Tuesday June 10, 2008 Moodle Moot: Keynote from Martin Dougiamas
Keynote from Martin Dougiamas
Tuesday morningMartin Dougiamas is the creator of Moodle and delivered the keynote address to the conference this morning. Two of the more interesting things I would like to share are his assessment of how well Moodle is being used pedagogically, and also what is new in version 2.0.
Pedagogy in Moodle
So how are pedagogical practices progressing in Moodle? Martin doesn't think that it has progressed far enough. Here is how he lays out the typical progression of how people teach in Moodle:
1. Put up the handouts (Resource, SCORM)
2. Have a passive forum - "OK, go talk now"
3. Using Quizzes and Assignments
4. Use wiki, glossary, database - here you are constructing things with your fellow students
5. Use the Forum seriously and actively - having more directed discussions
6. Combine the activities into sequences - you have to think about the student's learning journey
7. Think deeper about learning activities - i.e. have students create new discussions and respond to others
8. Use the Survey module to study/reflect
9. Use peer-review modules like Workshop - get students to be teachers with everyone grading each others, and the teacher can grade the grading
10. Sharing ideas, active research, self-study
According to Martin most courses stay in the first couple of steps.
Directions for Moodle
1.9
- Consolidation
- attention to detail throughout
- consistency throughout
- simplify the interface
- tidy up the code
- better help documentation
- fix known bugs
- Complete gradebook rewrite
- Outcomes (competencies) as part of grading
- Groupings
- Performance improvements (twice as fast as 1.8)
- Tags
- Notes
- Fancier themes
- Bug fixes
2.0
- Improved internal file handling
- import: support for external repositories (Merlot, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr, and lots of others, plus you can roll your own)
- export: support for e-portfolios (Mahara, MyStuff)
- Moodle will not be a portfolio system - they will only push out to other systems
- also export to HTML, PDF, XML
- Community hubs - connect to other Moodle servers/repositories
- Conditional activities (think selective release from Vista)
- Progress tracking
- Web services API
- New Modules: Feedback, wiki (new wiki?) and probably others
- Secure feeds (RSS) and flows
- Blog comments, external blog support (grab blog postings with specific tags)
- Messaging improvements (redirect where messages are sent - third party services, popups)
- Improved security/performance
- Improved usability/interface
In Closing
Martin closed with a singe question:
Q. What is the single most powerful technique for online education?
A. getting students to ask questions
Ain't it the truth!
Greg
Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 01:41:37 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]
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Although the tools are different in each LMS, would you say that the same progress lag exists in NCSU faculty's use of our other LMS options?
Posted by Beth on June 11, 2008 at 01:43 PM EDT #
I basically agree with that. The larger problem is that active learning techniques are not as wide spread as they should be. I think what Martin was getting at was he had designed Moodle to make active learning much easier to facilitate, but that Moodle was still mostly being used in a more passive way.
Posted by Greg on June 11, 2008 at 02:22 PM EDT #
I see what Beth is saying though, this is not a Moodle or Vista thing, this issue is tool independent, isn't it?
Posted by Charlie on June 11, 2008 at 02:30 PM EDT #