Month: May 2010

Requirements for an "indicators" Moodle block

On May 9, 2010

In elearning, herding cats, indicators, Uncategorized

The Indicators project team are off to Moodlemoot AU 2010. All three are giving presentations, but only two (i.e. not me) are on the indicators project. In thinking about how we might make the most of this opportunity, we’ve floated the idea of announcing an “indicators” Moodle block at the conference. This post is an attempt to make concrete our thinking and take some steps towards making it happen, hopefully even generate some interest and external comments.

What is an “indicators” Moodle block?

At least for me, at the moment, an “indicators” Moodle block is a simple extension to Moodle that just about anyone can install into their Moodle install and start getting some insights into whether or not what they (teaching staff, students or administrators) are doing is good, bad or indifferent.

Such a block would probably fulfill some/all of the following:

Can be embedded into a normal Moodle view.
As a teaching staff member, or a student, the block would be part of my normal Moodle interface. It’s not located somewhere special that I have to remember to visit, it’s always there.
Is very visual.
It sends a strong, very clear message. I don’t have to apply special knowledge or spend a lot of time trying to understand what it is telling me. If I’m doing something wrong, it should be red or something similar.
This does NOT mean that is obtrusive. As a part of a normal Moodle view it can take my attention away from other stuff.
Enables comparisons.
It doesn’t tell me how many times I’ve posted to the discussion forum, it tells me how much less (or more) I’ve posted than the best students, or all the students, or the worst students. In a friendly way it helps me understand how my use of the LMS compares to that of others.
Only uses what data is already in Moodle.
The aim is for anyone with a Moodle install to be able to add this block and use if straight away. No need to modify/connect with external data sources (at least not yet).
Serves as a stepping stone to more functionality.
The first block is our foray into providing such a service. Over time we might add more functionality. The block has to be a good open source project, something others can add to.
Also, the block has to allow the use to provide more than just visualise the data. It should help them to plan actions they might take, to talk to others about this, to track history etc.

Other tasks

Apart from thinking about what it actually is, we also need to think about what we need to do to start implementation. Here’s my first list.

Identify some visualisation software.
Most of these will be graphs or perhaps networks. We need to find a way to generate these graphs/network diagrams from PHP and in a way we can include in a Moodle block.
Figure out the Moodle database structure.
Whatever we do we’ll be pulling data from Moodle. So need to find out the format for the bit we’re interested in.
Data caching?
Most of these examples are likely to require getting a large bunch of data and doing some calculations before generate the visualisation. The block can’t be a performance hog, so we’re going to have to figure out some way to minimise performance impact. Caching?
Moodle block programming.
Have done a little, there’s a bit of doco out there. So shouldn’t be too hard.
Managing the code.
We haven’t done any joint development yet. Doing something like this would require us to figure out how we manage the development process.
Who does what?

Blurb for the alignment project

By admin

On May 7, 2010

In alignment, Uncategorized

The following is an early attempt at an “executive summary” for the alignment project. It’s meant to get folk who know nothing about the project excited, or at least interested, in the project. The main audience, at the moment, is probably limited to institutional leaders around learning and teaching and those likely to be evaluating ALTC grant applications.

Suggestions and criticisms more than welcome.

I’m particularly interested in literature references that support some of the observations/claims e.g. that consideration of alignment is not part of everyday teaching practice for teaching academics.

Executive summary

Instructional (Cohen, 1987), curriculum (Anderson, 2002) and constructive (Biggs, 1996) alignment are all built on the recognition that student learning outcomes are significantly higher when there is a strong link between those learning outcomes, the assessment and the instructional activities and materials. Cohen (1987) argues that limitations in learning is not mainly caused by ineffective teaching, but instead is mostly the result of a misalignment between what teachers teach, what they intended to teach, and what they assessed as having been taught. The importance of achieving and demonstrating alignment with expected outcomes is also a central component of outcomes-based accreditation and quality assurance approaches that are increasingly widespread within higher education.

For most teaching academics, however, the consideration of alignment in their courses and programs is not part of everyday teaching practice. Consideration of alignment is typically limited to events such as significant re-design of courses and programs of visits from accreditation or quality assurance organizations. This lack of regular consideration of alignment may be a significant contributing factor to the on-going limitations of university learning and teaching and its quality assurance processes. For example, Barrie et al (Barrie, Hughes, & Smith, 2009) make the observation

despite the rhetoric of graduate attributes policy and despite the espoused claims of statements of course learning outcomes, the reality is that teaching in some courses has not changed from a model of transmission of factual content.

Through a collaborative action research process this project seeks to build and grow distributive leadership capacity within the systems and processes of the two participating institutions that encourages and enables consideration of alignment, and action-based on that consideration, to become a regular, transparent, supported and integrated part of common teaching practice. Through this the project seeks to explore steps towards adoption Biggs’ model of the reflective institution. As a result the project aims to develop approaches that can systemically enhance learning and teaching through enabling and encouraging teaching academics to question and change their conceptions and practice of learning and teaching and through this on-going consideration of alignment significantly improve student learning outcomes.

References

Anderson, L. (2002). Curricular alignment: A re-examination. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 255-260.

Barrie, S., Hughes, C., & Smith, C. (2009). The national graduate attributes project: integration and assessment of graduate attributes in curriculum. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council.

Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347-364.

Cohen, S. A. (1987). Instructional alignment: Searching for a magic bullet. Educational Researcher, 16(8), 16-20.

Leadership as appreciating resistance

By admin

On May 3, 2010

In alignment, elearning, quotes, Uncategorized

Am busy reading and trying to do up a grant application, when I should be working on the PhD. However, I couldn’t bypass this quote from FUllan (2001: 65)

Defining effective leadership as appreciating resistance is another of those remarkable discoveries: dissent is seen as a potential source of new ideas and breakthroughs. The absence of conflict is a sign of decay … investing only in likeminded innovators is not necessarily a good thing. They become more likeminded … If you include the naysayers, noise in the early stages will yield later, greater implementation.

It resonates strongly with me for two reasons:

the increasing prevalence of the opposite definition of leadership; and
The trend towards increasingly corporate approaches within universities means that increasingly there are short-term management positions which have to deal with increasing demands for accountability from government etc. The simple and increasingly prevalent approach is to stomp all over resistance and naysayers. “You’re not a team player” and “Why so negative” are the common statements I’ve heard from this approach.

This type of success is the “I deny your reality and substitute my own” approach to leadership. It’s an approach that only ends up annoying people and failing in the long-term.
the importance I place on this definition.
Given the above, it should be no surprise that diversity of opinion is important to me. Increasingly, it is something I seek to encourage in the groups I work with, though it can often be very difficult to do. First in terms of people recognising the value of diversity of opinion. For example, I was on an interview panel where one member refused to consider someone for a job because they didn’t know a particular body of literature that the panel member thought important.

The really difficult distinction to make is between “appreciating resistance” and recognising the idiots. To often resistance is equated as being an idiot, and there’s a danger that appreciating resistance may mean paying too much attention to idiots.

References

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Can BIM support the use of Moodle blogs?

By admin

On May 2, 2010

In bim, Uncategorized

Problem

BIM is a Moodle activity module that helps academic staff manage the use of individual student blogs, where those blogs are hosted on the students’ choice of blog service (e.g. WordPress.com etc.). An in-built assumption/limitation in how BIM works is that each student’s blog must be open to the world. If access to the blog is restricted, BIM can’t mirror it.

For many folk this is not a problem. However, there are occasions where teaching staff want students to use individual blogs, but what the students post should be kept private, to some extent.

One Solution?

It’s been suggested that allowing students to register their Moodle blog with BIM might get around this problem. This post is an attempt to explore that option.

Potential constraints

I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this, so it has to be simple and not involve major modifications to BIM. In addition, I’m reluctant to add to BIM special support for Moodle blogs. The aim of BIM is to encourage and enable the use of real tools through reliance on “standards” i.e. RSS and ATOM feeds. I don’t want to add special support for any particular blog.

The Moodle blog itself is not much of a blog and is likely to change soon.

The Moodle blog

Focusing on 1.9, I can find out the following:

Site configuration for blogs.
Each Moodle site can configure its policies around blog visibility. Options range from turning the blog facility off entirely through to all site users being able to see all blog entries and everyone being able to see entries specified as world readable.
Users can also configure entries for just them to see.
RSS security by obsufucation, not real security.
My understanding is that Moodle blog’s can generate RSS, and that restrictions are based on the location of the RSS being secret as opposed to really secure.
As per this post on Moodle.org site the Moodle site needs to have RSS enabled at the site level via: Admin blog > Server > RSS > Enable RSS

Moodle Blog RSS

With RSS enable at the site level, an RSS icon is displayed on a user’s blog. If they click on that they get an RSS feed with the URL not being all that private. i.e. confirming above, you have to know somethings to work it out, but it can be worked out.

In terms registering a Moodle blog feed, you can’t rely on auto-detect as Moodle doesn’t use the right “HTML”. You actually have to register the RSS feed.

But now I have another problem. I can’t seem to get the Moodle blog to add posts/items to the RSS feed.

Conclusions

I’m going to leave this investigation now without having worked it out. The reasons are:

If you can get RSS being generated from the Moodle blog you should be able to register it with BIM, as long as the permissions are set correctly.
If you can do this, then the students’ RSS feeds are only going to be very slightly more secure than those on WordPress.com or similar.
It will be very easy for other students within the course to see each other posts, so not a lot of privacy.