 |
 |
Hi Fiona, We've just been revising our course management policy based around the idea of a Moodle course space lifecycle and I'm the process of writing this up for our internal stakeholders. Once it's been reviewed and approved I'm sure we should be able to share with this community and perhaps present something on it at the MoodleMoot. In essence we found that: * Staff and Students were confused if we kept older courses in Moodle for a long period and often kept going to older courses rather than the current instance of the course. * We've developed an academic course lifecycle whereby a course is active for a year, archived for a year (read only but available in Moodle to those who participated in the course), then removed from Moodle but the database records and content are stored in file store for a further five years before being destroyed. * We're starting to create courses for a new academic year earlier in the previous session to give academics more time to prepare course material. * We made some changes to the Course List Block so that a user's list of courses are grouped by categories with the current academic year courses at the top, then academic support courses, then archived copies of previous year's courses. Each course also has a different coloured disc as an icon (green for current courses, grey for archived courses) to make the most current courses the most prominent. Regards, Alison From: Moodle in UK Higher Education [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Fiona Strawbridge Sent: 28 January 2010 10:10 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Moodle Development Plan 2010 Likewise we are very interested in other institutions' development plans. At UCL major activities in the coming months are: - integration of Moodle with our student information system (SITS) based on the external database approach developed at Bath - Moodle housekeeping (removal of redundant courses and accounts, reorganisation of categories)( Alison's housekeeping issues really chime with us) - introduction of 'Moodle only accounts', possibly with a self-registration option (at present only those with UCL computer accounts can enrol on our courses) - provide a read-only archive instance of Moodle at the end of each academic year so that staff and students can refer back to/review their learning/courses (at present archives have to be restored from tape) - planning for Moodle 2.0 - get the remaining 2500 taught courses (of a total of 4500) into Moodle - by Sept 2011... We'd also be interested in how other institutions deal with archiving of previous years' courses. We've done the Turnitin integration and it's working well (and we think is going to boost uptake of both Moodle and of Turnitin) Fiona. On 28 Jan 2010, at 09:39, Pope, Alison wrote: Dear Nitin, This is very interesting - thanks for sharing! We do something similar each year, normally publishing ours in March (internally - we are not yet very good at publishing stuff more widely on our website). We are just starting to do the necessary workshops and consulting with stakeholders to find out what there annoyances and wishlist items are so far this session. It's a bit more complicated this year as we are trying to draw library, el-learning and repository activity more closely together into a more co-ordinated plan and vision for the user experience across learning resource systems so I am waiting for the formation of that joint project board before we can confirm plans in those three areas. I'm expecting this year to be reasonably quiet for us on the Moodle front this year after we did a lot of housekeeping on course management and retention last year, and like you we will be evaluating version 2.0 over the coming months with a view to a big upgrade (probably to 2.1 by then) next summer. We will almost certainly be looking at SSO this year, enabling seamless access between learning systems to make resource discovery and use easier for tutors and students. We also have the issue with user housekeeping having a growing database of users who have never been removed. We tried to get the user synchronisation script working this year to at least suspend accounts for those no longer in LDAP but I haven't been able to get it working against our Active Directory. We really want to get this working as academics want to see fully populated participation lists in Moodle. Also hoping Moodle 2.0 will have the hard delete functionality to allow total user removal once the system can check there are no orphan records for them. Other things on our backlog (I've got no idea which ones we will schedule this summer yet) include: * Turnitin Integration * Trying out the Microsoft Live@Edu plugin now we are moving student email over to that. * Trying out the Telstar reading list module produced by the Open University * Automating course synchronisation from the student system * Integration with Equella our new institutional repository Regards, Alison Alison Pope Business Analyst IT Business Development Computer Centre Royal Holloway, University of London Egham Surrey TW20 0EX [log in to unmask] 01784 414925 From: Moodle in UK Higher Education [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nitin Parmar Sent: 27 January 2010 15:58 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Moodle Development Plan 2010 Dear Colleagues, Just to let you know that the University of Bath's Moodle Development Plan for 2010 is now online and available at: http://go.bath.ac.uk/moodledevplan2010. I was wondering if any other HE institutions have developed a similar plan, and if they are available online? Perhaps, there are areas, stated in our plan, of mutual interest where institutions might be willing to share good practice with us (and others)? I'd certainly be interested to hear thoughts (on- or off- list) and discuss any item further. Look forward to hearing from you. Nitin -------------------------------------------------------------------- Nitin Parmar Acting Moodle Operations Manager & Learning Technologist [e-Learning team] -------------------------------------------------------------------- Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office University of Bath +44 (0)1225 384 392 [log in to unmask] | go.bath.ac.uk/nitin --------------------------------------------------------------------