Moodle Pilot Focus Group Winter 2009

Yesterday our Moodle Pilot faculty participated in a focus group with the CMS steering committee.We started by identifying the top 3 pros and cons of using Moodle and spent some time discussing those items. The faculty voted on the items, and the these 6 items came to the top:

Pros:

1. Look & Feel
2. Stability
3. Ease of Use

Cons:

1. Grade book was cumbersome
2. Lack of a selective release function
3. Forum tool lacked some functionality

The faculty seemed to universally like the layout, look & feel and organization of Moodle and felt the consistency was a benefit for both students and faculty. Several commented that they had fewer questions about locating course items, and one faculty noted that in his role reviewing courses, Moodle would make it much easier to both design and review Quality Matters courses. When asked if the consistency of the look and feel outweight the limited flexibility, the consensus was yes, especially for students' sake.

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)

Moodle Pilot Evaluations for Winter 2010

We've completed the evaluations from our Winter 2010 Moodle Pilot. Here is a summary of the results from both the student and faculty evaluations. More details from each can be found in links at the bottom.

Winter Moodle Pilot Summary
Summary of Student Feedback
208 submitted, 31 responded (15% response)

Overall, the student response suggested a medium to strong preference for Moodle over Blackboard CE8.  When compared as a whole, there were no categories which students preferred Blackboard over Moodle, though some preferred specific functionality of the Discussion Board in BB CE8 over the Forums in Moodle. However, there appears to be a 2/3rds preference for Moodle among students that responded.

The most common complaint was around forum subscription and e-mails that were sent to their MyPCC account.

Full evaluation from winter term students (pdf)


Faculty Summary

6/5 faculty polled, 100% response rate.

The faculty pilot participants felt that Moodle was easier to learn, use, and is more intuitive than Blackboard CE8, but that both were flexible and allowed them to effectively teach online courses. The format of the faculty evaluation differed in that we asked them a series of questions at the beginning of the pilot and at the end, comparing functions in Moodle to Blackboard.

On the whole, the pilot participants felt that Moodle functioned better than Blackboard in all categories except in "setting up the grade book," "ability to customize course layout,"  "Gradebook," and "Mail."

The biggest cons to using Moodle were

• Lack of internal Mail
• Grading and Gradebook
• Forum functionality/Grading
• Breadcrumbs unhelpful
• Lack of selective release

The biggest pros to using Moodle were

• Look and Feel (consistency)
• Stability
• Simplicity / Ease of Use
• LaTeX

Full faculty evaluation for Winter Moodle Pilot (pdf)

Sloan-C Moodle Moot

I recently attended the Moodle Moot at the Sloan-C conference in Orlando, FL. The focus of the moot was course management system selection processes, and there were a lot of institutions there in the same situation as us. Some were still a ways off from any decision, some where there creating new online programs, and some were, like us, actively working towards replacing our aging WebCT installation.

There were some really big take-away points that were especially useful to me.

1. From North Carolina's Community Colleges Keynote
1. Student orientations are more important for successful use of a CMS than which CMS is used.
   
2. The more comfortable an instructor appears with the CMS, the better student opinion is of the CMS.
3. No one uses all the features in a CMS.
2. University of North Carolina at Charlotte and North Carolina State are both migrating from the WebCT CE/Vista platform to Moodle 1.9.x by summer of 2011.
1. Both are moving from a pilot to a co-production scenario
2. Both are relying on faculty (with staff support) to migrate their content
3. Both are Banner schools and are using intermediary services to collect and manage SIS data before passing it to Moodle for course creation, enrollments, etc.
4. Establishing the scope and role of Moodle is important. Just because to can modify/add modules doesn't mean you should. People will start looking to use Moodle to solve all problems unless you define how it will be used within the institution.
5. Hardware requirements for the LAMP architecture are much smaller and cheaper.
6. UNC Charlotte offered grants to faculty for migration, though the award was in the form of instructional design/support time.
   
3. Robust online student orientations are good, but we've known that.
4. There are 3 migration options for courses leaving CE/Vista. This is largely true no matter which platform you migrate to.
1. Some hosts/vendors offer scripted/systematic course migrations. This assumes use of the Learning Module tool. Can cost as little as $40/course.
   
2. Manual migration services are available at a much higher cost ($120/hr) but often have better results.
   
3. One of the most common methods being employed by Colleges and Universities is a combination of faculty migration and training, which allows you to migrate only important content and gives faculty a chance to learn the new CMS while migrating. This is ultimately what happened for us when moving from CE4 to CE6, despite the "migration tool."
5. Moodle 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the underlying code. Some major feature additions include
1. Conditional Release
2. Improve file handling and security
3. More APIs to interact with external systems like portfolios, web 2.0 sites, web applications, etc.
4. well, there's lots more. See the Roadmap for more details. Beta is due presently.
6. Perception of Free - "Free like Puppies"
   
1. The selection of Moodle for UNC Charlotte was not about saving money
2. Focus was on quality of CMS, content and instruction
3. Supports common tools but has flexibility of add-ons
4. Significant need to establish "module" policy for determining need or reason for adding modules.

Now to incorporate this info in to our Moodle Pilot, which is slated to start for Winter term, 2010.

Project Team Meeting - September 8th

This week's project team meeting discussed 10 essential criteria that any CMS solution must meet for consideration. We're honing down the details, but will use those details to compare options in the marketplace.

We also discussed having a Moodle pilot, and Peter and Clayton will be working to develop a pilot plan.

Lastly, we discussed setting up forums and focus groups for discussing the future of online learning at PCC. We will be scheduling several meetings with various stakeholders during fall term based on user type (faculty, student), discipline (math, business, etc), and possibly a campus catch-all. The intent of these focus groups is to develop a vision for online learning that we can distill into usable criteria for selecting our next CMS.