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Presentation: A link to Anna Jones' presentation notes can be found here (special thanks to Anna for making them available to the Moodle community).
The following notes were taken at the Sydney Moodle User Group 10 event at Sydney University.
Venue: Centre for Veterinary Education, Sydney University (Professional Development Leaders)
Website: www.cve.edu.au
Host: Anna Jones, TimeOnline Coordinator
Moodle implementation launched in February 2009. Implementation fairly smooth but far to go in the implementation plan, including adding more courses and having more input from the instructors from around the world. Some of the points made during Ana's presentation include:
- Login via two ways: main website or straight to 'better vets online' site
- Drupal used to present information pages about the Centre
- IMS Database - drupal picks up the username and password - gateway Moodle System
- 1 username and password across multiple systems thanks to technical assistance from Catalyst in NZ
- Distance education courses brought across from WebCT, 16 in total
- Initial phase
- 250 participants
- Students are mainly full-time vets from around the world - from Canada to Singapore
- Teachers from around the world as well, for example a Dermatology Teacher (expert) from Germany
- Many courses are specialty courses in vet science, that are best practice in world
- TimeOnline courses to be brought over in next phase
- Distance education - online additional
- Disks are sent out along with course booklets to all participants
- Edna List server used initially now training staff to use Moodle forums
- Profiles locked down - users can't change detail because data would not be shared back with Drupal and other systems
- One forum per course
- Courses are 10 months long
- Shorter 6 week courses have a general discussion and then discussion per topic
- Policy about instructors replying to forum posts to ensure every few days replies occur and students feel supported
- TimeOnline courses to be added over time
- Anna as the coordinator checks courses everyday and prompts the tutor if necessary
- Two systems operation - 1. Test and development system 2. Production system
- Identical looks
- Site used for social interaction for rural vets. Online moodle takes social interaction to more long term use.
- What's next? Style Guide - creating uniformity across the course content. File sizes. More Course Devlopment and creation. TimeOnline courses across from WebCT. Creating uniformity with the branding across all materials.
- Anna and her staff have found Moodle to be very intuitive - Tutors were able to put up there course notes with little or no training.
Jason Hando with Moodle News
The workshop module has been picked up again. A wonderful activity module in Moodle, the Workshop module has long been plagued with bugs and problems and now has the opportunity to resurface better than ever. Please submit your ideas for the workshop module by starting with the Workshop Specification.
What is the Workshop Module?
It allowed students to peer assess other student assignments based on rubric provided by the teacher.
Cathie Cashmere and Jamie with Progress report from Cronulla High School
HSIE Faculty are getting increasingly on board with adding files and quizzes to the Moodle site. 180 laptops being distributed to students and staff in next few months. Looking to install and use third party modules and plugins to bring other faculties to Moodle. Having some issues with docx format files and the icon displaying in a course. Want to install OUBlog module to allow course-based blogging and commenting.
Jason Hando with 3 Creative Ideas for Moodle Themes
1. Hide Stuff using CSS:
- Hide the “Topic Outline” text:
- .outline {display: none !important;}
- Hide the Topic Numbers:
- .topicNumber {display: none !important;}
- Hide left column:
- #course-view #left-column{display: none;}
- .editing#course-view #left-column {display: block;}
2. Improve look of tables in Moodle using Ian Grivios’ tables files (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=121947)
- Add table_images into pix folder
- Add styles_table.css into theme folder
- Add code for referencing new stylesheet in config file:
- $THEME->sheets = array('gradients','styles_tables','styles_color');
3. Add lightbox functionality - add script reference into the header or footer of your Moodle theme, make sure the lightbox directory exists in theme folder, and then use a rel tag to force certain links to load in a lightbox.
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