way their work is public, but their grades are private.

So I’m back to the idea that they must work online, here in the interest of sharing the most difficult task of the class: developed historical theses. I have tried small groups for this, or reading the theses aloud, but this is really more efficient. What I really wanted was to use the Q&A forum format, because they have to post first before they see what the other students posted. But the button to post said “Ask a question” (it’s supposed to be used for that), and I thought they’d be confused, since they aren’t asking a question. Just another way the technology controls the desired pedagogical method. Moodle giveth, and Moodle taketh away.

I kept it in Moodle even though I would have liked something more open. Partly this was for thesis sharing without fear, but mostly because of two issues: management (not always a big deal if I like what I’m doing) and materials. I confess: some of my materials are copyrighted by others, or not linked for attribution. For Fair Use, those should be behind a passworded system.

I’m thinking I need to design an open course from the ground up, without a textbook or other pre-conceived ideas. But for now, we’ll see how this works. As we start, I intend to let James Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain (2002) influence what I actually do in class, as well as what I learned from Stephen Downes’ ideas of modeling and demonstrating as being a teacher’s main responsibility.

On to the England class….

Synchronicity vs Tracking

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

During this break, I was looking at some of the various web spaces of a new online colleague of mine, Ed Webb, a Poli Sci prof in Pennsylvania. He’s got classes working in various spaces such as Wetpaint, and he’s doing cool things like having them use Meebo to chat while they watch a movie. And it made me think about synchronicity.

Most of what I do with my online students is asynchronous. This is because I acknowledge that many of them take an online class because they cannot attend a class on campus at a particular time (most of our online students live inside our district). Several years ago I tried to set up online office hours, but it was a problem because I have four online classes. Each has its own course inside the CMS (before it was Blackboard, now it is Moodle). There is no convenient way to open a chat with all classes at once, other than IM. And I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer students use IM these day (although I have spent some time in the last few weeks adding GoogleTalk chatback badges to my web pages instead of just Yahoo and AIM status indicators). Moodle does let you open a meta-course and enroll everyone, then link their course to that meta-course but man, what a pain.

To get a place where a group could meet synchronously, I could go to the web and open a room somewhere, like Yahoo or ooVoo, and link to it from the class, but this would require students to get an account an log in, and I’d need them to log in so I could see who was there. Or I could use Elluminate inside Moodle, and trust them to be OK with the extra step and Javascript download, but even there they must enter a name. They could just type in any old name to join the discussion. I picture myself leading a synchronous discussion with a couple of dozen students, recording it and having to jot down names, the quality of what they contribute and how long they stay. Sounds like a pre-web nightmare.

How could I track participation? Don’t I need something automated with up to 200 students?

In thinking on this, it occurred to me: tracking is, by itself, the biggest problem with Web 2.0 for activities that count for the grade. The biggest reason we all use a CMS in the first place (especially now that there are other wonderful options) is just that: tracking, of grades, participation, performance, portfolios. The asynchronous environment, inside a closed system, is simply the easiest way to track student activity.

As I plan for Spring, I consider things like this….

Undoing Blackboard 8: Four-Step Recovery Program

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

At MiraCosta, the tech folks set up a Blackboard class for every section, on-site or online, whether we like it or not. It’s set as unavailable, but students email asking where it is, and many use Blackboard like a portal. The result has been recommendations that we use our Bb course to guide students to our course if we use other places instead (i.e. Moodle, a blog, etc.).

My workflow for undoing a Bb class in four steps:

1. Create a standard web page with basic class information, including the URL to enter the real course.

2. Go into the course in Bb, Control Panel. Using Manage Course Menu, add External Link (with Name “This course is not in Blackboard”), linked to your information web page.

3. Still in Course Menu, Remove all other items.

4. In Manage Tools, Tool Availability, unclick all boxes for Communications Area and Tools Area. (This prevents fruitless clicking around the tools in the Tools box part of the Menu, which appears automatically otherwise.)

The result is a Bb page that shows your info page only, and from which students can go only to links you’ve got on that page. It’s even simpler than in previous versions of Bb, where you had to reset the entry page and could only modify menu items.

So go ahead. Lead them the heck out of there.

Student Tags and What They’re Into

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

As usual, you find interesting things while trying to do something else. In this case, while trying to figure out how to tag resources for the Program for Online Teaching site, I instead discovered that Moodle tracks words students tag in their Profiles. Here’s what I got for this semester:

The size/boldness shows how often words were used. Notice how “History” is standard size, while music, beer, Beach, surfing, Travel, Photography etc. are much larger. Really shows what they’re into.

Third Thursday wrap-up: Bb groups, Flickr, wikis

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Our November Third Thursday Meetup (recorded) in Elluminate last night had great ideas, and it occurred to me I should be blogging these!

1. Signups in Blackboard

Pilar Hernandez showed us how to use a feature in Blackboard that allows students to sign up for groups. In her class, many students are local, and would like to meet in person to practice their Spanish. But they were unwilling to set up those meetings themselves, being shy about contacting each other. So Pilar set up half a dozen meeting times and places, using the

To do this, use the option under course content’s “select” drop-down:

Students can see how many are coming, and add or remove their names.

2. Annotate images in Flickr

I demonstrated how to annotate an image in Flickr. I uploaded a copy of the painting Masaccio’s Trinity, then used the “add note” button to put annotations anywhere I wanted in the picture.

You save each one. Then when a student mouses over the picture in Flickr (you need to link them to the main picture page) they can see your annotations.

3. Wikis for classes

Donna Marques took us into the wonderful world of wikis, where her students create and practice Spanish. To start, she showed us Common Craft’s video explaining how wikis work:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKSxJFKoDb4&w=425&h=350]

Her preferred platform is PB Wiki, which uses Google Gadgets. Students can practice writing, make to -do lists, see a countdown to presentation day, and work collaboratively in groups. Donna will be expanding this topic in her “Wiki Wonders” workshop on January 12 during MiraCosta’s flex week.

All Third Thursday meetups are recorded and posted at the Program for Online Teaching site. Join us there on December 18.

Top Five Myths of Teaching Online

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

1. I gotta use Blackboard.

No, you don’t, even if your institution sets you up a Bb or WebCT class and has a policy saying you must use it. Blackboard, or any course management system, is just a shell. There are a zillion features you’ll never use. Or maybe you’re an innovator who’d rather teach with blogs and wikis. Solutions:

  • Learn to use the Control Panel’s Course Menu to change all the buttons. Make invisible those features you won’t use. Remove them from Tools. This makes it easier for students anyway.
  • If you want to use the web inside your class, add Course Menu buttons and link out to the URLs of blogs, wikis, etc., being sure to tell students they’ll need to set up accounts. But the pages themselves will look like they’re in Blackboard unless you tell it to open them on a new screen.

2. It takes too much time.

That depends on how you organize, and what you want to do. It is a mistake to assume you must create the entire class before it starts, and have everything visible to students as they enter. Think in terms of it being a regular class, just online instead of in a physical classroom. The same time-savers and time-wasters come into play. Yes, there is a learning curve, so it may feel more like your first year of teaching than your tenth. If you are already web-savvy, this time is negligible. If not, make time first to play on the web.

3. It’s not like real teaching.

It is real teaching in every sense, from preparing class materials, to planning for interaction, grading, and expressing your professorial personality. If you don’t believe that, ask to sit in on an online class someone else is teaching. The trick is to set up a class that demands your online presence, and use every opportunity to create a classroom personality through the way you write and what you create. Some instructors need set times to go in and add to discussion or message students on their progress, so they’re always aware of what’s going on “in class”. Others are on the web anyway and “stop by” daily.

4. The students know more than I do.

If you mean cellphones and Facebook, yes, they just might. Although you could use these technologies to teach, it’s unlikely you’d choose to do so. Students’ superior kills in social interaction technologies do not translate directly into learning online, anymore than being socially popular translates to in-class performance. You know your discipline and you know how to teach more than they know how to learn, in any environment. And anything they know that you want to know, they’ll be delighted to teach you.

5. I don’t know how.

You can learn from others, or just get started. Create a class, planning it just like you would an on-site class. For every element you do in class, look in your course management system or search on the web to figure out how to do it online. Experimentation is key — you can’t break anything. Get technical help when and if you need it. Start small, and build more into your class after you teach it the first time.

We Interrupt this Programming for a Gradebook Rant

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

True, much of my time and writing now is being spent at my new connectivism course blog , but at the same time I am grading exams in Moodle 1.9 and am engaged in a fight to the death with the new Gradebook.

To understand this sucker seems to require an advanced degree in mathematics, and prior intensive participation in its development. I have neither. The big complaints so far are:

  • Scales in forums now translate automatically as percentages in gradebook.? You cannot stop this. You create a quantitative scale (i.e. “good post”, “pretty good post”, “needs some research”) and it translates it to the percentage grade out of how many items you have (in this case, three, so a student would get 66% for a “pretty good post”). It’s horrible. My scales are truly qualitative, and a high or low isn’t necessarily implied. For example, some of my scales for forums have “related to readings”, “reply to colleague”, “focused on lecture”. These do not have numerical equivalencies. The only way to turn it off seems to be at the full-site level, where doing so would also eliminate the possibility to have numerical scales aggregated into the grade. The only way to get scales ignored seems to be to use the simple “Sum of Grades” aggregation only. Right now I’m using the Quick Feedback to “grade” my onsite students’ homework, which is horribly clumsy.
  • You can’t have extra credit within a quiz. My quizzes all have 22 questions, with 11 maximum points, for a total of 10 points credit. Get that? One of the questions is “extra credit”, but it doesn’t matter which one. In Moodle 1.8, I could set the quiz maximum score at 11, and the maximum score for that quiz as a gradebook item at 10. Then if someone got 10.5, it would just add the extra in, but everything would calculate correctly in terms of percentage.Now I have to make my course total 110 points, and recalculate the entire letter scale so it fits properly.

And, on the page where you can edit all the various levels of grades (full course, category, category total, item — it’s ridiculously complicated), you cannot use Ajax (drag-and-drop) to organize things into categories, because of “accessibility issues”. Really, cumbersome isn’t the word. Just look at a section of instructions on how to use it:

I’m sure I’ll find more awful things. The big problem is that this is not just a situation where familiarity will solve the problems — it’s a big deal for novice users (and I’m not even one of those). I have always encouraged Moodle as being great for novices, and all novices start with the same three features (announcements, forums, and gradebook). Such complexity in the name of creating a more “robust” gradebook is unforgivable, and has undermined my encouragement to others to use Moodle.

To use a dinner-time analogy, a big hunk of meat on the table is impressive, but it is not much use if you can’t cut it with the knife you have. My carving knife broke using this new gradebook, and now I’m looking for a hatchet.

Overview of Participation

Lisa M Lane

Moodle does not let you see everyone’s forum participation all at once, unless you select only one forum. I have a forum for each week in each class, and ask the students to assess their own participation. Not that I don’t trust them, and of course I know who’s there a lot by reading their posts, but I like some stats to peruse while I assess their assessments.

Today I let Moodle’s download feature help me. Although I cannot get Moodle to sort by name when I ask for a report of all participations on all days, even limiting it to Add (to show only what they’ve contributed), it will do it when I download, in this case to Excel.

Then I can sort the entire chart by their name (Column D) and see easily whether they’ve posted the required number of times at the frequency I’ve requested.

The “Student Ease of Use” Argument

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

I heard today from a gentleman disagreeing with my article Toolbox or Trap? Course Management Systems and Pedagogy in EDUCAUSE Quarterly. His main point was that the choice of CMS should be about the student, not the professor. As a student in postgrad studies, he was frustrated by the multitude of different systems:

As a student, I didn’t care how the organization was done (pedagogically) , but I wanted uniformity among the professors… I didn’t want to learn how each professor want to organize their course uniquely. I want to be able to quickly (and intuitively) navigate each course and have appropriate documentation found in the same location for all courses.

I have heard this argument before at my college. It tends to come up any time it is suggested that we should only have one CMS. After pointing out that many students are enrolled at multiple colleges with multiples systems (nowadays called “swirling”), my response is the same as I made to my correspondent.

I think students are important, too, and I appreciate the argument about student ease of use. But then I look at the web and see a multitude of sites, with many different methods for participating in them.

Then I see the business world and, despite the “computer competency” focus on Microsoft Office, I know that the ability to transfer knowledge from one system to another is what makes for a valuable employee.

It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the confusion. I recall college classroom experiences of my own, where I found it most annoying that this prof wanted this sort of thinking and assignments, and another had completely different expectations. But improving my ability to respond in a nimble way to a variety of conditions has served me well.

And from what I’ve been reading in David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, our ability to organize for ourselves the mass information and communication at our disposal through the web is what will make us better at acheiving understanding.

So I’m beyond thinking that students should have to deal with different systems because instructors should choose the CMS that fits their pedagogy. I think we’re doing students a disservice not to stretch their ability to learn new systems and transfer that knowledge.

Moodle update

Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

MiraCosta College has arranged to offer both Moodle and ETUDES-NG by arrangement with Moodlerooms and the ETUDES consortium. I am delighted to report that these systems, in addition to Blackboard, will be operating for several years at least.

One of the conditions of doing this, in addition to minimal load on IT staff, was that I agree to be the “Faculty Lead” for Moodle, and my colleague John Turbeville the same for ETUDES-NG. In my case, this means I don’t have admin access, but am expected to assist faculty and lead anything having to do with upgrades or functionality, particularly third-party modules like WiZiQ (which we haven’t got quite working yet), Feedback and Questionnaire.

We updated to 1.9 a couple of weeks ago, so I encouraged current Moodlers to back up everything first. I thought a screencast might make it easier, so I made one. I even uploaded it to MoodleTutorials.org: it’s called Backing Up a Course.

Then questions began to roll in, as more faculty starting setting up their courses. Instead of answering each one by email, I began making more tutorials using Snapz Pro X:

Wish us luck! As I tried to tell IT, I ain’t no SysAdmin, but I’ll do my best.

Rate Me!

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Though some of my “Twitter buds” said I was crazy, I have invited my online students to evaluate my teaching, twice. As usual each semester, I have a survey based on MiraCosta’s online instructor evaluation, but with some of my own questions added.

Two of the most important questions I add are

  • I understand why I’m getting the grades I’m getting
    (responses are Likert-style, i.e. Strongly Agree – Agree – Disagree – Strongly Disagree) and
  • How much effort, in time and thought, would you say you put into this one class this semester?
    (responses are: A huge amount of effort – a large amount of effort – a moderate amount of effort – little effort)

These give me an idea of their own level of dedication to the class, and enable me to interpret the ratings. Thus a class that has a lot of slackers but gives me low ratings may not be my fault, or a class that has very low grades but gives me high ratings may have been happy with the experience anyway. The formal MCC evaluations, which are not administered every year but only during my tenure evaluation cycle, do not get to this level of assessment, so I do my own survey for each class each semester. (For those following technologies, I had a lot of trouble with Moodle’s Questionnaire module, and although I was advised to use Feedback instead, by that time I had already reconstructed the survey using phpESP on my hosted server.)

What’s new this semester is that I have also invited students to rate me at RateMyProfessors.com by putting the following notice in a Moodle block:

I’m asking everyone to please fill out the course survey at the bottom of this main page. In addition, if you’d like to do something more “public”, I invite you to respond at RateMyProfessors.com if you’d like.

As everyone knows, such sites tend to pull in the complainers (often those who dropped in frustration) or the enthusiasts. But in this case, by asking at the end of the semester, I thought I could attract the ones who’d hung in there, who actually know the whole class. And so far, it’s going pretty well.

SDCCD Online Teaching Excellence Symposium

Lisa M Lane

It had neither the drinking nor gay focus a historian would expect from a “symposium”, but it was cool. I missed the 2:00 sessions because I was presenting Interactivity and Learning Styles at the same time. I had beeen asked to reprise this from last year, but I didn’t want to, so I proposed a Web 2.0 presentation instead, but was asked to please do this one because the response from last year was so positive. The problem was that I have changed my mind somewhat since I gave the presentation (next post coming up!). I no longer think that students are technologically savvy, capable of picking up new academic uses of technology easily or willingly. On the other hand, I was asked to do what I did last year. So I added a slide of “caveats”.

And, just like last year, I wasn’t able to finish the presentation in 45 minutes. My wonderful colleague Shafin Ali was at the conference, and agreed to be my cameraman during my presentation. (34 MB, so it will take awhile to load — didn’t get around to YouTubing.)


Camera work by my colleague Shafin Ali (Professor of Economics, the “dismal science”, though he’s actually a very cheerfull guy!)

Here are some of my notes from the other sessions:

Keynote by Patricia James: “Putting YOU in Your Online Class”

  • students come into online classes thinking they’re ready but they’re not
  • instructors must make themselves accountable to actually teach, tell students about their response time and do it!
  • she creates an anonymous forum at the end of the class for “parting shots”
  • Mt San Jacinto apparently has Online Faculty Mentors who get release time
  • said you can’t use publisher materials only, or YOU aren’t there
  • be yourself, use friendly announcements (I thought she said be yourself – just kidding!), emoticons if you’re sarcastic (yup), encouragement, mention students by name

Effective Pedagogy Online: Seven Principles of Effective Teaching Practice by Hank Beaver

  • The seven principles can be a basis for quality evaluations
  • he shares retention statistics with students; many have trouble managing distractions or think the course will be easy, so he lets them know up front these may be issues
  • use multiple strands to achieve the same objective (although that is time consuming)
  • one of the attendees says she lists the amount of time students will need to succeed in each element of the class
  • several attendees were very harsh on deadlines; one used the phrase “flexibility means responsiblity” (he admitted to low retention); there seemed to be hostility toward students on this issue — I think that “responsibility means flexibility” and I’m responsible to be a little more flexible — I allow a week to do a quiz late for reduced credit
  • what I’ll change as a result of this session: I’ll ask them to look at the grading rubric early and ask how thy think they’ll do, I’ll change my FAQ title to something like “Helping Each Other” to encourage that, I’ll use CCCConfer’s Elluminate instead of worrying about getting it through Moodle, consider telling them how much time each element of the class will take

Joan Van Duzer and Carole Robinson: My Online Course is Ready — Now What?

A very useful presentation because it focused on how to actually facilitate an online course, and how to assess whether you’re doing it well. A group from the Community of Academic Technology Staff created an Instrument to Assess Online Facilitation. They’ve created a checklist, designed to be simple and straigtforward, that can be used by faculty just starting out, more experienced faculty or course evaluators. There is also an Activity Record, similar to the notes I keep on each class each semester. In their case it was designed to help transfer the course to different instructors each semester. We don’t do that at MiraCosta, land of academic freedom, so the main use for us would be keeping our own records.

What they came up with is, I think, an improvement on my own assessment tool that I developed in 2006. Joan Van Duzer was cited in mine, and a lead on the CATS project discussed in the session. She also teaches Moodle classes for @ONE, and the conversation went into Moodle. I made a note that CSU is choosing Moodle because Blackboard didn’t pass accessibility tests, as noted in Blackboard vs. Moodle.

I plan to introduce such a tool to workshops in fall.

Retention Experiment

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

As we all know, “retaining” students is a big issue with online classes. where the drop rate is traditionally higher than onsite classes. Right now I’m trying a couple of new things.

Moodle has several weaknesses, of course, and one is the way it displays the comments on a quiz essay question. It is difficult to tell the quiz question from the student’s answer, from the correct answer, from my comments. They are all in the same typeface and color. One way I get around this is by using the html font tag on the correct answer when I write a test, which is a pain when upgrading, but there you are. But it’s still hard to see my comments, and I don’t really want to write all comments in font tags as I grade.


So tonight it occurred to me that one little thing might help. Instead of just writing a comment, I start with their name and a comma. So instead of “This is a good answer” I wrote “James, this is a good answer”. I figure their name will jump off the screen at them even if it’s in the same font.

The other thing I’m trying is emailing students who miss the quiz. I offer partial credit for up to a week, but after it’s due I password it so they have to ask me for it. Moodle makes it easy to see which students didn’t take a quiz (at the bottom of the screen it gives you to the option to view “Show students with no attempts only”). I have begun using Quickmail, which lets me select several students from the list to send an email to, letting them know that they missed the quiz but can still take it for partial credit. I ask them to Message me from inside the site for the password, which gets them into Moodle and gives me a record of our communication.

I’m hoping these two techniques will help students see even more that I am truly there. I think instructor “presence” is crucial in an online class, and the individual touch (if it’s not horribly inconvenient to the instructor) can be helpful.

The 2.0 Fear Factor

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Having just finished editing my opinion piece on how CMSs limit pedagogy, I happen to find Fear 2.0, currently being discussed at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Conference in San Antonio, in a session entitled “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0” All the media is posted here.

Several videos were part of this project:

Although I’ve been promoting playing on the web, it never occurred to me that fear was related to anything other than security issues (school admins blocking websites, etc.). Although I do not yet live a full 2.0 life like some of these amazing innovators, I can see how fear of a number of things can be factors in stagnation: fear of change, democracy, looking stupid, losing control, freedom. And although I often think it’s the technology that’s not moving fast enough for me, perhaps people are moving slowly too.

CMS as Portal?

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

OK, I promise, this won’t really be a Blackboard rant. But at our college, the most supported system is Bb. We’re piloting one or two others (Moodle!), but the support folks are accustomed to Bb. Each semester everyone’s classes, both onsite and online, are automatically assigned a Bb course, whether or not they’re used.

Students taking online classes have become used to Blackboard. They don’t realize it’s just a shell, a system inside the internet. Last semester, I “erased” all the buttons on my Bb classes and left only one, with only one page attached: the page redirecting them to the Moodle class, which opened in a new browser window. Nevertheless, many students continued to use Bb as a portal, only entering my Moodle class through Bb’s interface.

I thus encouraged our Moodle users to do as I did: make all but one of Bb’s buttons unavailable, but keep the class there with a redirecting link. A pair of respected colleagues, David and Don Megill, resisted this idea of continuing with Bb as a kind of portal. But we all acknowledged that students use it that way. Gradually it began to annoy me.

So last week (today is the first day of spring semester), I simply didn’t make my Bb classes available at all. It is printed in the Schedule of Classes (and its online version) that students must email me before the first day of class. I have directions to the classes on web pages, linked from both my home page and the Cybercosta page. These pages give the URL for the Moodle classes. Then I watched enrollment.

This morning, the first day, 96 of 160 students had gotten in on their own. I sent the others an email (using the email they used to register at MiraCosta) with the URL. As I write this (the evening of the first day), all but about 6 students per class have found their way. Without Blackboard. Perhaps they will learn that not all learning experiences are based in that monopolistic system. It’s a good day.

Top 12 Things I Like About Moodle

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

This is the list I used for today’s Using Moodle workshop of the top twelve things I like about Moodle (except that I have two #7s so it’s really thirteen):

1. Fewer clicks: I do not have to “drill down” (use multiple clicks) to create materials or move through the class.

2. Personalization: There are more customization options for every aspect of the course.

3. Visuals: I can use images to identify myself and my students visually, and add images anywhere in the class easily.

4. Intuitive layout: The default layout for the class is weekly, like a syllabus.

5. Gradebook edits: I can change any grade for any assignment in the Gradebook like a spreadsheet.

6. Blogs, wikis and feeds: if I want to use these, they are already built in.

7. Grading Scales: I create my own qualitative scales for discussion and grading, with pulldown menus

7. FAST TEST GRADING!: the manual grading mode makes it possible to see all the student responses to the same question on one screen, and grade them there quickly.

8. BETTER DISCUSSION!: the nested format creates a more natural discussion that is much easier for students and me to follow.

9. Real Messages: Messages to and from student pop up every time the course is entered, and message history is kept per student so I can access later.

10. Basic stats: Student use stats are on their profile page and easy to understand.

11. Easy chat: Simple chat room by week if desired.

12. Students self-enroll: Email addresses tend to be accurate because students control their enrollment.