Moodle Pilot Focus Group Winter 2009
Pros:
- Look & Feel
- Stability
- Ease of Use
- Grade book was cumbersome
- Lack of a selective release function
- Forum tool lacked some functionality
Not much needs to be said about stability other than use of CE8 has turned it in to a non-standard feature, but we should point out that there was one brief outage over the weekend that lasted less than 2 hours. Faculty did not themselves experience any issues with being kicked out while working in the LMS: a common occurrence in Blackboard CE8. No students reported this to them either.
Ease of use was also popular. The faculty were "prepared" with a crash-course style training and then left to some extent to their own devices to update and run their courses. Comments from students were similar and that there was little additional support of the LMS needed.
On the negative side, several faculty have had and continue to face challenges working with the grade book. The problems tended to be around set-up and management, though some of those problems were mitigated by switching to a different theme. Another specific item is working with a running grade that shows students their current grade based on the work they've done. Even with staff support, we've had several challenges setting this up.
Faculty also missed the release criteria from CE8. While the hide tool worked fairly well (in some cases better than in CE8), it still required human interaction to release and hide content, and there weren't the same flexible options for releasing content to specific individuals.
The forum seemed to be less polished than the discussion tool in CE8, especially with regards to grading discussion topics, which can be an essential component to many courses. One faculty member even started using a sheet of paper to help tabulate who had done which posts for grading. Another faculty mentioned that there wasn't a comparable option to "create printable view" in CE8 that allowed her to view multiple posts and reply to each individually in-line.
There were a few follow-up questions and discussions that I've summarized.
- Several people used the in-line help and found it useful.
- Grading assignments was greatly improved (even "Awesome")
- Working with quizzes was great, and stability paid off here for students, though there were some issues with the "secure" option for a few students.
- Breadcrumbs were a bit of a nuisance because they didn't include the activity or topic so you often had to go several steps back instead of one or two steps. (note: this has been fixed in the admin settings)
- The lack of a mail tool was an early cause for concern but didn't top the list in the discussion, possibly because we've enabled the eMail module for Spring. The pilot faculty felt that an internal mail module was essential for
- Andy will be contacting new pilot instructors to give them the names of folks from the winter pilot for info.
- Media in courses worked well (maybe better?) with the exception of a single embedded raido player.
- Browser usage was 4 on Firefox, 1 on Safari.
- Superfresh theme is available, one instructor has been using it.
- Several folks used Respondus, but one instructor used Aiken format to import quizzes (and was happy)
Labels: cms, focus group, moodle, pilot