Lambda Solutions e-Learning 2.0 Online Training and Moodle Experts

After all of the resources, retraining and technology thrown into developing online learning capabilities, here’s what we wanted to know: what do the students think about it?

As a company that provides and supports a popular Learning Management System for online learning, we naturally have to focus on the needs of our clients – K-12 schools, colleges and universities and private companies doing corporate training. We’ve got a good idea of what these kinds of organizations are looking for. Now, thanks to a recent study by the ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, we’ve got a better idea of what the real end users are thinking – and some of these results are pretty eye-opening:

• Almost 60 percent of students said they learned more in blended learning environments. By contrast, only 20 percent thought they learned more in the absence of any online learning.
• Most students see real benefits from using technology, particularly for improving productivity and building connections with other students.
• Students are used to using technology to learn – and most consider themselves more capable of using it than their professors.
• Almost half of students think their school needs more technology.
• Less than a quarter of students think their institution uses the technology it has effectively.

Check out more of the results in ECAR’s excellent infographic showing students’ reactions to technology in education

What does the feedback on online learning mean? Students want more technology

Some of the results of the poll seem to be interrelated. There are good indications that if technology was implemented better, students would be even more enthusiastic about blended learning than they are.

For instance, as we noted above a significant percentage of students thought that the technology that was being used already wasn’t being implemented as effectively as it could be. Only 1 in 5 students thought technology was being integrated seamlessly.

Meanwhile, just 1 in 5 students thought that technology was being used often enough. About a third of students wanted their professors to use email, ebooks and e-textbooks more often. And when it came to course registration, making grades available online and putting classroom resources on the Internet, the vast majority of students (about 4 out of 5 students) enjoyed that.

Clearly, if teachers and administrators could create more of a seamless integration of technology into a blended learning environment, students would be happier.

eLearning Benefits. Accessibility, Productivity, Feeling Connected and Feeling Engaged

When it came to measuring specific benefits of technology for academic success, there was a range of results that students strongly agreed about:

• 52 percent. Gives me access to resources and progress reports.
• 44 percent. Makes me more productive.
• 35 percent. Helps me feel connected.
• 34 percent. Makes learning more engaging and relevant.

By far, the biggest reason (59 percent) students thought blended eLearning benefited them was in giving them access to a wider range of resources. That’s certainly something that the Moodle LMS does very well with repositories, allowing teachers to integrate course content from online presentations, YouTube videos, blogs, wikis and more – letting students venture far beyond their hardcover textbooks and photocopies. Moodle also does very well at giving students access to grades and progress reports – and with Moodle’s configurable reports, administrators and teachers can also remain very much up to date on that score. Students weren’t asked about their favorite LMS in this study, but it’s clear that overall, organizations have a lot to gain by integrating technology better into their courses.

Are you a teacher who has already incorporated blended learning into your course? Or are you a student or corporate trainee who has done blended learning? What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen in terms of eLearning? Leave a comment!

Blended learning helps students and trainees feel more engaged about the material they’re assigned. It’s not at all surprising – when you replace or supplement a student’s textbook with an innovative way of looking at the material, you’re already going to get their attention. When it comes to the Moodle LMS, what modules help students feel like they’re collaborating and learning in interesting ways?

A little while back, we published a roundup of the best Moodle 2.0.x modules for improving course presentation and user experience. We’re continuing along with our series, presenting the best modules we’ve worked with and would recommend, that improve learning engagement. Here’s the quick list:

1. Team Builder

2. Flashcard

3. Dialogue

4. Lesson Objectives

1. Team Builder lets you build teams based off a set of criteria. “You ask your students some questions, and then develop a predicate based off their answers for your teams.” It's also an effective drag-and-drop interface for building Groups, helping you save a little time on the administration side.

The University of New South Wales is using Team Builder in its courses. They have put up a handy demo video on how they are using it, with the example of sending out students on assignment various parts of Sydney to perform some interviews for a survey. Each group will have to visit a number of places in Sydney and ask strangers a series of questions and will want to track their progress.

2. Flashcard is pretty much what you would expect: you can create flashcards of questions and answers quickly and easily. While the focus in education in many situations is on building critical thinking skills, when it comes to memorizing key facts of geography, economics, HTML coding or just about anything else you can think of, flashcards are tough to beat. They work as effectively when you’re 10 years old learning math tables or when you’re an adult training memorizing warning signs to pass your hazardous materials transportation course. Repetition works – and since it’s kind of fun, it helps keep students engaged.

And here’s a demo on how to set Flashcards up on your Moodle LMS:

3. Dialogue lets students or teachers communicate in a two-way private conversation or with all members of a group.

OK, I know you may be wondering, in an age where pretty much everyone has an email account, if not several, isn’t this module sort of redundant? Actually, there are advantages to using it.

For instance, one setting allows for the same message to go out not only to current registrants, but also future students who enroll in the course, saving effort. Also, a teacher may want to send a “read only” message, disabling replies. Another benefit comes in with course continuity – if one teacher leaves and a new teacher comes in to take their place, the new teacher has easier access to all of the messages for any relevant student groups.

4. Lesson Objectives shows current lesson milestones in the side bar (to both teacher and students). The teacher can check them off as they are completed. “You can enter a timetable, linked to different groups, so that objectives can be entered as far in advance as you want and will be displayed at the appropriate time.” One important feature is that students can view all lesson objectives a week at a time to track progress.

Educator Gavin Henrick points to the obvious benefits to student engagement in being able to track their progress. Whether you’re plodding through a biology class or running a marathon, everybody feels more enthusiastic after they’ve just passed a visible milestone.

Yes it is very easy to view, the student can just see what the objectives are for the lesson period and whether they have been met or not. This is a neat visual aid to aid motivation of students. The objectives can also be expanded to a popup for a clearer picture.

That’s our list of the best Moodle modules for version 2.0 for student engagement. Do you have a different list? Feel free to leave a comment and explain why.

When was the last time you updated your learning management system? Many organizations skip a year or more. While that may save work on the IT side, students and teachers miss out on the continuous improvements that are being made in learning technology.

When you get your Moodle LMS hosted through Lambda Solutions, we include one upgrade per year. That’s a tremendous value to students as teachers as learning technology is improving so quickly. Teachers, administrators and Moodle course providers will want to ensure their LMS takes advantage of new capabilities, avoids security issues and bugs and keeps the user experience positive.

Want another reason to get Moodle hosting from us? It’s about personalized service. Our technical team works with you to assess your needs and get you started with the right service. We monitor system performance and offer advice on upgrades and enhancements to best serve your customers.

Recently, one of our clients generously provided their take on what it was to have us on their side, helping keep their LMS running:

”We are very pleased with Lambda Solutions' services. Working with their IT team has been wonderful. They are quick to respond, nice to work with and treat all questions as important and valid…”

• Learn more about getting Moodle hosting through Lambda Solutions

Why Does Your Open Source Moodle LMS Needs Maintenance?

As open-source software, Moodle gets updated every day. New fully-tested versions are released about once a week. You don’t necessarily need to do your maintenance every week, but your support team should have a schedule that regularly checks the following:

• Security patches. Like all web-based applications, Moodle can be vulnerable to hackers and automated attacks. These intrusions can impact performance and more seriously, steal user data. Security updates may involve firewalls, updated password protection, performing regular software updates and making sure you have a backup ready in case you do get compromised.
• New features. Moodle 2.0 and later versions allow users to create repositories to share and re-use content, provide better web services and advanced UI, allow self-directed learning through conditional activities and offer mobile capabilities that just didn’t exist before. When the LMS doesn’t get updated, teachers and students lose out.
• Bug patches. All software has bugs – it’s the nature of the beast. Since Moodle is open-source, bugs tend to get found and patched quicker than in proprietary LMS’; your IT people just need to make sure they download and install those patches to keep things running well.
• New Moodle LMS versions. Moodle typically comes out with two major releases per year and more minor releases throughout the rest of the year. Moodle support people not only need to ensure the versions are up to date, but that modules in use maintain compatibility (or that work-arounds are developed).

Are you considering implementing the Moodle LMS for your academic institution, eLearning firm or company offering employees online training? Contact us about our Moodle support options we offer over the lifetime of your LMS implementation

Moodle 2.0 and later versions offers better overall course presentation and user experience. Thanks to constantly updating modules, the open source learning managements system makes it easier to view information, create lists, categorize activities and create easy-to-use checklists at the click of a button.

There are a lot of contenders, but we’ve whittled it down to the Top 5 Modules for course presentation and user experience with Moodle.

1. The Book Module makes it easy to create multi-page resources with a book-like format. Basically, you can build complete book-like websites inside of your Moodle course, including chapters and sub-chapters.

There’s an example of how the Book Module is used over at Glyphdoctors, where they’ve set up a chapter-style site for learning about Egyptology. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but it does the job – at least according to one educator familiar with learning management systems:

“The module looks great and is very intuitive. The book module seems like a good option for those migrating from traditional content delivery platforms such as WebCT & Blackboard. I can appreciate that Moodle was built on a social constructivist philosophy - but many instructors still want to deliver content in an easily navigable and readable format. Thumbs up for the Book module.”

2. Course Menu Module. The Course Menu block is a tree based expanding menu block. One of the best features of this module is that it mirrors the stock navigation block, except that a user can remove or add items allowing for a custom ‘fit’. You have the option to use functions such as:

• Site pages
• Gradebook
• Calendar
• My Profile
• My courses
• My profile settings
• Course administration
• Show All Sections

Here’s how one user has implemented the Course Menu module to develop an accordion-style menu:

Moodle Accordion Course Menu from Mark Schumann on Vimeo.

3. Collapsed Weeks Module. According to Moodle.org, this module “A week based format that solves the issue of the 'Scroll of Death' when a course has many weeks. All weeks have a toggle that displays that week. The current week is displayed by default. One or more weeks can be displayed at any given time.”

Basically, it’s just an easy way of searching through the timeline of a course without being presented with too much information at once. That makes it pretty handy for teachers and students.

4. Collapsed Topics Module. This works for topics exactly the same as for Collapsed Weeks described above, simply making it easier to rifle through course topics without getting lost.

“One or more topics can be displayed at any given time. Toggles are persistent on a per browser session per course basis but can be made to persist longer by a small code change.” Not revolutionary, just really nifty for teachers and students who need a better user experience.

5. Checklist Module. As you might expect, this module allows teachers and students to create checklists for individual assignments or for a series of eLearning activities. Color coding makes checking progress a snap.

Naturally, teachers who would prefer to have total control over students progress can check off items themselves, but some users have found greater student “buy-in” when they’re authorized to check off their progress on their own. After all, isn’t eLearning supposed to help teachers cut down on admin as opposed to adding a new layer? The option is there if online Moodle instructors want it. Here are the options users have:

• Indenting items, to show a hierarchy of importance
• Optional items (which can be hidden in the class progress report and contribute to a secondary 'all items' progress bar)
• Student checklist items (so that students can add their own items to keep track of)
• Dates on checklist items
• Choice of colours

And here’s a quick demo of how the Moodle Checklist Module works:

That’s our top five list of Moodle modules for version 2.0 and later, but perhaps you’ve got other ideas? If you think other Moodle modules are more deserving, feel free to leave a comment and explain why.

Imagine trying to start or re-launch a career today without access to computers or resources to learn new skills. What if you couldn’t easily get around or were suffering from a brain injury that made attending regular classes next to impossible? The Moodle online learning management system is helping Canadians who are facing these kinds of challenges every day.

“I have become more direct, stronger, and less fearful,” says Crystal, who has had to deal with a brain injury, learning disabilities, mental illness, asthma and chronic pain. She is learning new skills through training on Moodle.

“My feelings about finding work have changed. This program has given me more confidence and determination to never give up.”

Crystal is one of many people getting help through the Neil Squire Society, a Canadian not-for-profit organization that empowers Canadians with physical disabilities through the use of computer-based assistive technologies, research and development, and various employment programs.

Lambda Solutions provides hosting and support for the NSS. Online learning programs through Moodle are helping train these people to reach their employment goals and long-term dreams. "For a non-profit organization with limited resources, having Lambda as a supportive host has been invaluable," says Neil Squire Society e-Learning Manager Chad Leaman. "They have taken an interest in our work, and have made suggestions to help us improve our Moodle instance.  When we hit technical difficulty, support has been prompt and friendly.  It feels less like calling a tech company and quoting a ticket number, and more like calling a friend to help us out.  They've been integral to Neil Squire in providing a quality online learning environment to our program participants."

How Moodle has helped NSS reach their target audience

The NSS has five offices across Canada that help people with disabilities reach their goals of becoming more included members of society. They’ve offered distance and eLearning through Moodle to reach out to those communities. They’ve developed partnerships with other organizations that deliver services to people with disabilities. At first they tried webinars, but because offices were scattered across time zones, scheduling was difficult. They needed a better solution to give their clients access to online learning courses they could use anytime, anywhere.

That’s when Neil Squire brought in the Moodle learning management system. The shift in strategy has succeeded, allowing them to reach far more people in far more communities than those served by their regional offices, doing employment training and other courses.

We can see the success of the Moodle implementation in their results for NSS’ clients, like Brenda, who has Multiple Sclerosis that makes it difficult for her to talk or type:

"I decided to return to university because of the Neil Squire Society and what you did for me. You helped me realize that I have the ability to do this.”

Other Benefits of Using Moodle: Accessible Staff Training

NSS doesn’t just use Moodle to help their target audience access eLearning opportunities. They also use it in-house to train staff and volunteers. “New staff are given a formal orientation” using Moodle, Leaman says (see his video produced for the BCCCA Conference, Moodle at the Neil Squire Society). “Many of the documents, procedures and guidelines to be a staff member can be found in our Moodle online learning site.”

• Liked this Moodle case study? Also check out  Giving Students Better Access To Learning With Moodle
• Learn how we can help you install and customize Moodle for your organization to help your clients access eLearning

We’re proud to note that Lambda Solutions’ own Co-Founder Jim Yupangco gave a well-received presentation on Moodle as an Institutional Virtual Learning Environment at the BC Career College Association Conference. The presentation included an overview of some of the challenges that face learners, businesses and educators, explanation of open source software, steps for successfully using Moodle and a few case studies.

• Read Moodle as an Institutional Virtual Learning Environment

Some highlights that may be of interest to our current clients as well as prospective organizations looking to install or customize Moodle for their own systems:

First, the number of users of Moodle has increased hugely over the last decade and now includes well over one million registered users.

Other Open-Source software and social networks can be seamlessly integrated with Moodle.

Moodle Adoption Quick Facts

• As of 5 October 2011
• 1,500 Sites In Canada
• 12,900 Sites in US
• 57,000 Sites Worldwide
• 75+ language packs
• 46 Million Users
• Teachers 1,123,328
• Enrolments 20,267,985

Moodle.org Community Overview

• 160,000+ downloads per month
• 1.1M registered community users
• 1865 new site registrations per month
• 1,800 new community users per day
• 40,000 active on community site each month

Have a look at this graph showing adoption since 2003 (It’s bigger in the PDF – but you get the idea):

And this graphic shows how Moodle could make use of other open source software and social networks your organization might be using:

Do have a look at the presentation on PDF. If you would like to chat with us about the contents of this presentation, please feel free to contact us directly.

We’re happy to talk with you about how you might be able to use Moodle in your organization, or how you might improve your implementation if you’re already using Moodle as a Learning Management System. Email support@lambdasolutions.net

Lambda Solutions’ Co-Founder Jim Yupangco is presenting about “Moodle – An Open Source Learning Management System” at BC’s Career College leaders at the annual BCCCA Conference, October 27 to 29 at the River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond, BC.

We are very excited about the opportunity to take part in this event, which will include over 70 of the province’s most successful and dynamic private colleges. Many of them have already begun implementation of online learning and blended learning for a wide range of course offerings – more and more, learning management systems including Moodle have become an essential and effective part of post-secondary educational offerings.

Here is a synopsis of our presentation on “Moodle – An Open Source Learning Management System” you can also find on the BCCCA’s conference package:

This session complements the earlier session on 'New Directions in Education Technology'. Moodle is an important technology that has seen widespread adoption in the recent past by thousands of private and public training institutions around the world. This session will cover the following topics:

• Definition of a learning management system
• Open source advantages and the adoption of Moodle
• Incorporating Moodle into traditional classroom based learning
• Using Moodle to support distance learning
• Moodle implementation – challenges and requirements

Some other presentations we are really looking forward to and recommend others check out at the BCCCA Conference:

• Dr. Roslyn Kunin. “The Economics of Private  Education and Workforce  Development in BC”
• Kevin Evans, CEO with the Industry Training Authority. “Industry Training Authority – The Path Ahead”
• Tim Agnew and Greg Ferrie of Agile Project Management Solutions. “New Directions in Educational Technology”
• Sheny Gregory, Independent Consultant. “Social Media Tools for the Classroom” 

As an official Moodle partner, we often get questions from prospective clients about implementation, migration and customization issues as well as more pointed queries (like “what is a Moodle partner, anyway?”).

You can learn a lot about Moodle by visiting the official Moodle.org website; after all, Moodle is open source and they do have a lot of free resources there for teachers, trainers and administrators. But sometimes information is hard to find, even for common questions. Moodle.org’s forums are quite active on certain topics, but since they’re user-generated, they may not cover what you need in a comprehensive or consistent manner. Even the more popular sections aren’t necessarily up-to-date with the latest information about Moodle 2.0 or later versions.

Our new Resources & FAQ section provides answers to some of your most common questions about integrating Moodle in your own school or corporate training environment.

We hope these resources will be useful for our current customers, prospective Moodle users and others. If you have questions not covered in that section, please contact us for more information about learning management solutions

We’ll be adding to our Resources & FAQ section over time. Feel free to check in as we provide a better knowledge resource for our partners and customers.

In the meantime, we will continue to provide updates about Moodle and Lambda Solutions on our blog. Read some of our most popular recent blog posts:

• Configurable Reporting with Moodle
• eLearning LMS Benefits from a Blended Approach

How To Make Money With Moodle. The Business Case for Online Learning

As teachers, administrators and human resources training professionals rely more on Moodle for their learning and training needs, one question comes up sooner or later: “How do I keep track of it all?”

That’s where Configurable Reports available with Moodle 2.0 come in.

Here’s an example: Vancouver Community College has programs that are fully online as well as blended courses. “Our teachers and administrators are already generating configurable reports to track active versus inactive course shells,” says Karen Belfer, Dean for the Centre for Instructional Development and School of Instructor Education at VCC.

That helps them administer over 200 courses online. But they’re looking to drill down with Configurable Reports and get information that teachers can use to improve the way they teach:

“We’re now looking at tracking student progress with these reports,” Belfer says. “For courses that already have well-defined learning outcomes, we can compare the different strategies that are allowing this to happen and see which ones are working the best.”

• How is your school, university or company using Configurable Reports to track data in your Moodle LMS? Send us your stories and feedback! Email support@lambdasolutions.net

What Exactly Are Configurable Reports, Anyway?

Configurable Reports is a very useful block available in Moodle 2.0 for administrators and teachers, helping them track information such as where students are geographically located, their academic progress over a timeline, how may times they have logged into a specific activity and much more.

Moodle has had a reporting capability since the early days, but now you can generate one or two customized reports instead of sifting through four or six. Having all of the information in one place makes the process more efficient.

According to the official Moodle website, reports may include:

• Courses reports, with information regarding courses.
• Categories reports, with information regarding categories. A courses report can be embedded in this type of report.
• Users reports, with information regarding users and their activity in a course.
• Timeline reports, this is a special type of report that displays a timeline. A course or user report can be embedded in this timeline showing data depending on the start and end time of the current row.
• Custom SQL Reports, custom SQL queries. This block can use the same SQL queries as Tim Hunt's Custom SQL queries plugin.

Configurable Report templates

The vast majority of administrators, managers or teachers will generate reports using the templates listed above. It can take as little as 30 minutes for someone with experience using Moodle to put together a report that will prevent many more hours of potential headaches. The Custom SQL reports are a bit more of a logistical challenge; you would need to know how to program in .php code. That said, if you need a completely written-from-scratch, kind of report to measure variables in a way that isn’t covered in the templates, you do have that option.

What do Moodle’s configurable reports look like?

Here is an example of an enrolment report:

And here is a custom student grade report:

Exporting the configurable reports

Configurable reports can be exported into Excel format or Open Document  Format. This makes it easy to integrate with your organization’s existing IT systems. So if you’re used to working in Excel, you don’t have to learn a whole new coding language to figure out what’s going on with your LMS.

Benefits of Configurable Reports

This gives you a lot of options as a teacher or administrator. For instance, you might like to create a report showing completion rates across multiple courses. Or you might want to try to see if there is any correlation between students taking your courses in terms of where they are physically and when they typically log in. Let’s say you’re teaching a math course: you could categorize questions as “algebra” or “division” and immediately see from the report where a student (or all of the students) are struggling. These can help you tweak course scope and curriculum and judge just how marketable your courses are.

For companies selling courses through Moodle, configurable reports offers a quick way to see how popular certain courses are and where tweaks might be needed. For instance, a course description that gets viewed many times but has fewer signups may indicate that a course topic is interesting, but the description of the curriculum (or the curriculum itself) isn’t persuading potential online students to sign up. Armed with this information, you can make alterations aiming to increase registrations.

• Do you use Configurable Reports in Moodle? Tell us how you’re using it and we can feature your organization in an upcoming blog post

• Learn more about the benefits of upgrading to Moodle 2.0

The MoodleMoot Virtual Conference 2011 this week was fascinating, covering a lot of ground: Moodle for instruction and learning for blended and fully online courses, teaching with Moodle in unique ways, online facilitation using Moodle, Moodle tips, integration of technology into the curriculum and more. I’m still trying to absorb all of the information (Naturally enough, the presentation content is still available online – do check it out, teachers and Learning Management System wonks).

One of the highlights for us was the presentation by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dr. Mark L. Winegar. His eBook, A teacher’s guide to eLearning – 2012  is particularly good, covering topics as diverse as audio podcasting, collaborative software, Learning Management Systems and more.

The section on LMS included an excellent video (It’s an eBook – why not include a YouTube video?) Learning management system or the open web? which we’ve embedded here:

The video revisits the advantages and disadvantages of LMS platforms versus using the open web:

LMS Advantages. With Moodle or other types of LMS’ you will get:

• Guaranteed flows of information to and from students
• Efficient handling of assignments
• Comes with privacy and security capabilities
• Statistical analysis capabilities to allow teachers to assess student participation
• Overall, a good level of support not necessarily available with open web tools.

The main issue for LMS is whether its proprietary or open source is cost. Moodle’s open source model cuts costs by doing away with licensing fees, but with all LMS’, there are typically costs like support and hosting.

Open Web Tools Advantages. Using software like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and blogging

• Students are often already familiar with the tools, making adoption easy
• No requirement to learn a custom LMS tool
• Low-cost or no-cost software.

Open Web Tools had serious drawbacks for an educational setting. There is no built-in way of tracking performance. Accessing records over time may be difficult or impossible as software changes (or is replaced by competitors). And there are hidden costs such as the time it takes to manage students’ use of these tools.

A Blended Approach to eLearning

Winegar recommended a “blended” approach – which is something Moodle allows for very well. With Moodle 2.0’s integration of open web tools like linking to YouTube videos or custom blogs, the artificial divide between LMS’ and open web tools disappears.

He recognizes that it doesn’t have to be an either-or approach, noting:

“We can use an LMS and supplement it with whatever Web 2.0 resources our students might best benefit from. However, I believe it is best to use an LMS as a portal to any extraneous tools you might select.”

LMS Feature Set Essentials

Winegar came up with a good list of capabilities a good LMS should have (We’re pleased to note that Moodle has all of these):

• Bulletin Board. A learning management system's least sophisticated function is to provide global access to course documents such as the syllabus, assignments, schedule, policies, handouts, hyperlinks, podcasts, and instructor's contact data.
• Sharable and Reusable File System. This is handy for teachers as it releases them from reproducing course documents every time they teach a course.
• Communications Systems. Email, chat, forums and more.
• Guided Web Portal. Directing students to those sites that are most useful to their study with links within your web course.
• Student Assessment System. An absolute essential. It ultimately saves time, increases student motivation, and reduces the course's carbon footprint.
• Tutor. Many will use it to review material they didn't fully understand when it was first presented.
• Virtual Classroom. Technology has advanced to the point where we can easily teach completely online.

Check out Winegar’s whole eBook. It’s definitely worth the read.

Learn more about how we can help your school, university or company integrate an eLearning LMS into your environment