Lambda Solutions e-Learning 2.0 Online Training and Moodle Experts

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.

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

It’s been a busy summer at Lambda Solutions. Our clients are keeping us busy with all kinds of Moodle projects, from updates to Moodle 2.0, custom theme development, and online learning course migration and integration to various Moodle LMS support consultations. Phew!

But amid this flurry of activity, we’re still keeping up with the latest news, updates and opinions about Moodle from our education technology bloggers and pundits. Here’s a roundup what we’ve been blogging and reading about Moodle and online learning initiatives:

Lambda Solutions Blog

• How To Make Money With Moodle. The Business Case for Online Learning. Schools and companies are developing Moodle online courses and selling those courses to many customers easily over the Internet. But before you take advantage of this business opportunity, here are some questions to think about.

• Migrating to Moodle the Easy Way. We’ve made it easier than ever to migrate to Moodle from learning management systems like Blackboard Vista or WebCT.

• Giving Students Better Access To Learning With Moodle. Case Study. Learn how college administration, faculty and students are getting value from adopting Moodle as their LMS.

• The Case For Online Learning for Teachers. More reasons why teachers love using Moodle with their students.

Around the Interwebs:

• Case Study: Using Moodle on the Undergraduate Music Programme. A great video case study on one award-winning teacher’s experience of building a Moodle course, including feedback from his students.
   
• Peer review task and Workshop tool in Moodle 2.0. A good overview of a presentation on how to design and facilitate a peer review task using the Workshop tool.

• Moodle Monday: Progress Bar. Tim comments on Moodle 2’s improved combination of activity completion tracking and conditional activities.

• Online learning: A solution for S.C. In a time of constrained government spending on education, online learning looks like a win-win solution. (We told you so).

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

You can use the Moodle learning management system to make money. Yes, universities, private colleges, technical institutes and all kinds of private online learning providers can offer courses – even entire online learning programs – at a profit.

The Business of Online Learning

Schools, universities and companies are looking at a new trend in online learning: open education in areas like art and design, health sciences, business, computer technology, engineering, sciences, sustainability, writing and technical communication and much more. This new revenue stream is allowing companies and institutions to really expand what they can offer.

These schools and companies are developing Moodle online courses and selling those courses to many customers easily over the Internet. This requires an investment to take advantage of economies of scale.

• Selling online learning courses profitably requires a certain scale. Moodle starts to make sense when you can see yourself selling $10,000 or more in courses per year.

• Set up, installation and customization of Moodle can cost $3,000. Be prepared to cover those initial costs.

• In your second year, your costs go down – but they won’t go away entirely. Now you’re only paying for hosting. Hosting support starts at $720 a year.

Assuming you’re ready to cover these start-up costs, you now need a business plan.

Developing Your Own eLearning Business Model

For every online learning provider out there making money hand-over-fist, there are others who failed to learn the lessons most people took away from the first dotcom bubble: it’s not enough to have an idea for a great product and access to the untold millions of potential customers over the Internet. Think about these factors as you put together your business plan:

1) Dynamite Online Branding. Naturally, online marketing is going to be a key part of your selling process. You have to differentiate your company from the pack. How are you going to get found online to sell your courses online?

2) Superior Course Content. You have to offer quality instruction, ideally something that will allow them to get certified in something.

3) Understand your target market. Who wants to buy your course? Why? What do they need to learn?

4) Build Your Reputation. Most eLearning companies haven’t been around long enough to establish a choke-hold on the market. Your business will live or die based on your reputation for ability to deliver.

5) Develop Your Infrastructure in a Cost-Effective Way. How will you handle growth? Do you have the hardware and IT support you need to take care of your customers – and yourself?

How We Can Help You Make Money With Moodle

We’ve been helping our clients develop scalable, cost-effective Moodle-based online learning companies for a while, now. Here’s what we can do for you:

1) Consult with you to optimize how you will offer your online courses through Moodle. We know what works and what doesn’t.

2) Install, develop and customize Moodle for your (and your customers’) needs.

3) Provide hosting for your Moodle-based business with great security, high speed and redundancy built in.

4) Moodle technical support to train your people how to fix issues in-house, or help you with our own support people.

Learn more and consult with our experts about how we can help you get your Moodle business going

Online learning has become so common in the K-12, secondary school and college setting that it’s easy to forget how revolutionary it is. eLearning is not just an add-on for classroom teachers. It is a radically different model than the teacher-focused classroom model, where students have to haul their textbooks to class and learn at the pace that their teacher can manage.

Online learning is student-focused, meaning that while the student must complete a curriculum assigned by the teacher, there are also opportunities for the motivated student to get more education out of the same amount of teaching resources.

Classroom teachers who keep up with current events and the politics of their local school boards are some of the most ardent proponents of online learning as a solution for budget crunches. Tight fiscal budgets means less resources for students and teachers. Technology is the way to compensate, as Microsoft’s Bill Gates recently pointed out:

We need a lot more of this going on at different levels: college level, high school level, elementary school level, to really figure it out for all the different topics, all the types of students out there. With the financial crush of state budgets, these techniques give us a way to make things more effective without having to increase the amount of resources that goes to education.

Fellow business magnate and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch put it a little more bluntly (and less charitably) when he tried to motivate global business leaders to help improve the education system:

"In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him," Mr. Murdoch said in a speech at the e-G8 forum in Paris, a two-day digital conference leading up to the G8 Summit. "But not in education. Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution."

There are still holdouts among some teachers who have had success with a traditional approach to education. But it is clear that online learning offers significant benefits for educators. Some of the main ones include:

• Less time spent on administration, more time actually teaching. Learning management systems like Moodle allow teachers to track student progress more easily and consistently using the Student Reporting feature. Instantly see how the student has done on tests and assignments and track their blog (for writing assignments), with a lot less paperwork.
• New and interactive ways to teach. Longtime educators understand that not all curriculum material is intrinsically fascinating. But with online learning, teachers can offer students a richer learning experience. As educator Meg Wilson puts it, the Web Is What You Make Of It: “The incredible amount of resources available on the Internet today allow students access to connect to information wherever and whenever they want to. Students are no longer just consumers of content, they are now active users, creators, and publishers of content. Young people are learning in informal, nontraditional ways everyday.”
• Good teachers love to teach, but as well, the best educators like to constantly learn. Teaching with eLearning resources forces teachers to constantly up their game, and make professional development a daily activity: “As new technology, unearthed historical information, new data, and advanced strategies for teaching are identified, teachers are in the enviable position of utilizing or communicating this newfound knowledge to many others.”

Are you interested in incorporating online learning for your classroom? Ask your school administrator or university managers to consider adopting an online learning LMS like Moodle to give your students – and yourself – more opportunities to learn

Course Completion and Pre-requisites are new standard features in Moodle 2.0 and have gotten some welcome attention from classroom teachers incorporating online learning and corporate trainers (some of whom have been clamoring for these functions since Moodle started taking off). In Moodle 2.0, courses can be assigned completion requirements based on activity and resources finished by learners.

This completion tracking can be done by the teacher. However, students can also self-complete resources, activities and courses, streamlining administration (Naturally, educators and trainers can always test students who click on course completion in the time-worn tradition of “trust, but verify”). This change makes it easier for schools and companies to track progress without needing to develop an administrative work-around – just one more way that Moodle 2.0 is helping eLearning work more intuitively.

It’s important to note that these functions help track course completions, but defining pre-requisites doesn’t prevent students from skipping courses. For instance, someone who hasn’t taken French 101 could still register for French 202 -- but the system will show even if all elements of the 202 course are actually finished, the course isn’t complete until 101 is taken.

Some ways to define how courses are completed, according to Moodle Docs:

• Activities completed. Listed here will be the activities in the course which have Activity_completion set to them.
• Check the ones you want to count towards Course Completion.
• Date. If you check the Enable box you can then set a date, after which the course will be declared complete..
• Duration after enrolment. If you check the Enable box you can then choose a number of days after enrolment upon which the course will be marked complete.
• Grade. If you check the Enable box you can set a passing grade for the course.

By adding blocks to the main course page, both teachers and students can easily track course progress. This kind of functionality is just one more reason so many organizations are upgrading to Moodle 2.0.

Contact us to help your organization implement a Moodle upgrade today!

Teachers and students are using social networking to help share lessons, foster better communications with parents and give students more opportunities to take ownership of their learning opportunities. But they’re not using Facebook or Twitter. Instead, they’re using the capabilities from Moodle, an open-source e-learning software platform (with 37 million users and counting).

Plenty of educators have figured out how to incorporate social networking sites into education already. But you can very quickly get into a gray area that makes some teachers and parents uncomfortable (Is it really appropriate for teachers to be messaging students on Twitter after school hours or on weekends? Where do you draw the line?).

Moodle allows teachers and students to use social networking capabilities within a password-protected “walled garden” for classes that is already geared specifically for educational purposes, without opening up faculty and pupils to weirdness over what’s appropriate.

One Moodle-using educational technology coach at Carmel Unified School District in California sums up the possibilities:

We use Moodle as our walled garden social network- kids can blog, add tags, message each other, etc. and so it draws them to the Moodle site (making it more likely that they will check out school/course information). We think of our Moodle like a virtual school – there are virtual classrooms and virtual hallways/playgrounds. The kids can hang out and talk in the virtual hallway space of our Moodle and we prefer that to them hanging out in the virtual city streets of the rest of the internet.

The first “social” aspect of Moodle 2.0 involves the Community Hubs. Anybody can set up a Community hub, which is a directory of courses for public use or for private communities. Basically, it’s a way to share course material and communicate. It’s actually not very Facebook-ish – but that’s sort of the point. Teachers, parents and students can get access to the information they need, not updates about what sandwich you’re having for lunch. It’s social, stripped down.

Moodle 2.0 also makes it easy to integrate internal and external blogs by importing and exporting content. Instead of having to visit blogs in WordPress, Blogspot or other content management systems, you can bring them all into the same system.

Moodle 2.0 takes the best social networking capabilities popular networks like Facebook or MySpace have to offer, but leaving out certain kinds of capabilities that might be counter-productive (ie. games and unrestricted instant messaging is out). It’s about making communicating and learning easier.