Lambda Solutions e-Learning 2.0 Online Training and Moodle Experts

We’re excited about the opportunity to present at the upcoming eLearning Alliance of Canadian Hospitals (eACH) conference happening on June 7 in Toronto. We often feel like the work we’ve done implementing, hosting and supporting Moodle for our healthcare clients is particularly important. After all, some of the blended learning we facilitate is for frontline healthcare professionals to keep their patient care skills. The work they do helps keep people healthy and even save lives; that’s an unusually high standard of return on investment for eLearning with Moodle.

For those who are attending (or thinking of attending) this important eLearning conference for the healthcare sector, have a look at our quick abstracts of our various presentations by some of our Moodle eLearning experts, as detailed on the eACH conference calendar.

We're proud to support the healthcare community with online education and training solutions. This is definitely an area where we can see immediately how online learning can translate into real-world healthy outcomes for trained staff, health organizations and -- most importantly -- patients. We help our healthcare sector clients with online learning implementation, managed hosting and support for the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) and partner with Totara for workplace learning and compliance certification, in healthcare and beyond. 

Attending a screening of the film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, and subsequent panel discussion completely reinforced our ideas about the challenges facing the healthcare sector -- and how online training can help.

We see that costs are crushing the US and Canadian healthcare systems and patient outcomes have plateaued. The movie highlights that over $1 billion was spent by health related lobby groups trying to ensure Obama-care worked for them... rather than patients. 

Lambda Solutions hosted another Moodle "Half hour how to moodle" in April 2013 in support of the Moodle community.

Moodle Webinar – Theming and Customization

Moodle provides educators and trainers with a robust toolbox of educational tools. Moodle offers various options to tailor the design to the organization, the learner and learning devices. There are a variety of prebuilt themes that can be modified to customize the look and feel of Moodle on desktop and mobile devices to conform to the style and esthetic of your brand. You can modify the course listing on the front page, and personalize settings to change the user experience.  Learn how to adapt the look and functionality of Moodle to meet your needs in this month’s “half hour how to Moodle” webinar.

Please see the following recording of the webinar, slides, and additional links, which focus on which aggregation methods support your grading structure.

Moodle Theming and Customization from Lambda Solutions on Vimeo.

It’s one thing to believe in your business – and quite another for a top tech organization like Rocket Builders to be recognized for delivering real value to clients. We’re extremely proud to be named on Rocket Builders’ Ready to Rocket list of companies that are positioned for fast growth in 2013.

We know that the companies that have made the list in the past have gone on to great success in following years, winning new clients, investment, and world-class reputations – we’re looking forward to a bright future.

“With the growth of mobility and cloud computing as major drivers of the ICT sector, there are many market opportunities that BC companies are capitalizing on,” said Reg Nordman, Managing Partner at Rocket Builders, “And despite slow economic growth in most global markets, ICT companies are finding ways to win customers in the United States and abroad.”

The corporate world needs online learning, too. While some automatically think of K-12 schools, colleges and universities when anyone mentions the Moodle LMS, there are millions of people taking training online: from warehouse forklift operators getting safety training to salespeople learning effective scripts and corporate executives learning the finer points of a company’s project management processes, it’s all happening now.

Lambda Solutions became LMS distributor Totara’s first and only Canadian partner in 2012 to facilitate successful corporate-sector enterprise deployment of Moodle-based learning solutions.

How do you tear down all of your school’s classroom walls and tell all of a school’s teachers to quit the lecture-style classroom teaching they’ve always done and turn them into on-the-spot tutors for computer-assisted learners without sparking a teacher’s strike?

Show them the data.

(We’ll tell you the full story in a bit. Patience!).

This is about doing a lot more than “tweaking” a classroom. Learning analytics combined with online learning can revolutionize how students learn, literally smashing down the walls that hold students back.

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)

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!