Rapid Uptake of Moodle by EC Faculty
- Pilot trial in Spring 04 with 2 courses
- Little publicity for Fall trial
- Massive interest from faculty
- Demand for workshops over break
Some Courses created but not used
- Out of 100 courses created 21 were not used
- Similar proportions for Fall & Spring semesters
- Unused courses indicate rush of enthusiasm but no follow through
Faculty use of Moodle : by Division
- Increase in Humanities faculty in spring semester
- Master Arts Teaching used no courses in the spring
There was considerable turnover in faculty between semesters. See slide 7
A better analysis would be to look at the percentage of faculty in each division using Moodle. There was a big buy-in from the Chemistry department after the Xmas workshop.
Courses taught : by division
- Considerable increase in Humanities and Science division in spring
- Good Sci Div attendance at New Year's workshops
Ditto comment for slide 3
Distribution of student numbers
- Average course size
- Moodle also popular for courses with large numbers of students
A better analysis would be a comparison of students/course in those using Moodle and not using Moodle
Change in faculty between semesters
- Only 10 faculty who had used Moodle in the fall continued to use it in spring courses
- 23 new faculty came on board.
- We don't know the reasons behind this considerable “churn”.
Change in numbers faculty using Moodle between fall & spring do not reveal
the turnover. A topic for a questionairre methinks.
Number courses per faculty
- Majority of faculty tried out Moodle with a single course
- Considerable proportion had two courses in Moodle
- Some faculty even hosted all three or four of their courses in Moodle
Anecdotally, the younger faculty seemed to take to doing things online with Moodle more readily.
How Moodle used : course outline
- Moodle's course Outline allows faculty to customise the way their course is presented.
- Blocks of content can be grouped as weeks or arbitrary topics
- The Social outline is basically a single discussion forum.
- Weekly & Topics format equally popular.
Use of graphics in Outline
- Faculty enjoyed enhancing the course outline with graphic images.
- Makes Moodle “fun”
- Hidden sections in the Outline used to conceal work in progress.
- Both these are a measure of sophistication of usage.
Moodle Activities
- Resources used by nearly every course
- News forum used to make announcements
- Journal used for online writing assignments
- Glossary used in creative way by Maths faculty
Resources : how much used
- Most courses used fewer than 10 resource items
- Surprise #1: number courses with 20-30 resources
- Surprise #2: number courses with greater than 50 resources
- A measure of intensity of use
Resources : types used
- Adobe Acrobat files and Web links were the most popular of resource types
- MS Word was also popular but caused problems for students
Resources : types used (continued)
- Powerpoint also caused problems - many converted to Acrobat format
- Text & HTML pages inside Moodle also used
- Links to personal web sites indicate “power users”
- “Directory” is a useful container for making a bunch of files available.
Assignments : usage
- Assignments can be either offline — description only
- Or online - upload a single file
- the chart shows that faculty made moderate use of assignments in their courses
Assignments : online/offline
- Usage of online submission of assignments was slightly less popular than offline
- A quarter of courses with assignments used both online and offline together.
News : usage
- News forum is used to make announcements to whole class
- Students are “subscribed” and receive a copy of the posting as email
- Faculty can make sure that students check Moodle by posting news items.
- Not used as much as I'd like
Journals : Usage
- Journal activity is a single online writing assignment.
Uses HTML with web links and graphics capability - Not as popular as assignments
- Most faculty made limited use of online writing in journal
- But some used them extensively (courses with 27 & 37 journals)
Discussion Forums : usage
- Apart from a couple of exceptions discussion forums were not heavily used.