Enhancing Moodle to meet the needs of 200,000 distance learners

In 2005 The Open University UK selected Moodle as the basis of its institutional virtual learning environment. Since then, the system has been integrated with existing elearning and administrative systems at the University and considerably enhanced during an extensive development programme costing around €8m and taking nearly three years. Many policy issues have emerged which needed to be tackled alongside the software developments in order for the platform to be adopted by the 7,000 tutors and nearly 200,000 students of the University. The Moodle system has proven to be reliable, scalable and customisable and has resulted in a more flexible system for the Open University than the commercial alternatives. This paper examines some of the many enhancements made to Moodle by the Open University, most of which have been fed back into the product for the benefit of other Moodle users. It describes some of the policy and pedagogical issues which have emerged during the roll-out of Moodle across the University

Putting Pedagogy in the driving seat with Open Comment: an open source formative assessment feedback and guidance tool for History Students

One of the more challenging aspects in the current e-assessment milieu is to provide a set of electronic interactive tasks that will allow students more free text entry and provide immediate feedback to them. The specific objective of the project was to construct some simple tools in the form of Moodle extensions that allow a Moodle author to ask free-text response questions that can provide a degree of interactive formative feedback to students. In parallel with this was the aim to begin to develop a methodology for constructing such questions and their feedback effectively, together with techniques for constructing decision rules for giving feedback. Open Comment is a formative feedback technology designed to be integrated in the Moodle virtual learning environment. Put simply, it provides a simple system allowing questions to be written in Moodle, and for students' free text responses to these questions to be analysed and used to provide individually customised formative feedback

Learning First, Technology Second: Enhancing Missionary Training Through Technology

This article describes how the missions agency EFCA ReachGlobal uses the open source online learning platform Moodle to train missionaries and to fulfill its goal to become a learning organization. Moodle is employed in three ways: online facilitated courses, collaboration zones and knowledge banks. Blended learning is also used, notably in ReachGlobal’s pre-field training for missionary candidates

The Moodle text (or HTML) editor toolbar - PDF

The Moodle text (or HTML) editor toolba

Adopting Moodle:Case Studies in the Diffusion of Innovation

This joint research paper among five part-time English teachers at Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen University, hereafter called Kyoai University, represents a focused practical application of Action Research based on CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) in the classroom and syllabus. This research builds upon the history and development of CALL at the University, including previous research based on student perceptions of CALL (Deadman, 2014) and teacher’s perceptions and evaluations of multimedia technologies (Mason, 2014). The paper details and investigates how CALL is adopted amongst the teachers in this study, through the existent software Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). Two of the members of this group have used Moodle, whereas the three other part-time teachers have had limited exposure and experience using it. The aim of this research group is to peer-teach each other in a community of practice, in order that our own technology skills increase, ultimately transferring this to better learning experiences for the students. The paper will use teachers experience, observations and planning to detail the purposefulness of technology in the curriculum; the teacher’s own perceptions of the technology; the subsequent selection, planning and design of appropriate class-specific Moodle applications; and each teacher’s initial evaluations of Moodle as they begin to construct their own Moodle accounts for various classes.　A general　e-mail was sent to all Japanese part-time teachers who would be interested in jointly partaking in a research paper, based on the above considerations. As such, the members of this research paper are equal in membership and responsibility for the research, as per the ethical considerations of practitioner research (Hammersley, M., Gomm, R., and Woods, P., 2003)

How to create a Moodle assignment

How to create a Moodle assignment, VL

How to add a block to a Moodle course - PDF

How to add a block to a Moodle cours

Using the feedback activity in Moodle (student version)

Using the feedback activity in Moodle (student version

Using the feedback activity in Moodle (staff version) - PDF

Using the feedback activity in Moodle (staff version