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Contributed by Linda Martin, Coordinator of English Language Support and International Services and Part-time Instructor of English

Finding new strategies to encourage my students to develop their writing skills is always at the forefront of my pedagogy. Although I am still a novice with technological methodologies, I am becoming fond of the idea of teaching beyond the walls of my classrooms with the use of technology. I’ve always been a student of alternative approaches to education when I see a clear benefit. With continued experimentation with Moodle applications such as its Forum feature, I have found innovative ways to teach my students and extraordinary ways for them to learn, not only from me, but also from one another.

There are multiple transitions for most international (and non-native speakers) students when it comes to understanding the teaching and learning styles in a DePauw classroom environment. Often, cultural and societal traditions are still active in their mindsets and can influence their oral participation among their peers. However, I have learned that with Moodle’s Forum feature, I can minimize these inhibitors and establish a more equal rhetorical environment. Here is one example that I find most useful.

One of my strategies is to establish robust discussions related to our weekly readings. Sometimes during these classroom discussions when we have achieved a heightened level of critical thinking and expression, I observe body language among the students that can alter or even inhibit the direction of our discussions. Who is really going to express themselves about the topic in front of their peers? Who would dare say something less than totally flattering about his/her government or even about America’s government? So, I created the Readers’ Discussion Forum. In this required weekly discussion group, teams are created for each week consisting of either three or four students – depending upon the total number of students in the class. The team members decide which role each will play: Initiator – the one who initiates the discussions; Provocateur – the one who stimulates the discussions with probing comments or questions; Summarizer – the one who reads and captures the essence of everyone’s comments and identifies the thread(s), or main ideas that connect the responses. Questions are developed by the team and sent to me by Monday morning of the week the readings are to be read and discussed. This means that a team must be “ahead” of the rest of the class in their reading of the materials. I review the questions to ensure that they will promote thoughtful and stimulating responses. All week, students are posting their responses to the questions as well as replying to each other’s responses.

What are some of the benefits of this type of teaching and learning? Students are comfortable writing from their own laptops; they can be reflective and take the time to compose more thoughtful responses than when speaking in an in-class discussion; they learn to respect other perspectives even if contradictory to their own personal values; they practice their writing skills; absences do not cause obstacles to completing their assignments or to miss interacting with their peers; active participation is guaranteed. In addition to developing critical thinking and enhancing writing skills, technological skills are also developed that can be applied later in different situations.

As an educator, I see an embedded value that I cannot always accomplish in the classroom - a level of intellectual curiosity that is cultivated through writing in a discussion format, which could also happen with our students who are native speakers of English. Through the use of forums, I have found that students’ thinking processes are enhanced by and developed through these extended opportunities for communicating and writing. Because classes are determined by time block parameters, time is a factor that limits group discussions and it can diminish both a charged discussion and/or the epiphany of a new concept. However, in the Moodle Forum, a student can continue to express himself/herself and other students will respond accordingly. It becomes an ongoing conversation throughout the week in and outside of the classroom.

I believe there are numerous pedagogical benefits to using technologies that allow us to extend beyond the walls of the traditional classroom. As these technologies become more sophisticated, staying familiar with them and their proper uses will allow us and our students, in general, to benefit from expanded learning opportunities.

Contributed by Lynda S. LaRoche, Assistant Director of Instructional & Learning Services (I.L.S.) and Moodle Support Coordinator

This past spring FITS researched the possibilities for a Moodle upgrade and presented the options to the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (ATAC) for their recommendation on behalf of the Faculty. After studying these possibilities, ATAC formally endorsed an upgrade to Moodle 1.9.5 to be effective for the 2009/2010 academic year. This article highlights several feature enhancements plus behind-the-scenes improvements that refine the performance of Moodle.

Behind-the-Scenes Improvements:

• Major performance improvements with forums
• Server-side optimization that improves scalability and performance
• Security enhancements
• Updated default settings based on faculty feedback

Researching and implementing Moodle upgrades are ways FITS partners with faculty members to offer the most appropriate instructional tools for university teaching and students’ learning. We encourage you to share your suggestions and concerns with us because your experiences can help us improve our resources.  Please ask us for help in discovering new uses for Moodle technologies!

Contributed by Thomas S. Dickinson, FITS Faculty Coordinator

When I first began teaching in the public schools I was introduced to a time-honored ritual that every public school teachers knows: taking the papers for a ride. I would collect papers from students—quizzes, essays, homework—clip or band them together, drop them into the briefcase or backpack, and them take them to the car when school was dismissed. I’d take the papers for a ride home, where they often sat undisturbed in the briefcase or backpack. Sometimes they made it to the coffee table or the desk in the study; most times they just went back and forth, accumulating more and more miles like a frequent flyer does.

I have gone paperless, thanks to Moodle. I no longer take papers for a ride.

My move to paperless courses has its origins in my work as a distance education professor at another university. There, I taught masters and doctoral students in courses in curriculum, curriculum planning and instructional design. These students communicated with me via Blackboard through chats, discussion boards, electronic journals, uploaded papers and assignments and email. Since my students were physically scattered all over the world (I had Department of Defense teachers in Osaka, Japan, Peace Corps members in west Africa, and public school teachers in Atlanta, Georgia as well as students at the university who were taking both face-to-face and distance classes.) the medium of connection was electronic, not face-to-face interchanges or even paper presentations of their work.

During this time I came to depend on direct responses to student work, often using a variety of editing functions on various word processing programs to make comments on papers and projects in their draft stages as well as final submissions. Students used email and email attachments regularly but as time progressed I found that Blackboard, with its file submission function, provided a much easier avenue for responding to student work as well as storing completed items.

I also came to appreciate my students’ perspectives about distance education and finding materials on the course Blackboard site. I was constantly reminded to “put it up there” in relation to a link, a JSTOR article url, or detailed instructions.

When I came to DePauw I brought these distance education insights to my work with face-to-face classrooms using Blackboard. In the literature these classes are known as “hybrids”. As the campus made the transition to Moodle and discovered its amazing flexibility I began to consider how to make the leap to a totally paperless class. My efforts to move in this direction were significantly enhanced by the use of a Tablet PC that allowed me to use digital ink to mark student papers electronically in the same fashion that I would if I had paper copies.

My efforts then began to focus on the use of the Moodle feature “advance uploading of files”. This provided my students with the ability to upload multiple drafts of a course assignment. I could comment on multiple drafts as well as a final submission using the Tablet PC and digital ink and send the assignment back to the student, all the while maintaining a copy of the draft and the comments I had made. If I conference with a student, in a W competency for example, I could open both the students original work from Moodle and the draft containing my comments for review. New comments or additions can be added directly to a new draft that can be placed on Moodle at the conclusion of the conference.

I had always used discussion boards on Blackboard so I continued to use forums on Moodle and my students profited from this form of communication and the feedback I could provide to them. The same has proved true with the use of the journal function in Moodle.

If you examine my course Moodle site you will find a wide range of information and assignments on each course site. I continue to remind myself of my distance education insight of “put it up there” and I continue to be additive with my postings. This semester, in a W competency class with weekly journal submissions, I have been using paintings and photographs as visual prompts for their journal. Each week I post a range of visuals that student can use as fodder for their journal.

I also post a range of optional information for students in each course. Some of these posts are of readings that parallel our current assignment. Others are suggestions for books or articles by authors that students have read in other courses but which touch on our work. As well, I post student presentations for the class to view and respond to.

My classroom instruction incorporates Moodle as a supportive element along with required texts and activities. This semester I am using a standard instructional classroom with desktop computer and projector. If I am working with a word processing program then I have the additional option of plugging in my tablet pc and using digital ink to illustrate particular points. I am also working in a seminar room that does not have a projection system but students, with their individual laptops, have access to the Moodle site individually.

So in the final analysis I use Moodle and the range of opportunities that it provides but I don’t print items and bring to class and I don’t ask students to do so. My students tell me that two things emerge from this stance: they always have access to everything; they don’t worry about losing anything. My students who travel as representatives of the university are particularly appreciative of the paper-less focus and the extensive Moodle site.

If you want to move to a paperless class, regardless of whether it is a “green issue” for you or you are just tired of “taking the papers for a ride”, I suggest that you proceed with a plan such as outlined below:

• Explore the “advanced uploading of files” and go “paperless” for one assignment that has multiple drafts or submissions; assess how this works both for you and your students.
• Try the journal element of Moodle as a continuing activity over the course of a semester. You might even want to split the class into paper journals and paperless journals and compare the two (including how much paper students used with traditional paper journals).
• Try a Tablet PC to see how you might use the digital ink feature in both your teaching and your grading. Try the use of the tablet and digital ink with a face-to-face conference to see what impact this has upon students.
• Keep a record or file of the paper you distribute to your classes for a semester. Are there items that would be difficult to provide on Moodle or are they traditional offerings such as journal articles and word processed documents.
• Talk with individuals who have gone paperless in your department or among your teaching colleagues. Further, talk with the FITS staff about how you might approach this goal.

I don’t take my papers for a ride anymore but I have access to them wherever I am.

By Lynda S. LaRoche, Assistant Director of Instructional & Learning Services and Moodle Support Coordinator

By now you know the importance of periodically creating a backup copy of your computer files, especially if you’ve been through a system crash, power outage, or computer virus that wiped out your hard drive. However, have you thought about regularly backing up your Moodle gradebook and course site?

You may be thinking “The Network Team routinely creates a backup of the Moodle server, so why do I need to do it, too?” First, good practice - creating your own complete digital copy of your Moodle course at a particular instance of time is good practice. Second, comfort - knowing you have your own backup and physically holding it in your hands is comforting because you know you do not have to depend on someone else if a problem occurs. Third, recovery time - accidental deletion of material is rare, but it does happen and Moodle does not come with an easy to click “Undo” button. Pulling lost material off your personal backup is much quicker than relying on someone else to search through several server backup files that contain thousands of Moodle sites.

To create a backup of your Moodle gradebook:

1. Click Grades in the Administration block of your course.
2. Under the View Grades tab, click the format you want for your backup. Note: ODS format is an OpenDocument Spreadsheet (click here for more information).



3. Save the backup to your hard drive, the network, a USB drive, CD, DVD, etc. and keep it in a safe and secure place.

To create a backup of your Moodle site (including the gradebook and user information):

1. Click Backup in the Administration block of your course.
2. The default setting is to include all materials, including all user data. Keep these settings, and then click Continue.
3. The default name for the backup file includes your unique course name along with the date and time of the backup. You can keep this name or rename the file to something more meaningful to you.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page, click Continue à Continue.
5. The backup file will be placed in the Files option of the Administration block of your course under the backupdata folder.

A backup of your Moodle site only contains quiz questions if at least one question from their category has been added to a quiz. Also, scales are only backed up if they are used by at least one activity. To ensure all questions in your quiz pool and/or all scales are backed up, you may want to consider creating a mock quiz and/or activity that is not visible to your students. Once you are done with your backup, you can delete these mock items.

Losing course materials is a very rare occurrence. Although you are not required to periodically create a personal backup of your Moodle gradebook and course site, it is a “Best Practice” I strongly encourage you to consider.

Thomas S. Dickinson, FITS Faculty Coordinator

Most of us who are experienced instructors at the collegiate level are forward focused. We are concerned with where our students will be once they complete our courses and leave our tree-shaded environment for other worlds. We think about the skills we have taught and want them to take with them, the literature that we have read together and the promise that they too will find joy in the written word. We are future focused because we are continually working toward our goals, both for our students and for ourselves.

But while we are future focused there is a beginning reality that all of us must address: how do we plan our pathways to the future we desire. Course design is a highly idiosyncratic process involving an instructor’s background knowledge, their values and beliefs about that knowledge, the purposes they want their students to put their new-found knowledge to, and literally a thousand other concerns. However, good course design is generally composed of four distinct parts: content knowledge, skills and abilities that students will acquire, the audience for the course, and time.

These four general components of course design are also interwoven together; no one element exists unto itself. Each component interacts with the other three components and in turn, is influenced by them as well. These four general components are situated, in today’s classroom, around the technology tool of a learning management system (LMS). Learning management systems, such as Moodle, provide a tool for the delivery of the course content, a vehicle to help shape student skills and abilities, a structure for student learners to use, and a means to extend classroom time.

Click on graphic to enlarge

The synergy between content knowledge, skills and abilities, audience and time

Instructors at this level have a profound task in front of them; with so much information available, with so much knowledge that instructors have amassed through patient study, reading, and research (in addition to the years of course preparation), it becomes overwhelming at times to decide what to leave in and what to leave out. At this point, instructors often step back and assess the content knowledge they want to focus upon in relation to the other three general course components (skills and abilities, audience and time).

For example, an instructor may have a first-year introductory course which would heavily influence the scope of what might be possible to deal with in relation to content. As well, an instructor might also consider if these first-year students have any prior exposure to this content area or if this will be their first formal study of this content.

All of the four general course components will make their own demands and the give-and-take between and among these features is what makes each course design unique. Even within a single discipline, in a multi-section offering, individual instructors have wide latitude within these four design components. What is most pertinent today is that in addition to this synergy between and among the four general course components there is another element to be considered: the tools of the learning management system.

Learning management systems: A tools approach

Learning management systems are not a core component to the four general course components of content knowledge, skills and abilities, audience and time. Instead, they are tools to help individual instructors more appropriately manage their teaching and student learning. For example, while none of us are Dr. Who and can manipulate time, we can extend the time outside of the classroom through our use of forum discussions, student blogs, or collaborative wikis. Just as a classroom contains a range of teaching tools–chalkboards, overhead projectors, and moveable desks that could be arranged into discussion groups–a learning management system (i.e., medium) operates in similar fashion. The components of a learning management system should be viewed as individual tools (i.e., forums, blogs, wikis, etc.), within a medium (Moodle, for example) that extend our opportunities for teaching and learning. Further, and in particular with Moodle, these tools provide us with myriad means of feedback—on individual course journals, through pre-structured comments on quizzes, or elaboration of a concept on a class discussion forum.

Linking general course design components and learning management systems

One of the truly visionary elements of a learning management system is that individual instructors can use as much or as little as they need. There is, in other words, no prescribed amount of a learning management system to use; it is totally dependent on an instructor’s vision of their course and the four general course design components.

During your initial planning for a new course next semester or a major or minor revision on a long-taught course, these elements are available to you in whatever combination you see fit. That is, after all, what makes conceptualizing a course such an individual and forward-focused exercise.

Lynda S. LaRoche, Assistant Director of Instructional & Learning Services and Moodle Support Coordinator

Now that you’ve archived all your Blackboard courses, you may be wondering “what now?” 

For those who have already transitioned to Moodle, I recommend saving your archives to a CD or DVD to place with your physical course files. By doing so, you will not only have a record of your students’ grades, but you will also have a digital history of your class materials.

For those who are in the process of transitioning to Moodle, you can reuse the material saved with your Blackboard archive. This can be accomplished by using a Blackboard course content extractor program named bFree. For more information about this process, contact moodle@depauw.edu or any FITS instructional technologist:

• Michael Gough, michaelgough@depauw.edu or x1093
• Lynda LaRoche, llaroche@depauw.edu or x6600
• Veronica Pejril, veronicapejril@depauw.edu or x4389
• Dave Diedriech, ddiedriech@depauw.edu or x6442

Contributed by Art Evans Laurel H Turk, Professor of Modern Languages and Professor of Modern Languages

I have two very large Blackboards, developed over several years. And I now find myself (somewhat grumpily) in the process of having to “migrate” them to Moodle. One course is my Honor Scholar FY seminar on science fiction; the other is an upper-level French seminar on the history of French song (1940-present). Scheduled to teach the latter course again this spring, I spent most of Winter Term 2008 converting the materials for this French song class from Blackboard to Moodle. Here are some things I learned.

Moodle’s three-column architecture is very different from Blackboard’s. Whereas Blackboard requires a kind “Russian nesting dolls” structure for organizing your materials (box-within-a-box-within-a-box), Moodle’s structure is more wide-open: the main “topic” boxes containing your materials are next to one another, running vertically down the screen. Personally, I don’t care much for Moodle’s three-column interface, but it’s open structure makes it much easier to navigate through the entire site. It is important to realize, in switching over to Moodle, that you will probably need to make some basic design changes to your original Blackboard course.

I found that there is no easy way to import foreign-language files from Blackboard to Moodle without a lot of cleanup. Some materials can be imported directly into Moodle’s “Files” repository. But, for me, opening both systems side-by-side and simply cutting and pasting from one to the other proved to be the fastest and most reliable way. Blackboard has always been notoriously unstable concerning accents and other diacriticals (I had to reenter them twice over the past three years); Moodle does not seem to have this problem, happily.

In addition to text and graphics, this French song course also contains approximately 250 music recordings in “streaming audio” format. These presented a special challenge. They were not functioning well in Blackboard—e.g., students using Macs could not make them work properly and sometimes, even in Windows, they tended to activate at odd times. To solve this problem, the original CDs were re-ripped, and the sound files saved in .mp3 format and then stored on a special streaming server (thanks to Roni Pejril). Throughout this process I discovered that Moodle offered one improvement over Blackboard in that the button to activate each song now could be placed on the same page as the song’s lyrics, allowing the student to follow along while listening. Bottom line: we have so far experienced no glitches at all with the “streaming audio” component of this class, a constant source of difficulty when they were in Blackboard.

I also include daily online mini-quizzes on each of the 50+ singer-songwriters featured in this Moodle site. These quizzes are short, consist of several true-false questions, and are timed at 5 minutes each. Since certain upgrades were added to Moodle in January, these quizzes and the gradebook have also been working perfectly. The students seem especially to appreciate the “countdown clock” that appears on the screen when they are taking a quiz, letting them know exactly how much time they have remaining.

I have not yet experimented with many of the tools available in Moodle (wikis, forums, workshops, etc.). But I must confess that the more I work with Moodle, the less grumpy I am becoming about having to migrate away from Blackboard.