Last week ULCC facilitated the first e-ILP2 Focus Group to review the initial implementation.  It was hugely successful, with practitioners providing a ‘show-and-tell’ sessions and sharing tips and tricks (see some examples below).  We’re now ready to release it as a Moodle block to the wider community under an Open Source license.

James Ballard outline the reasons why we had to entirely re-write the e-ILP, which also allowed us to build in a much more flexible and extensible approach to learning support.  We have witnessed a new community of practice with evolving needs and a new understanding of the benefit to e-learning to pastoral support practices.  In light of this and with the release of Moodle 2.0, ULCC took the decision to review the existing code and implement a new ILP that was more flexible and extensible to anticipate existing and future needs of the systems.  Key changes included: Read more …

As part of an upgrading to Moodle 2.0 workshop for the Moodle User Group Greater London (#muggl) at City University this blog details some of the mundane and unusual things that might go wrong in an upgrade and how to avoid them and get the following:

++ Success ++
Command line upgrade completed successfully.

If an upgrade fails then you need to start again which for large sites can lead to a few all-nighters if you’re on a deadline. We’ve successfully completed over 50 upgrades so far (big and small), and here are a few of the things we have found that could go wrong.

This assumes use of the command line upgrade and are presented in the order they are likely to occur in upgrade sequence:

php -d admin/cli/upgrade.php --non-interactive

Read more …

As much as I would like this to be a tale by Chaucer, the original problem originates from my colleague Jim Judges who has been running a series of training sessions using Moodle 2.0. My Chaucerfied version of the issue:

In Moodle once the noble judge
uploaded a file to his course,
it came to pass with simple nudge,
others would use without remorse.
Upon a time the judge did change
content set forth within this file;
would users of the courses strange,
see the new content in a while?

Chaucer aside, there are two parts to the original tale reported by Jim. If my file is shared with multiple courses what happens if (1) I change the original file; and (2) I delete the original file?

Read more …

The workshop held in the Anatomy Theatre and Museum at King’s College was my first experience of the flexible service delivery programme. After introductions and an overview of the programme we split into groups to look at some of the problems the programme has been exploring. I joined the e-learning group, led by Sarah Sherman, looking at the problem of switching from a proprietary Virtual Learning Environment to Moodle, an area I have some experience in having overseen twenty or so migrations in my time at ULCC.

The discussions, however, went down a direction of exploring some cultural challenges as well as technical of integration and interoperability.  The following mind map captures my notes and reflecting on this I wonder how this compares to my own perspective working for a shared service provider.

Read more …

Part 1

Course Files – Where have they gone…?

Customers have been asking me lately about the changes they most fear in Moodle 2.0 and top of the list is;

“how do we navigate to and find the course files area once we have upgraded the site”

In versions of Moodle prior to 2.0 all  files uploaded into Moodle were stored in a physical directory known as the “Course files” area.

This was where a teacher might upload files to be part of the course content, but this area also included everything students uploaded, such as assignments and forum attachments. These “activity files” were stored in a special folder called moddata in a certain structure that helped modules keep track of their own files.

Read more …

Bilbao

In extending our existing work in this area Philip Butler and I were accepted to present a paper on our Personalised Learning Framework for e-Learning at the 7th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society. The conference was in Bilbao so the natural highlight was the evening tour of the Guggenheim Museum, to which I returned again on Sunday to further the disorientation of Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time exhibit. This article reflects on some of the key issues raised at the conference, which brought together many disciplines through its 4 strands: Human technologies and usability, Technology in Community, Technology in Education and Knowledge in Technology. Read more …

60 customers attended the first of ULCC briefing events which set out to outline Moodle2.0:

• Explore Moodle2.0 and how it differs from the current version.
• Explore what benefits it offers to learning providers (not just a different way of doing things)
• Explore what issues have to be planned for.
• Know what is involved in upgrading.

Everyone agreed the event was very welcomed and the feedback we received was unanimously positive.  Customers were especially pleased with how questions they’d come along with had been answered and that they could leave feeling reassured that ULCC were managing the process of migrating to Moodle2.0. Read more …

Desmazieres' Library of Babel

This is the first post in a series of blog articles addressing various questions about the upgrade to Moodle 2.0. The repository API is one of the big new features, and we are commonly asked by providers which repositories should they be using. This coincides with a desire to move away from e-learning as a passive content space to an interactive learning space. At first glance increasing the number of repositories may appear contradictory to reducing existing content-centric trends. The first part of the article will try to help clarify what a repository is followed by some examples of how you might use this for sharing mobile created content, sharing teaching resources, and collaborating on documents. Read more …

Submitted by Martin King:

I was approached by the course convener of a first year Drama course requesting whether they could have separate Moodle course spaces for the six groups.  Initial thoughts on the practicality of dividing a course in this way worried me; the enrolment system automatically places students in a single course space for each course code.  Breaking from single to multiple courses students would be faced with enrolling themselves on the correct group with the department and Moodle team shouldering additional administrative burden – not good!  There was also the six extra courses to manage that were not integrated into college systems.  Read more …

At the first FOTE event in 2008 I outlined the ULCC Personalisation of Learning Framework and demonstrated a theoretical excample of what this might look like using Lewisham College as an example.  I’m delighted to say that, two years on, I can now show how this looks in practice by revisiting Lewisham to see the extraordinary progress they’ve made since.

Earlier this summer I attended the excellent ‘Learning in the Digital Wales’ conference to speak about the ULCC Personalisation of Learning Framework and barriers to organisational transformation:

‘The logic of education systems should be reversed so that it is the system that conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system. This is the essence of personalisation’
Personalisation and Digital Technologies

I believe learning providers are beginning to realise their most formidable barrier to progress are the learners themselves!  Of course we can’t be rid of them, but transformation will pivot on whether or not we really understand them.  So perhaps our real challenge can be crystallised into the following two simple questions:

1. What is a 21st century learner, and
2. How do we accommodate 21st Century Learning?

Kaye Bachelard, Mahara UK10

When I started regional advisory work with JISC RSC London just over 10 years ago, the world was a much simpler place; government was funding the sector to buy VLEs and it was easy to measure a divide by seeing who had one and who hadn’t (this was before we looked at how effectively they were being used!).  Apart from, maybe, the Millennium Bug, there wasn’t much more to worry about.

Fast forward a couple of years and suddenly everyone was excited by the ‘digital native’.  Their imminent arrival at the doors of post-16 sector caused some panic, and a clear divide could be drawn, rather simplistically, between learning providers who welcomed them and those who were unprepared.

This summer I filmed some e-Learning managers in London and asked them to ‘characterise’ or ‘describe’ what they thought of the 21^st Century learner.  I was very pleasantly surprised how clearly everyone expressed themselves around this idea and were fully prepared to re-evaluate their core business strategies (did you know that today’s learner in post-16 education is most likely to have used a computer mouse before a pen or pencil?!).  Does everyone feel like this?  I began to wonder if we were beginning to witness the next digital divide…