It was a pure luxury to spend the day brainstorming with him and great to see ‘Moodle head quarters’ and the core team. Was surprised to see a familiar face - Tim Hunt from the OU - who is out here on secondment for a year. Martin is a partner in our JISC Curriculum Design project, which is partly about exploring how we might adapt and deploy the tools and resources we have been developing in our Open University Learning Design Initiative (OULDI) in different contexts. There are essentially three layers – embedding the use of the tools and resources across the OU, cascading them out into four other UK institutional contexts (Brunel, Cambridge, London South Bank and Reading universities) and then across two pan-community contexts (i.e. the Moodle and Lams community). I bought Martin up to speed with the various components of OULDI – CompendiumLD, Cloudworks, the different schema we have been thinking about in terms of reconceptualising design (see this ariadne article for more on what I mean by this) and the types of events we have been running to get community engagement and user feedback (such as our Cloudfests and Design Challenge events).Martin was very interested in our latest developments of CompendiumLD and could really see the power of being able to represent designs visually. Of course it would be wonderful to be able to more closely integrate CompendiumLD and moodle, so that with one click the design could be converted into a course on the fly, but this would be far from trivial! One of the recent features Andrew Brasher has been working on is enabling users to add time allocations to tasks in activities, which are then automatically aggregated from each role (student, tutor, etc.). He is also working on being able to map learning outcomes at different levels of design. I showed Martin our new version of cloudworks (will blog a more detailed post about the specifics of this later), where the focus is on encouraging dialogue and discussion around different community needs. Martin gave some great feedback on the site and it was interesting to what him navigate around – albeit a bit nerve wrecking too!! We talked about usability and design issues with site development and of course issues about security and anti-spamming. Quality control also came up – in terms of the balance between open access and contribution and avoidance of site dilution in terms of good content. Martin showed me around the Moodle community (virtually). It really is very impressive seeing the open source community up front and in action – the shared mechanism for reporting bugs, voting, discussing and tracking developments via tracker.moodle.org (a repository with ca. 17,000 issues and bugs). He talked about the sensitivity of identifying and promoting ‘experts’ or ‘trusted others in the system. They currently have a simple but effective approach with a voting on objects in the system, which just says ‘Was this useful?’ yes/no. Responses are aggregated according to an open algorithm and people within the system then have little icons associated with their name to denote their ‘expertise’. He also shown me around the moodle discussion forums and the ways in which they are using tagging to group people with common interests together. One mechanism for example was to view users who are tagged in the system with similar terms – Moodle and Guinness seemed to be particularly popular – not sure what the significance of that is!Clearly the Moodle community is vibrant and worldwide– which is why it seemed such an obvious and valuable community to work with; a collective bound in a common interest – i.e. the use of Moodle to develop courses. What struck me was that crudely speaking you could categorise the community engagement and dialogue into three layers:
- Technical discussions – i.e. the layer most closely aligned to the open source notion. This layer is about a shared, collective enterprise of identifying, discussing and tracking issues and bug fixing. This layer is particularly well developed and Moodle has a sophisticated online system and volunteer facilitators to ensure this is effective.
- Support issues – the next layer up is primarily around users sharing tips and hints, seeking support and advice on how to use Moodle. This is primarily through a range of treaded discussion forums at moodle.org
- Pedagogical issues – the third layer is about sharing ideas about good practice in course design. What struck me was that this was the least developed layer and this is where I think there is a real connection with the work we are doing and why I am so excited about being able to work with Martin as part of our JISC project.
The Cloudworks site we have been developed is precisely about providing a mechanism for encouraging and facilitating discussion at this third layer, i.e. helping users to find, share and discuss learning and teaching ideas and designs. However we know that this is far from trivial. Rarefying ideas and designs into different representations, whether those are textual descriptions/case studies or visual designs, loses something of the essence of the design in the process. Although teachers say they want case studies and indicate that they are interested in sharing designs and discussing ideas with others, in actual practice this rarely happens in practice (note the third pedagogical issues layer I referred to above). And yet extending the vibrant open source community engagement to more generic learning and teaching issues has been a long term goal of many of us working in this area.
We then let brainstorming get the better of us (think this was because it was after a delicious lunch in a local café…) and started to think ‘what if…’ Wouldn’t it be nice if when a moodle user started a new course there was a set of resources and tools they could draw on to help guide them in creating a great course? Could we take and adapt some of the tools from our OULDI work as a starting point for this? Could Cloudworks act as a conduit for sharing the designs and ideas generated within the moodle community? In other works can we focus on promoting that third layer – and get vibrant community engagement around the pedagogical aspects of developing moodle courses? So Martin and I decided to have a go at doing this. We plan to develop a moodle course, which will be initially seeded with the various tools and resources we have been developing, as well as others we think might be useful. We are going to put out an invite to the moodle community to participate in the course. The goal will be to use the tools and resources to design ‘great’ courses. Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences of using the tools and resources and to discuss each other’s ideas and designs. Courses created will have be made available on the moodle demo site. We think we will target educational developers/instructional designers/learning technologists – i.e. those tasked with providing support and advice on course creation within institutions. Although we will initially seed the course, we will continue to develop it based on participants’ feedback and reflection on their experience of using the tools and resources. Participants will have a shared goal in terms of adapting the core course to develop their own institutional version of ‘Create a great course’.
This may of course turn out to be a mad capped idea but we reckon it’s worth a try and if nothing else I am sure it will generated lots of interesting discussion and we will learn a lot in the process. It was a privilege to be able to spend time with Martin and I am really looking forward to taking these ideas forward with him and to more fruitful discussions in the future.
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