Moodle in the UIUC CTER Program

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Revision as of 22:30, 11 April 2006

Tony Hursh, EdPsy grad student, and member of CTER support staff

• "Instant Moodle" demo (installation of basic Moodle server from thumb drive)
• Description of CTER
  • Online Ed. M. program
  • Students are mostly working K-12 teachers, some college/university staff
  • Currently in ninth year
  • About 50 students in program at any one time
  • CTER moved to Moodle about two years ago.. motivated by campus no longer supporting Blackboard and WebBoard, and reluctance to change to WebCT.
• Moodle Use in CTER
  • Two servers, one for course delivery, one for student use.
  • Production server Mac OS X, student server Linux.
  • 2-3 courses per semester on production server.
  • Students have created about 40 courses on their server, many in active use with K-12 and college students.
• Other Moodle servers at UIUC
  • UIUC College of Education
  • UIUC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
  • Math Department
  • Library Science
  • English

Tom Anderson, UIUC EPSY faculty member and CTER Program Director

Some comments about Migration from Blackboard (Bb)

• Used Blackboard for 3 years, about 20 courses.

• Felt very comfortable with it since it was easy for me to insert and edit information, and was student friendly

• Never in the 3 years that I used Bb did it lose information, or fail to respond for more than a hour or two.

• I was very disappointed when UIUC decided to stop supporting Bb.

• At about that time Tony made CTER aware of the Moodle revolution.

• He and others experimented with it for a semester, then most of the CTER instructors migrated to it without major problems. The migration routines/application that began to appear were not particularly helpful to me.

• I opted to use Moodle, rather than WebCT Vista, primarily because it was so similar to Bb, and that it had many additional features that looked interesting.

A basic lesson managed by Moodle

• Subject Matter Content to be processed by student
  • Textbook assignment
  • Online text material – documents, websites, wikis, blogs,
  • Videos
  • Power points
  • Lectures on voice files

• Student assignment to interact with subject matter content
  • Written Essays in assignments
  • Voice pieces (mp3 files)
  • Wikis
  • Blogs
  • Journals
  • Forums
  • Chats
  • Power points

• Interaction among students and instructors
  • Forums – mediation role play
  • Chats – mediation role play
  • Wikis

Evaluation and grading

• ePortfolios
• Tests
• Surveys

Managing a Resident Hybrid Course, and a Similar Online Course Via Moodle

• A CTER course, and a residence f2f hybrid course.

• For most of the course the content materials were similar for both courses – lectures, textbooks assignments, power points, video clips, etc.

• All students had the option of attending the synchronous sessions online via Elluminate, face2face at COE, or listening to the archived session.

• Also, they could attend the face2face with their lap tops, and participate online. Virtually all of the residence students (19) attended face2face and as many as 6 tried Elluminate while f2f. There were about 13 of the CTER students (19 enrollees) each Elluminate session.

• The student assignments varied each week, and are listed on Moodle.

• All students were expected to read and interact with each others’ work. A requirement of 40 "replies to the work of other students”

• Students will submit their semester work in the ePortfolio at the end of the course

Norma Scagnoli, CTER Program Coordinator

From the Administrative point fo view: Moodle as an alternative system for an online program

Evolution of LMS in CTER

• Web pages + WebBoard
• Web pages + WebBoard + AOL/TappedIN + Survey tool + Collaboration
• HTML Template + WebBoard + TappedIN + Survey tool + Collaboration + Audio/Video
• Blackboard & Webpages
• Moodle

In the CTER program at the U of Illinois (http://cter.ed.uiuc.edu) we have never imposed a LCM system to our faculty. They have been presented with different options available through the college or campus. At the beginning of the program (7 years ago) all courses were developed in HTML with an instructional design and navigation that represented the philosophy of the program. As years went by and more options became available, some courses continued being developed in Dreamweaver; some preferred Blackboard (none of our instructors chose WebCT when presented with the option); and some used Moodle. Today all courses but one use Moodle as the primary content management system. The two main reason why instructors chose Moodle was that they felt more confident to work on their courses by themselves without having to depend on instructional designers or tech support to make changes to their courses, and the other was that the webpages that had been produced for previous version of the course were very easily incorporated into Moodle, keeping the navigation consistent and everything within the same learning space. Those that were using Blackboard moved to Moodle because campus was no longer supporting Blackboard, and Moodle seemed the best choice. When we surveyed students to know what system they liked better, the ranking of the responses was : First)Blackboard, Second) Moodle, Third)Web pages and applications (applications=webboard/tappedIn for discussion, a chat program, etc.).

Advantages of Moodle over Blackboard and WebPages

• Integration, import and export content
  As administrator of the program I prefer Moodle to Blackboard and to web pages for several reasons. One of them is because it is easier to 'take content out' from Moodle than from Blackboard. When we had to migrate courses from Blackboard it was not user friendly at all. Now with Moodle we burn a CD every end of semester as a back up copy of the course, and it takes us 5 minutes to provide the instructor with his course in a format that will display in any browser.
• Instructor support
  Another reason is that Moodle has cut the support needed by instructors in half. The requests for help to make last minute changes have almost disappeared.
• Administration: Roster, attendance, participation
• Updates & Training
  Using web pages meant combining the course management system with other applications, for example software to facilitate synchronous and asynchronous communication, or grading. This involved being dependent on three or four or more providers to keep everything updated and running, and also provide students and faculty with training every time one of the applications had changed a lot.Also, supporting one system is easier for administrators than having to support two or three, but our program is small and we can still ask instructors to choose. Moodle is at the top of choices so far.
• Cost of staffing: tech support, instructional design, web development, graphic designer.
  Regarding costs, Moodle has been more cost effective than supporting Blackboard and much less costly in staff hours than supporting webpages. Regarding interaction, I think it depends on the instructor use of the system. In seven courses in Moodle or Blackboard, I can find many different ways to use the synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, depending on who is teaching.

As instructor and instructional designer: The instructional possibilities of Moodle

Four Phases of Instruction (Allessi & Trollip,1991)

1. Presentation of new materials:
   Moodle allows for variety of formats, internal and external sources, inside and outside the system.
2. Guiding the student through interaction & collaboration
   -Learner-Learner interaction
   -Learner-Instructor interaction
   -Learner-Content interaction
   -User-Interface interaction
   -Collaboration: Peers, Groups, Whole course
3. Practicing
   -Assignments, glossary, lessons, quizzes, journal
4. Assessment
   -Monitoring students activity, grading scales; grade book

• Flexibility with formats and consistent navigation

• Instructor-friendly

• Language support & CTER Outreach

School of Engineering, UNSL, Argentina: http://cterhost.ed.uiuc.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=34

College of Education, UNLP, Argentina: http://cterhost.ed.uiuc.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=22

Interuniversitary Commission (CONARE) Costa Rica: http://ctercms.ed.uiuc.edu/course/view.php?id=15

School of Math & Science, UNLPam: http://online.exactas.unlpam.edu.ar/moodle/login/index.php

Continuing Education UAA: https://educa2.dgd.uaa.mx/course/view.php?id=2

Gary Cziko, UIUC EPSY faculty member

• talks about his use of Moodle in creating an international online community for language learners?

Personal Testimonies

I had taken previous online course using Blackboard and really liked it. It was easy to use, easy to read and easy to make changes. When I began the CTER program last June at UIUC, I was introduced to Moodle. Almost immediately, I was won over with Moodle. It is so simple, so simple, in fact, that I have developed a Moodle for 4 of my high school classes and have introduced Moodle to a new group of students. The reaction from my students has be great. - Brad Frey - Johnsburg High School

Questions