Lambda Solutions e-Learning 2.0 Online Training and Moodle Experts

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

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.

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!