“The purpose of the conference is to support networking and sharing among those who are researching Moodle and thinking about ways to improve it for different learning scenarios.   It will also directly inform the development of Moodle in the future.”

This is going to be interesting aspect which was not apparent before but makes sense to learn from successful case studies of implementation of Moodle.  Martin went on to explain:

“We’ve had a good number of papers already submitted for the conference, so it’s looking pretty exciting!  Submitted papers range from in-depth case studies of how Moodle can be applied and used in various environments to interface design experiments and the development of whole new modules to introduce new techniques.

(Personally I love detailed and rigorous case studies.  There are so many ways to apply even a stock Moodle but it’s important to understand what patterns best achieve our goals of improving education and why they work)”

They have extended the submission date until the 28th May, so if you have a paper to submit, go ahead! You have two more weeks to do so.

Conference link – > http://research.moodle.net/

There are many great 3rd-party plugins available for Moodle. However, it is important to assess the suitability and reliability of the plugin before adopting it. The list in the linked document is not exhaustive as there may be more or fewer questions depending on the individual installation and organisation.

Some hosting providers may have already have audited the plugin and publish a list of ones they approve for their hosting platform - Remote-Learner for example. However. as although something may be technically okay, the suitability and cost implications may be something to make you think.
The list is basically something that one could use to assess the risk related to implementing the plugin. Each question could have a few lines to describe what it means, but you should get the overall picture. To give some context I will explain the reasoning behind three of the questions here:

Question: Has it got a Moodle Docs page.

Even though a plugin may have extensive documentation already, if someone is in Moodle and clicks the Moodle Docs link at the bottom of the page in a plugin that’s where they end up. So having a page, or even a stub page which has the links to official documentation is a good thing and helps people getting lost.

Question: Do they (the author)work for an established Moodle development team (Moodle partner, the OU, or HQ for example)?

This is an assessment of business risk. If someone is a freelancer, the ability for them to provide ongoing support for a module is sometimes (not always) less than where it was built-in an established development team where it may be in use by many clients or installations and thus maintained for business reasons. This is not always the case, but it is just one of the many things that one coud consider.

Question: Does it impact performance of Moodle in normal or high traffic usage?

How complex is the solution? Is it using a lot of slow database queries constantly, are they optimised? are the server resources being heavily used by this and reducing the overall performance? Does it encourage more synchronous activity or is it asynchronous? Understanding what the impact of the usage of the plugin, especially if it is heavily adopted by courses is important.

Please feel free to add any questions or sections that you think should be added to the list

Ralf Hilgenstock of eLeDia and Susanne Gebauer and Gerald Hartwig have now completed the German version of the Tool Guide which can be downloaded from Slideshare.

There is also a Spanish translation of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide by  Alfredo Ruiz.

If you want to create your own version of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide I have added the powerpoint to the original page.

Just one request, if you can send me a copy of the changed one for an archive – that will be great!

1st Moodle Research Conference – Sep 14-15
The call for papers on the 1st Moodle Research Conference being held in Heraklion, Crete-Greece is nearly up as 14th May nears, so if like me your have your submission nearly done, time to finish it!
For information on the Conference check out http://research.moodle.net/

EdTech 2012 – May 31, June 1
Although not a Moot, this Ireland based EdTech conference is being held in National University of Ireland Maynooth has a focus on Digital Literacies. There are some very interesting keynotes (Martin Oliver and Lesley Gourlay , Martha Rotter and Doug Belshaw) and there is also a workshop session on Moodle 2.
For more information check out http://www.ilta.net

Here are some of the Moodlemoots in the coming 2 months:

iMoot 2012   May 26-29
This is an online Moot, focused on Communication, Collaboration and Community.  There will be a good number of presentations from Practitioners around the globe. The 4 day ticket is only 80 AU$ – which is great value so this is one not to miss.
For more info check out  http://2012.imoot.org/

Mountain Moodlemoot  May 30, June 1
This moot is held in Helena, Montana and features a rich schedule over 2.5 days with a nice range of pre-moot sessions from Tammy Belgarde, Michelle Moore, Floyd Saner, a keynote from Laura Pasquini of the University of North Texas, and presentations from Helen Foster and Tim Hunt.
For more info check out http://www.mountainmoot.com

MoodleMoot Oklahoma – June 4-6
The Moot will be held at the Metro Technology Centers, Springlake Campus. The first day is a selection of training sessions and then the main days will be broken into four/five tracks on Curriculum, Hands-on, Technical and Business.
For more info check out http://moodle.metrotech.edu/

Moodlemoot Croatia – June 13
This Moot will be held in Zagreb, Croatia. The topics will include Implementation and development of the Moodle system

• Teaching and Learning with Moodle
• The technical side of Moodle
• Moodle 2.x

The two named speakers are Joyce Seitzinger ( New skill of digital curation ) and Susana Leitão (Moodle and SIGARRA IS – an integrated environment).
For more info check out http://www.srce.unizg.hr/moodlemoot

MoodleMoot Euskadi June 15
This Moot is held in Txorierri, Spain and looks to be a very interesting day with a number of key presentations and then three parallel sessions.
For more info check out http://mooteu12.moodlemoot.net/

French MoodleMoot  June 20-22
This 8th Moodlemoot in France will be held at the University of Nîmes. There is a wide choice of case studies, round tables, and Technical and training sessions including quite a bit on Moodle 2 and on Mahara.
For more info check out http://moodlemoot2012.unimes.fr/

Hungarian MoodleMoot – June 28-30
The Hungarian Moot is held at Szent István University in Gödöllo, Hungary. The first two days are presentations with the 3rd day of practical work. The presentation themes include elearning content development, ePortfolios and Moodle integration among others.
For more info check out http://moodlemoot.hu/

This setting determines whether the whole course is displayed on one page or split over several pages. The setting has no effect on the SCORM format however works nicely on topics and weeks!

The Options are

• Show all sections on one page
• Show one section per page

So what does it look like?

The following images show the course page as it is at first with just the section name showing in a list, and then as the user moves through some of the sections.

The things to note are

1. The main page is now an index for the course
2. There is basically a next section / previous section above and below the section area but using the name of the section
3. Section 0 is still there (like using the old  &section=  option, so you need to be aware of what you put in that section).

Index of the Course page - "One section per page" option on

Looking at one section

Paged Version of Course - Last Page

So as you hopefully can see this provides a nice section by section experience.

Of course now, make sure your section 0 is just 1 line of text/graphic in size to get best use of this and that your topic fits on one screen!

Nice improvement!

As per comment, changed the images to be a real course.

This is one of a number of great improvements for the course page which includes the lovely activity selector pane. So keep an eye on the Moodle tracker!

I like it! It is super cool.

So here I have added two short vidcasts of the assignments settings and one of an example from teacher and student point of view.

Hope you find them useful.

Assignment Settings

Assignment Example

• Background to Module/Author
• What does it do?
• Is it simple to install?
• Is there documentation for it?
• Is it easy for the teacher/admin to use?
• Is it easy for the learner/student to use?
• Does it do what it promises?

However this is going to be the first post of a series which together will be my review of ELIS – Remote-Learner’s Enterprise Learning Intelligence System for Moodle. It is a system designed to tackle some complicated processes and organisational challenges, and my normal review structure wouldn’t really suit a review as it is not just a plug ‘n’ play module.

Background

I used to work for Remote-Learner, so became familiar with the suite of add-ons. It was made publicly available through their GITHUB repository – https://github.com/remotelearner/ over 10 months ago. Initially released for 1.9 it was upgraded earlier this year for Moodle 2, so it is about time I did a review.

So what is ELIS?

ELIS is a suite of tools that add some very specific and useful features into Moodle. Here I go briefly into each aspect:

Program Management
Whilst native Moodle provides category-course structures for Moodle, and some level of interlinking with meta-enrolment, these are not interlinked as a program. ELIS provides a hierarchy structure for courses, providing the ability to group them into programs, build in dependencies, assign credits or certification for completion and also to easily roll out new iterations of the whole program as a track of classes. One nice aspect is to expire a completion of a class so that they have to re-take, useful for yearly compliance type training, or CPD.

User Management
All users in out-of-the-box Moodle are managed by the admin centrally. There is ability to provide a hierarchy for organisational structures with manages, owners and so on.  THe ELIS Users feature enables the creation of user sets where viewing the users is dependent on your role within the ELIS system, so that a user can only see their users and not others. Being an admin of a user SET in ELIS does not mean you are an admin in Moodle.

Reporting
So with the extra course/program aspects and user structures and permissions, a lot of new reports can be built to provide an overview on the system. I won’t go through them all here, but it includes things like program level reporting across all the classes for a user, by himself or a manager of his user “SET”, be it a company organisation or a university course, and user Set report across all the programs, and classes in them, giving a very wide view on one or all people taking the programs and classes. However more later on this.

Notifications
Some of the events in Moodle prompt emails to users, such as self-enrolment in a course, however if someones tutor, manager, HR department wants to also get a copy that is not normally possible.  The notifications aspect of ELIS provides a decent suite of event based notifications which can go to the user, or people with a right to get them for that class or user, on events such as:

• Class enrolment / completion / or when they have not started by a given time
• Program completion / or when they have not completed  by a given time

Repository
ELIS has an interesting Alfresco integration that goes beyond the repository API. I didn’t have this set up for the review with Moodle 2 so I won’t be discussing this beyond here.

Summary
So to properly review this solution, I will break the review into a few different parts.

The next post in this review series I will start with the reviewing the User Management.

The English version is available on SlideShare and can be downloaded locally:   - Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide here -

Alfredo Ruiz has now completed a Spanish translation of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide. You can find it on his site and he has also added it to scribd.

If you want to create your own version of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide I have added the powerpoint to the original page.

Just one request, if you can send me a copy of the changed one for an archive – that will be great!

The challenge

Usually the standard Google Analytics code logs the url of the page. Now for my blog that url is meangingful in its naming:

http://moodlemoot.ie/programme/online-presentations/

/programme/ is first level and indicates the page is within that area
/online-presentations/  is the page name and indicates what it is

These urls are easy to understand when viewing in a report, however as with some other applications Moodle does not have these clean URLs (or SEF urls).

A url of a course in moodle could be : http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/course/view.php?id=15
Or a section in a course: http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/course/view.php?id=15&topic=2
Or a resource in a course: http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/mod/resource/view.php?id=146

In a Google report the friendly url makes the report instantly meaningful, whereas the normal Moodle url adds the challenge to go back and see what it is.

So the challenge was to address that in a way that takes advantage of the incredible reporting power or Google Analytics.

I have had this idea for some years, just never had a particular reason to implement it. I have seen others do something similar, but this approach here had a specific reasoning behind it.

Anyhow, on with the show.

Pretty Pictures

Before the pretty pictures, let’s explain what we did. It is a simple approach and it is not a solution for everyone. (yes, better get this in now this is an approach to the solution which may or may not suit you). So with the code implemented for yourself, you can do what we have but you may want different things. We do, just did this as a conceptual demo of the approach.

We had Google Analytics log  this url http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/2012/general/Pecha+Kucha/What+is+Pecha+Kucha/Page

instead of the normal one which would have been  http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/mod/page/view.php?id=69

It logs /$category/$courseshortname/$sectionname/$activityname/$activitytype

This is our 1st phase of the development we hope to do, we will plan to have custom variables stating role (student/teacher) and other aspects as well, but more on that another time.

The reason for the / in the url is specifically to available of the Page path depth analysis in the Analytics.

I will add later what we intend to do next, hopefully collaboratively with people.

The stats reports here run from the date before the Moot, till the day after. April 1-5th.

Here is a quick overview of the visitor traffic that Google Analytics tracking provides.  In this case the top report is Page Views  vs Visits, with some summary stats below it.

The bottom demographic report shows Operating system in this regard.

It is also possible to show time spent, so the image below is of Average Visit Duration.

URLS dont matter here, just that the code is everywhere on your Moodle site – so within the Theme. This is important and it is why the code solution we went for was a theme change, not a block or mod.

Visitor Flow

Another very handy report, for seeing how users flow through your site (main page, login, course page, forum, view post, etc…)  However you can see from this image that the URL is important here and becomes meaningful.

That red bit is user dropping off at that point. You can also use this kind of analysis to explore your navigation labelling and so on.. but enough on that for now. As with most of G-A you can play with the source item which in this case was Country on the left. It would not surprise someone looking at this to know that the Moot was held there. But it could be many things like city, or operating system filtered for Returning Visitors only..

That was audience standard reporting, what about content (pages etc) reporting? Well, now it gets a bit fun!

Now we see the Page urls in the results below. And you can see what we have done with urls and that the report is instantly readable.

Then you can get more info on the Pages

So I can see that The glossary in the best practices course has an average of 2 minutes on a page. 337 views, 84 unique.  Hmmm Michelle will like that I am sure.

We can look at referral traffic (where the person came from when clicking a link to the site) – I have doctored image to remove some person info. So we can see most came from the main Moot website, then twitter links, and mostly afterwards the email alerts. But 71% was direct traffic who type in the URL or had a bookmark.

Custom Reports and Dashboards.

Thats all well and good for normal reports, but when you build custom reports and dashboards the fun really begins.

There is a number of widgets on the dashboard which show specific information. Like the pageviews/traffic for a specific course over the 5 days.  These widgets are configured easily as below:

This only counts the traffic where Page Page level 2 contains /workshops/  which is the unique course shortname.  This is the very reason we went with this approach.

So how about a whole dashboard on one Moodle course only?

These widgets all filter on the course level for /game/ and show different aspects.

But there is more. Path level rocks.!!

With this report, I can then dril down a category (in this case 2012), into one course and then see a list of the section names that people spent time in the items within that section. and could also dril further to see the usage of the items within that section alone

Custom Report with option to drill down

Custom Report Drilled down 2 path levels

Access

Now of course if you were (for some, or maybe all courses) want to give this info to each teacher or school/faculty admin you would not want to give them access to the main G-A login, so you can either

a) download the PDF of the report – [attach pdf]
b) Have it email them the report, daily, or weekly, monthy etc.

So by setting up a dashboard for each course that you want to the overall usage can be fed right back to the people who want to know.

Future Development Ideas ….

This was just the first implementation of the solution as a visible proof of concept and approach. Although I have a clear idea of how this “could” progress what would be better is to get a group of like-minded people together to collaborate on this going forward, or at least that is the idea. Get in touch!

So, what are the possible future roadmaps bits?

- Using Custom Variables in G-A to track visitor used related aspects such as

• the main role of a user from a hidden profile field (staff vs student or Job Title, or work department)- useful for breaking down activity by a new visitor option
• perhaps even an anonymous hash which correlates to a user within Moodle, just g-a does not know it.

- Using page related variables to track certain aspects of visit (category for example) instead of URL paths

- Exploring logging Event tracking for activity completion or completions

- Building a settings page / config to control which variables are logged in the various parts of the implementation as no two sites would probably want to same data

- Build an email messaging scripts that takes the PDF sent via email by Google-Analytics for a report, and inserts it to a course for the teacher.

- build a plugin which replicates moodle logging calls into analytics calls as a more 1-1 outsourcing of the inbuilt statistics

- Exam using the analytics API to extract data and produce reports in Moodle using Google-Chart rather than report via email or the Google Analytics interface.

Well, that is some ideas, I am sure that there will be many variants to tackle all the use cases that people want to implement, but perhaps we can get a group to work through some of these together.

Technical Implementation

So for the technical aspect, I suggest you pop over to Bas Brands blog.

Julian – iMoot is a Global online conference that aims to unite the best speakers from all over the world in one place to share their knowledge with the global community. Having been in a lucky position to visit Moodle Moots all over the world, I have heard from a wide variety of passionate and knowledgeable Moodle speakers. I realised however that sadly they are often only heard by people in their regional locations. The idea of iMoot was to provide a central online space where these local experts could get their voice heard by the community at large. The second goal is to charge as little as possible to ensure these voices can be heard by as many moodle users as possible.

Julian – The next iMoot is coming up on May 26th. It will run for 24 hours a day over 4 days. The reason for the non-stop schedule is to allow for presenters from all over the world to present in their local timezones. It also allows us to have a very active, dynamic and diverse program.

Julian – Well first I should point out our theme. This year we have gone with Moodle C³ - Communication, Collaboration, Community. We saw these three “C’s” as being the cornerstones to Moodle’s success and of those who use it. We are keen to hear stories that reflect on that theme. The iMoot itself is a working case in point of these very same C’s in action. More information on the theme can be found here – http://2012.imoot.org/mod/book/view.php?id=31&chapterid=11.  As the event is global and has an intentionally loose theme, the streams themselves are simply slit up into presentation types. These are “How To’s” or instructional sessions), “Case Studies” and “Academic Papers”. This last one has been added by popular request from the community.

Julian We are currently seeking submissions for this years iMoot. If you have already presented, or will be presenting, at a moot somewhere in the world, we would love it if you also submitted your session online at our website. If you are not presenting at a moot but still have a session in mind, we would also love to hear from you as well. In return for speaking at the conference you receive free admission to the event and access to all sessions.

What we require from our presenters is the ability to present at least one live session delivery via our Moodle website. We use Adobe connect for the live delivery. Support is provided to presenters who have not used the tool before. If a presenter can, we ask that they present at two different times of day to allow more attendees to hear them. But while a request, this is not a pre-requisite. After a presentation time is also given for some Q and A.

If you are interested in submitting a presentation, a direct link can be found here - http://2012.imoot.org/mod/data/view.php?id=10