Course Management at Earlham

Moodle has had a supremely successful roll out at Earlham in 04-05; over two semesters the system has been used by 60 faculty in 79 courses with over half the student body. This web-based presentation covers the adoption of the Moodle system by faculty, views on usability & pedagogy, how it was actually used in practice by both faculty and students, and conclusions and best practices. 34 'slides' onscreen or 17 pages of print.

Moodle Survey

Survey of all faculty who had used Moodle in 04-05 year using the SurveyMonkey online survey tool. 60 faculty were canvassed and 32 responded to the 10 questions. Many useful comments. Conclusions still to come.

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I submitted a proposal for the MITC Fellows programme called Teaching with Social Software : Pedagogical Insights [pdf format]. Although the proposal wasn't successful (I suspect the weakness was in the assessment and outreach to Earlham faculty) I think the course described is sound and I'm hoping that it works well. Certainly I've had supportive and envious comments from other Instructional Tech folks I've talked to.

Moodle Surveys

Online surveys were conducted in the fall semester of 2004 to find out:

• What teaching faculty thought about their experiences with Moodle.[Nov 04]
• What students thought about the use of Moodle in their classes. This comprehensive report (14 pages) was produced for ITPC and the conclusions are worth reading [Feb 05]
• What student users of both Moodle and Chef thought about each & how they compared them. [Feb 05]

Reports / Proposals

• I submitted a proposal for a workshop at the AECT Conference 2005 in Orlando called "Using Moodle in the classroom: how this online learning environment can enhance pedagogy" ; I'm going to present this together with Brian Beatty from San Francisco State
• I submitted a proposal for a Ford-Knight research project with CS students for spring 06 entitled Enhancing the Moodle Course Management System . It was accepted! [Jan 05]

User Guides

• Twiki is Earlham's stand-alone wiki system. It's particularly suited for authoring collaborative web sites. Here's a user guide.
• Most people think they know how to scan documents into Adobe Acrobat. However there are some gotchas that can balloon the file size of your document and make it unusable for students. Make yourself an Acrobat expert here [Sept 04].
• The Mozilla Firefox browser has been in the news recently. For Mac users especially, Firefox is a must have for Moodle; find out why here [Aug 04]

Here are some topics about which you'll be able to find information:

• Overview of Course Management Systems and their pedagogical value.
• Tips from teachers for using Moodle with a class.
• User guides for various Moodle features.
• Evaluations of CHEF and Moodle by students and faculty.
• Usability assessment of CHEF and Moodle.
• Reports and proposals germane to course management from various committees.
• Reviews and lists of relevant web resources.

• There's a new 'Moodle teaching tips' section to the User Guides. These are useful practical tidbits that faculty have discovered in their day-to-day use of Moodle. This could help you benefit from other's experiences.
  • Do you have a tip or “good practice” to pass on? Or maybe there's something that you cannot get Moodle to do readily for you? Contact Markp and we can suss it out together. [30^th August]
• For a good introduction for new faculty to the potential of Course Management Systems (otherwise known as Virtual Learning Environments) and getting started with Moodle take a look at the CMS & Moodle page. [16^th August]
• A start on Moodle user documentation [posted 18^th June]. I'm taking a three pronged approach:
  • for those who follow the 'what does this button do?' way of working with software, there's a highly visual overview of Moodle's main screen layouts and how the system is organised with all its major functions.
  • for those who learn by doing, there's the Moodle 'how to' series which takes you through the common things you may want to use a Course Management System for (eg making a copyrighted document available to your class).
  • finally, there will be a couple of pages which talk about good pedagogical practice with Moodle and give examples of how it can be used effectively with a class.

• Using Moodle in Field Botany (350) spring 2004; an evaluation [posted 6^th May]
• A report from Tom Kirk of a telephone conference call regarding future directions for CHEF/SAKAI and MITC [posted April 28^th].
• ITPC Report and proposal to April 28^th faculty meeting [posted 26^th April].
• Survey of Management courses in spring 2004 which were using CHEF [posted 14^th April].
• Read all about the CHEF pilot trial we conducted in the fall of 2003 [posted 9^th April].
• Minutes of the March 22^nd ITPC meeting.

You should be able to find your way around the web site easily using the pull-down menus and the right hand Link box; the “crumbs” at the top of the page give an indication of where the page is located in the site.

If you have any difficulty finding a page that you think should be here or if you have any other comments about the design and especially the site navigation, please do email me.