Lambda Solutions e-Learning 2.0 Online Training and Moodle Experts

For nearly four years, Lambda Solutions has been working closely with BCcampus on their Moodle Shared Service.  This collaboration has assisted twelve B.C. colleges and universities in using Moodle, many with multiple Moodle instances.  The benefits of deploying Moodle through BCcampus Shared Services are numerous, including leveraging existing deployment expertise, significant cost savings, and centralized stable infrastructure.

BCCAMPUS MODEL

A BCcampus program called Shared Services assists B.C. public-post secondary institutions in exploring educational applications for teaching and learning.  By bringing multiple institutions together to pool requirements, it creates a community of support in acquiring and supporting educational technology.  “Shared Services provides post-secondary institutions with a scalable, systemic, and sustainable foundation for e-Learning services,” says Lawrence Parisotto, Director of Collaborative Program and Shared Service Initiatives.  “The cross-institution collaboration assists in reducing software and infrastructure costs by pooling demand and negotiating system-wide licenses and services.”

In March 2008, BCcampus began a pilot project with Lambda Solutions, exploring Moodle as a learning management solution.   Nearly four years later, any B.C. post secondary institution can access Lambda as a dedicated Moodle service provider through BCcampus Shared Services.  Currently, twelve B.C. institutions have various Moodle instances supported by  Lambda Solutions.   

THE LAMBDA EXPERIENCE

Lambda works with each participating institution to ensure they are able to analyze, develop, design, deploy and support Moodle.  For B.C. universities and colleges participating in the Moodle Shared Services, they are treated as unique customers.  “We work directly with the schools participating in BCcampus Shared Services just like any other customer,” says Lambda Solutions CEO Shevy Levy.  “We focus on how Moodle can meet their particular needs and be successfully used at their institution.”
Each BCcampus member follows a business process, from an expression of interest, to drafting a project charter and project plan through an interactive process including evaluation and operationalization.  Our work with each of them includes:

• Installation of Moodle and various plug-ins;
• Training for faculty, course creators, and administrators;
• Integration of existing systems based on the needs of the school, such as Banner, Mahara, etc;
• Assistance in moving from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.x;
• Working closely with schools in developing themes and course templates;
• Hosting of Moodle installations in partnership with BCcampus through Simon Fraser University (SFU).

The scope of Moodle use is controlled by the individual institution on a case-by-case basis.  Some members are only utilizing Moodle in specific departments, or just exploring the possibilities of Moodle.  Other institutions, such as Kwantlen Polytechnic University, are planning on migrating very large Moodle instances consisting of hundreds of courses and thousands of users to Shared Services.  “The scope of use is dependent on the needs of the school,” says Parisotto. “Some are at a boutique level of a single instance; others have four or five Moodle instances.  Through the business process, the needs and expectations of all parties are clearly mapped out with Lambda Solutions.”

EXTRA VALUE TO ALL INSTITUTIONS

The BCcampus Shared Services model creates an additional number of benefits to B.C. post-secondary institutions.  Beyond significant direct cost-savings for participating schools, Shared Services construct a community of support and development.  Lambda has been able to provide a variety of services across all institutions, including professional development workshops, ongoing technical support, and sharing best-practices in using Moodle. This network minimizes the learning curve for all schools and assists them in quickly adopting Moodle as an ideal solution.

Lambda has also worked closely with BCcampus in upgrading the underlying technology infrastructure supporting Moodle for all participating institutions.  Over the last year, Lambda worked with BCcampus and SFU in deploying VMWare, greatly improving reliability and the end-user experience.  Now, each Moodle instance is supported through its own Virtual Machine, using SFU’s “cloud” infrastructure.  By providing a robust single technology solution to support all Moodle institutions, universities save resources through the efficiencies of centralized hosting and support.

The success of this model between Lambda and BCcampus was shared at the 2011 Moodle Moot in Edmonton. “For participating B.C. Campus institutions, Moodle Shared Services provides excellent value,” says Levy.  “This model allows significant cost savings for dedicated support in deploying and supporting Moodle.  Colleges and universities are able to extract the value of Moodle to better meet the needs of their students and educators.”    

You’ve decided Moodle is the right solution for your organization. No more license fees, the open source model works for you and you like Moodle’s adaptability. But wait: where do you install it? On your own aging servers? A giant server-farm run by IT guys who aren’t used to managing a system with a ton of users – at least not for that entry-level price they quoted?

It’s easier and more cost-effective to have someone host your Moodle instance rather than setting up your own server to host it. We humbly submit that someone is us.

More and more of our eLearning solution clients are looking to us to host their Moodle installation. We’re and official Moodle partner and certified services provider, so we know a thing or two about getting Moodle hosted with the right level of support; proactive hosting, 99.99 percent uptime and fast response when the system needs tweaking.

Why is Hosting Moodle a Pain for Big Hosting Companies?

General-purpose server farms are not usually configured for Moodle, partly because Moodle is very database intensive.

Moodle logs student activity, records grades, and generally has many people adding content (student posts, assignment uploads, quiz attempts, etc.). This means there is a much higher amount of “write” actions to the database.   

But most commercial severs out there are tuned to handle sites where most of the action is in reading from the database, with only a few users writing to the database. That’s the usual model; there’s just one or two nerds in a company who keep the website fresh with new content. No one else needs access. But in K-12 schools, colleges or companies, you have hundreds or thousands of users.

The deceptively low prices you see at general-purpose hosting companies are possible because running a server where most of the action comes from reading from the database is much easier and less expensive than setting up a complete learning system and tuning a web server that writes a lot to the database.

That takes high-grade hardware, SANs, clustered servers and Virtual Machines  running across multiple machines, and staff experienced with setting up and running these. Good luck getting those bargain-basement prices from a big hosting company when you throw those kinds of requirements at them.

Take the Pain Out of Moodle Hosting for Your Organization

Lambda Solutions is an official Moodle Partner, so right off the bat, you know you’re getting a high level of expertise with regards to Moodle. When it comes to hosting, you get these benefits:

• Our servers are set up and tuned for a high degree of database writes.
• Our IT and Support staff understand the unique challenges of running an LMS. 
• We also believe in allowing our clients autonomy in the true spirit of open source – a customer is free to explore, modify or extend their Moodle system as determined by their needs.  Though you are free to help with development, we are always here to assist you with customization and development of your system.

How Much Hosting Support Do You Need for Moodle

That depends on how you’re going to use Moodle. Here are a few questions to consider just before you give us a call:

• How many Moodle users are you going to have, including students, teachers/trainers and administrators?
• How many people might be on the site at the same time?
• What type of content do you plan on delivering? Will it be media heavy content like video or flash animation? Or mainly static files likes PDF or PowerPoint?
• Do you or any of the other staff have any experience with Moodle?

How you answer these questions will help us figure out how best we can help you. Contact us to learn more about your hosting options for Moodle

Between our Moodle support services, LMS migrations and other consultations with our education and corporate clients, it’s sometimes challenging to keep up with all of the exciting developments in eLearning in general and Moodle in particular. Based on our conversations with our partners and clients, we know prospective eLearning solution adopters face the same daunting deluge of information.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the latest articles and resources we’ve found useful and inspiring for the eLearning-inclined, including some of our own recent stuff:

Lambda Solutions Blog

• How an Open Source License for eLearning Works Better Than a Proprietary Solution. Part 1 in a two-part series on the open-source LMS model. We may be biased, but that doesn’t make us less correct in giving a thumbs-up to open-source.
• Procuring an Open Source License for eLearning. Part 2 of our look at this process.
• How Moodle Helps School Deliver Quality Education at Great Value. A great case study – and a great early success story showing how one school is able to improve teaching outcomes while cutting costs.
• Learning Analytics and Reports to Improve Learning Outcomes. A good roundup. Note that the Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012 conference is about to start!

Around the Interwebs

• Classes still on after water main break. Thanks to Moodle, not even a flood can keep students from their studies.
• The Ever-Expanding School Day. “Byron High School math teacher Troy Faulkner noting that he starts hearing from his students almost instantly if he doesn't meet his 5 p.m. deadline to load a video demonstration of the following day's lesson onto YouTube. They're that anxious to log onto Moodle and watch him solve quadratic equations.”
• Why Change is [very] Good for Education. Inspiring stuff for academic administrators, teachers and students.
• What’s the big deal about online learning? 10 tips to motivate you. Good points all around, from an online student’s perspective.
• Designing online learning for the 21st century. Higher student numbers combined with fewer education dollars allotted per student, plus the move to a knowledge-based society are making blended learning models in post-secondary education a necessity.

Are you a Lambda Solutions client with a success story from using Moodle? Send us your stories and be featured in our blog and the next Moodle Roundup

Let’s say you’re convinced open source software such as Moodle is what you want for your online learning system. As a manager or administrator, what is the process you go through next to make it happen for your K-12 school, college or company training program?

Last month, we looked at How an Open Source License for eLearning Works Better Than a Proprietary Solution. In Part 2 of our look at open source licensing for eLearning systems, we’re examining the procurement process.

If you’ve done an RFP process before, you’re going to need to switch up your usual way of doing things, as Richard Wyles notes in Leveling the Playing Field for Open Source Solutions. It’s not a completely different process – but it is different.

A Different Procurement Process for Open Source Solutions

First, make sure that you set out a different RFP for open-source service vendors than for proprietary eLearning solutions vendors. For instance, don’t expect the open source vendor to provide a “sample” installation or service – since they don’t make money on the open source software (because, well, it’s free) they are not going to be willing to give away their bread-and-butter services. Instead, consider things like the “availability of commercial support, reputation of suppliers and their product development model.”

Also, be prepared for a consultation process with the open-source candidate. This is your chance to ask the open-source provider about how they’re going to meet the very customized needs of your organization, whether it’s a technical school offering training for dental hygienists, an ESL language school or a department of engineering at a university. This is also your chance to see how well prepared the vendor is to provide useful recommendations and act as a trusted advisor for “what is possible” with the eLearning software. Be prepared to pay for consultations if necessary – and remember that the information you gather at this stage can still potentially hold value for later implementation.

As an experienced provider of Moodle open-source eLearning installations and customizations, we’re experienced at consulting with clients to help them understand their needs as they go through the process.

Contact us and we can answer any other questions you may have about the open source license procurement process for Moodle

Open source learning management software like Moodle is free – sort of.

You still have to pay for supporting the software (as you would with proprietary software as well). But for many organizations looking at getting an LMS, even those that they take into account the value of getting it without having to pay a license, forget about the additional types of value that open source provides.

Advantages of the Open Source Learning Software Licensing Model

As Richard Wyles points out in a brilliant white paper, Leveling the playing field for procurement of open source solutions, many companies forget to think about a range of added-value bonuses that you get from going open-source:

Place a score or qualitative value on issues such as vendor lock-in, exit costs, speed of the development and release process, number of contributing coders/companies in relation to  your risk exposure, ability to keep the code and support of interoperability standards. These are valuable attributes often over-looked by the purchaser.

Supporting the Open Source LMS. More Choice, Improved Flexibility and Better Value

As we’ve seen, the open source model offers some intrinsic benefits, which we’ll soon explore further in another post. But the open source model also affects how support is delivered. We mentioned previously that both open source and proprietary learning management solutions would require support, but that support still takes different and advantageous forms:

First, there’s greater choice when it comes to obtaining support. Open Source LMS users don’t just avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to licensing. They can also shop around for a support vendor that will meet their needs in terms of pricing, level of expertise, reputation or a host of other factors.

Second, support tends to be more flexible. You can request module additions or theme customizations a la carte with an open source model; with proprietary software, users may be forced to adopt a “premium package” license option that will include all of the functionality they need, along with a bunch of capabilities they’ll never need. Indeed, as one client we talked to recently noted, users of open source software have the advantage of figuring out which improvements they want to implement themselves or through experts. “We chose Lambda Solutions because we were looking for a place that could not only host our Moodle, but help put it together as well,” says Pre-Collegiate Learning Center Director Lauren Ariev Gellman. “We were especially impressed with Lambda because  they would allow us to add on to it ourselves once it was set up.”

Third, as Wyles points out, “an open source subscription offers code support and maintenance, security updates, error correction, and patch updates…” but that’s not all. You’d likely get that as well with a proprietary system. Where open source support really moves ahead of the pack is by offering new features and new version releases. Those items tend to add a significant premium if you’re going through a proprietary model (and this is a very familiar scenario for anyone who has upgraded Microsoft or Apple products over the years.

While evangelists of open source licenses often tout lower cost as the key benefit, it’s probably more accurate to say that open source licensees are getting better value.

• Learn more about our Moodle support services

(Creative Commons image available for commercial use and adaptation via Ultra-lab)

In the world of private education, there’s an affordability crisis. Parents want to send their kids to receive high-quality education at a private school, to give them all the opportunities they deserve. But with tuition costs rising to $20,000 to $30,000 a year, getting that kind of an education just wasn’t accessible to everyone who wanted it.

A new private school in New Jersey, the Pre-Collegiate Learning Center, saw that need in the community and responded by blending online learning with traditional classroom instruction. Lambda Solutions helped install and customize the Moodle learning management system for the Pre-Collegiate Learning Center, setting up an educational portal that allows them to provide a competitive private school education for just $5,000 a year.

Blended Learning. An Empowering Solution for Motivated Students

The 20 students in the pilot program at PCLC each bring a laptop to school. English and History classes still have plenty of traditional classroom lectures, but about a quarter of class work is completed online in projects and quizzes. Science and math classes use far more educational resources accessed through Moodle, such as instructional videos and tests, from Thinkell, Math Academy and other online educational hubs. When it comes to learning languages, 100 percent of the work is done on the computer, thanks to Rosetta Stone. The students feel engaged doing it.

“Blended learning has several advantages,” notes PCLC director Lauren Ariev Gellman. “This is how students learn today. To go at them with a more old-fashioned approach wouldn't work. Also, this kind of technology helps get them ready for after they graduate. It helps prepare them for the real world.”

Affordability is the third major advantage – though Gellman stresses that if the school couldn’t offer a high standard of education, the affordability of it wouldn’t matter. No parent would sign up their child unless they knew they were learning what they needed. Parents can log in to the portal using the student’s account to check on their progress, making the system transparent – and the school is looking at ways to boost their reporting capabilities to give parents even better information to track results.

Teaching and Coaching

Teachers monitor progress and coach the student through the learning process as needed. Some meet weekly while others will check in almost every day, depending on the student’s needs.

“The coach tracks the data, understands where the students are at and helps them get to where they are going,” Gellman says. “The most successful students tend to be very self-motivated.”

Scaling up the Education Revolution

The PCLC has been running the program only since September of 2011, but they’ve got plans to scale up. Demand for this kind of program is high. “By year six, we plan to have 150 students,” Gellman says.

PCLC’s method for solving the challenge of affordable private education may be progressive and almost futuristic, but according to Gellman, it seems to be right on track.

“Some experts have predicted that by 2013, 25 percent of public high school classes would be online and that by 2019, 50 percent of instruction would be online. I think it's actually happening.”

With the help of Lambda Solutions and Moodle, PCLC is offering blended learning that helps alleviate the pressure of affordability without compromising education quality – with some very positive implications for both private and public education.

Learn more about how we can install and customize the Moodle learning management system for your school

With the increase of online courses, there is a greater need to quickly track progress of individual students, compare learning outcomes for courses and groups, and report grades to students. We’ve put together some information and upcoming professional development opportunities available to explore how learning analytics are impacting student’s educational experience.

We’d like to share an inspiring presentation about Transforming Learning Through Analytics that was made by George Siemens and Vernon Smith at Educause 2011 by. Pick a rainy day or quiet evening to get inspired by this video and slideshow.

In a recent blog post we wrote about Configurable Reports. Ask us about our reporting services package which includes installation and setup of configurable reports, a walkthrough demo, followed by review of your reporting needs and the development of custom reports.

LAK 2012, The Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference and Workshops are held in Vancouver Canada on April 29 – May 2, 2012

SoLAR members are offering an open Online course on Learning Analytics (see the 2011 Learning Analytics Syllabus) from January 23-March 17, 2012 for which you can register here.

Time flies and since our last newsletter where we discussed the many benefits of moving to Moodle 2.1, we would like to update you with a quick overview of the best enhancements in Moodle 2.2.

With custom mobile themes, improvements to iOS5, and the Moodle App, your Moodle courses are more portable than ever.

• Advanced Grading - Rubrics - Rubrics is the first plugin of a new 'Advanced Grading' plugin type. It currently works for Assignments and will be extended across all modules. Here is a nice video demonstration of Rubric Grading with Moodle 2.2 by Mary Cooch
• Moodle Mobile Theme - Moodle 2.1 introduced the ability to select different themes for different devices, and now with 2.2 a standard theme in core is custom-designed for smartphone browser screens. When users visit your Moodle site on a small screen they'll see a completely different layout, that can be optimized for small touchscreens by MyMobile Theme.
• Learning Tool Interoperability – Moodle supports the embedding of learning objects that support IMS Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI 1.1). This opens up plug & play use of a growing amount of interactive content. LTI is the ultimate “write once, run anywhere” mash-up solution for educational apps. Here is a great video discussion on Learning Tool Interoperability
• Common Cartridge Import – Support to import courses that use this standard for packaging learning content is now available for Moodle 2.2.

Moodle profiles now supports globally recognized avatars Gravatars

Other enhancements

• TinyMCE editor supports Safari on iPad/iPhone with iOS5
• Conditional activities can be made available at an exact time
• Mobile app enables download of all resources for offline viewing
• Navigation block links to topic/weekly sections
• Option to upload users to a cohort, and to add users to a cohort in bulk and more
• Course listings can optionally display course short name everywhere
• Activity descriptions can be displayed on course homepages
• SCORM AICC improvements to handling of external AICC packages
• SCORM reporting improvements including a new SCORM interactions report
• Choice of which fields (email, department, etc.) are shown in a lists of students

More details in the Moodle 2.2 release notes

Moodle users are constantly adding and updating new modules to improve its capabilities. We’ve given our recommendations about the best modules for Learning Engagement and Course Presentation and User Experience. Today, we want to focus on the best modules for Course Creation and Management.

Wait a minute. Why do I need these modules for my Moodle LMS?

The Moodle LMS is infinitely configurable, but that means the core open source software might not let you build and manage courses the way you want until you grab these modules. Not to worry, though – just like the rest of Moodle, these modules are open-source, too.

Recommended Modules for Course Creation and Management

1. Drag and Drop File Upload. This allows you to drag files from your desktop into a Moodle course. As one recent reviewer put it (with an extra helping of cheese) “this is really quite cool and will save some people oodles of time (or is that Moodles?) of time.

OK, drag-and-drop functionality may not seem like something amazing at first thought, but if you’re old enough to remember email and desktops before this kind of functionality became standard, you’ll quickly realize how much of a time-saver it is. This module isn’t so much “recommended” as “essential, should have been built into Moodle in the first place but fine, let’s add this”. Note that it works with recent versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, but not with Microsoft Internet Explorer (You’re not still using IE, are you?).

2. Configurable Reports. We’ve mentioned this module before in the context of tracking and managing student results. It’s highly recommended for Moodle 2.0 for administrators and teachers because it helps them track all kinds of information, such as:

• Where students are geographically located
• Students’ academic progress over a timeline
• How may times students have logged into a specific activity

That kind of information comes in very handy for schools and institutions that may offer dozens, if not hundreds of courses, to a large student body. In the short term, teachers get a handle on who their students are and how they are progressing in the class. In the long term, you can use this data to adapt course materials to appeal to certain demographics that may tend to choose types of courses in blocks, or to groups of students who tend to learn better in certain paths.

Do you find other modules useful for Course Creation and Management? Leave suggestions in the comments. Or if you want assistance in installing or customizing these Moodle modules, contact us.

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!