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Sorry, no insights into the title of the post. This is simply a test post that I'm using for bim development....more...
Some more tidying up of BIM to get it ready for release....more...
The following started as an attempt to develop an argument that business intelligence/data warehouse tools are not a perfect fit for what is broadly called academic analytics. In fact, as I was writing this post I realised that it's actually an argument that business intelligence tools aren't a perfect fit for what I'm interested in doing and that is not academic analytics....more...
Apart from some playing around with the gradebook, the new development for BIM is complete. What is left to do is the various cleaning up, double checking, documentation and other tasks necessary to turn BIM from essentially functional to something reasonably okay to install. This is the first post describing that process. It and the following ones will essentially be working through the to do list....more...
Almost forgot to add this into BIM. BIM is used by staff to manage and mark feed/blog posts from students. Eventually, those marks have to be put into the Moodle gradebook so they can form part of the students final grade. This post summarises a search for information about how this can be done within Moodle and some design thinking about how to get it done in BIM....more...
I'm wondering if too much of the focus on improving teaching within universities is focused on groups within strong(er) ties at the cost of increasing the weaker ties....more...
I had sort of hoped that most of the new BIM development was finished. However, after a bit of research at the local institution it becomes obvious that I'll have to implement a marker allocation screen. Hopefully, it won't require that much work....more...
My current institution is currently a member of the DEHub - "A community for learning and teaching, research and Innovation in Distance Education". The exact connection with my current institution and more importantly the folk doing work in distance education/learning and teaching remains somewhat vague. However, it is probably time for me to actively see what connections exist with my work and interests, there should probably be a lot....more...
The following is an attempt to make concrete some idea and tasks associated with writing a journal paper for the Australian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) based on the ASCILITE'09 paper based on the work of the Indicators project. The paper will be co-authored by a group and the aim of this post is to start discussion about content of the paper and the tasks we need to do to get it written....more...
A small group of colleagues are discussing possible ideas around a project to engage in curriculum mapping. Possibly with the aim of going for an ALTC grant. As part of that process one of my colleagues has raised a range of questions about the project (we're still at the storming and norming phase). The following is my attempt to answer some of those questions. The responses I give are obviously influenced by my beliefs about learning and teaching in higher education and how it does or does not work....more...
This post continues on from the manage marking work and describes the design/implementation of the view and release operations of manage marking. There are strong similarities in what both operations do and how they do it, so doing them in one....more...
We come to the main last collection of functionality required of BIM to be operation (a major tidy up is needed after this, but it's getting there). That last collection is currently going under the label "Manage Marking". It covers the functionality required by the teacher in charge of a course to manage the marking being done by other staff, this includes the following tasks:...more...
A central assumption in BIM is that student contributions to their feeds are, at least in some part, intended to respond to questions or activities that have been created to encourage reflection and other good stuff. This requires that the teaching staff using BIM have a mechanism for creating and changing the questions students will respond to. This post describes the initial implementation of this screen....more...
One of the good and also problematic things about the Indicators project (attempting to identify patterns in LMS usage data) is that there are so many interesting idea for further research that arise from the patterns being identified. What's best/worst is that the project has really only scratched the surface. This post is an attempt to write down an idea I had today in order to save it for another day, perhaps see if anyone has any insights that can improve it, and if anyone is keen to get involved....more...
Increasingly BIM development is getting to the stage where the functionality for BIM's three different types of user (coordinator, markers and students) are just about complete. I've been using a very naive, probably misleading interpretation of Moodle's capabilities system to distinguish between the different types of users and what they can do. Yesterday, doing what I thought was some minor updates, it broke. I'm currently having to use a kludge to get BIM to work for different users. This post is documents my attempts to fix this problem....more...
This post is meant to document the (hopefully short) process of getting the Mark Post screen implemented in BIM....more...
BAM/BIM has initially been designed for use at CQU. In that time it has been used in 29 course offerings with 13 of those averaging around 200 students per offering. i.e. BAM/BIM is originally designed for large offerings and hence needs to provide support for the teaching staff in charge of those large offerings....more...
In the last bit of work on BIM I got the Allocate Posts page working. This created the issue of getting the navigation/bread crumbs trail work in a useful way. I made an initial start on that, this post tries to get it complete. It will also be an attempt to get the "tabbed" screen for the coordinator working....more...
The last bit of work I did on BIM continue the current trend of getting screens mostly working without some of the extra effort required for a production system. This is in part driven by my desire to become more familiar with differing aspects of Moodle development....more...