I was recently asked by a VET college to advise about setting up Moodle as a more social area for the students. They wanted it to be a place where the students could not only practice writing but also a place where they could upload photos and videos from field trips, exchange visits and so on. So in short, not the official LMS but a more social digital space. They had already decided that this should be in Moodle and they told me that they had already downloaded and set up a Moodle template for them to work on so that it would be ready for the next academic year.
This meant that we were working with Moodle 2.0 which I had not seen before. So since my web host offered Moodle as a quick install, I downloaded Moodle 2.0 so that I could see what the differences were. When I was first brought into the project, I thought, just as in Alice in Wonderland, that if I were setting up a quasi-social network then I wouldn’t start from here. I have tried several times to promote an open and active Moodle and it hasn’t worked. Moodle works fine for small groups following the same course but isn’t designed for casual dropping by. However, the more I discovered about Moodle 2.0 the more I realised that this isn’t just an upgrade but something materially different. And many of the differences help to make Moodle much more social than it used to be.
So here are the issues which I thought worth considering:
- Design
- Icon navigation
- Motivating
- Keeping the conversation going
- File sharing
There has been a definable Moodle ‘look’ since the very beginning and it has got to the stage where I can spot a Moodle at fifty paces. Design is important, especially if you are trying to attract and motivate teens. So I recommend choosing from literally hundreds of Moodle themes, some of which even include static pages and the navigation to reach them. College LMSs tend to be extremely dull, monotone places which students only want to dump their homework in and run. So the advent of Moodle themes is a huge step forward.
Many sites now use icon navigation rather than hotlinked text. This is not a new feature of Moodle 2.0 but the use of icon navigation, supported by a few intervening static pages before accessing the courses proper and the whole presented using the new themes gives the opportunity to make Moodle look much more attractive. One of my favourite examples of icon navigation is this guide to Web 2.0 tools.
One of the keys to motivation is creating indivdual and group identity on the digital space.
Profile: Under the old Moodle, the profile is often something which is given minimal attention but it is the thing which is most useful especially at the beginning of a course to help you to get to know your class. In the school LMS I noticed that students were not motivated to add even the most basic information about themselves. I interpret this to mean that they don’t see the LMS as a social space at all. So one of my recommendations would be to run some sort of low key competition to get learners to fill in their profile.
My home: This is a new feature in Moodle 2.0 and is a personal homepage in a similar way found on other more dedicated social networking discussion spaces such as Ning. Users can personalise this page by adding text, images, videos and presumably also embeds (of games and so on). Again, learners could be motivated to populate their My Home page through some sort of contest activity. One major point about My Home is that access to this page is always available even if the learner is subscribed to several Moodle courses.The video below shows what it looks like.
Class/group logo: This is something which worked quite well when I taught 4 teen classes recently. Instead of clicking on text of the class name, get the class to design a logo. This refers back to the item on icon use above.
Comment box: A new feature is the comment box which can be added to the front page and to the course page. This provides an additional way to get feedback from users.
RSS feeds: One problem with Moodle if you want to make it more social is that users do not have access to all ‘courses’ (or in this specific example – class spaces). One way around this might be to turn on the RSS feed in specific forums and to feature these on the front page.
One of the commonest events on Moodle, especially one which is meant to be a social hub rather than a learning hub, is that the conversation just peters out. There are technical and psychological reasons why this happens.
Forum subscription: The technical reason concerns subscribing to forums. Unless you are subscribed to a forum then you won’t be notified of any new posts. This means that the only way of finding out if there is something new is by physically going to the Moodle page and clicking on every forum that you might be interested in. Only a tiny minority of people are prepared to do this. So it becomes an important decision every time you set up a forum whether to allow people to choose to subscribe or whether to force everyone to be subscribed. If you opt for the latter you lay yourself open to accusations of spam as people receive notifications that they aren’t interested in. It’s so much easier in a course where the tasks and activities of which forums should be a large part, are compulsory.
Active moderation: The psychological process is that forums need a moderator to remain active; someone who will initiate and respond to posts. There’s nothing less appealing than a forum in which the last post is dated two years ago!
Class ambassador: One suggestion for the college I was visiting was to appoint roving class ambassadors whose brief would be to find interesting material and respond to incoming posts. If the ambassador post was rotated this might help to maintain motivation and make sure that the standard was kept high.
Netiquette: I wondered also if there was a need to have a discussion about Netiquette with the students. My experience with these teens was good when I was teaching them. They set up wikis and webpages and were very good at only posting appropriate material. But the brief of this new Moodle is deliberately more social and less academic so I wondered if it might be wise to define the boundaries beforehand rather than waiting for an unfortunate incident.
Ratings: I also suggested that it might be an idea to turn on the ratings feature in some of the forums. Again the criteria for the ratings would have to be discussed before hand but in some cases this might help to raise the level of discussion.
One of the aims for this Moodle was to enable file sharing, specifically photos but maybe also videos.
Images: The Lightbox Gallery is an optional add-on module for Moodle which has existed for some years and allows users to add photos and then displays them as a strip and also allows slideshows. These Galleries can be placed both on the front page and on course pages so this means that a college trip could have a gallery of photos as part of its documentation.
Videos: Another add-on module for Moodle allows you to set up YouTube videos in a player but this is more teacher centred and does not allow learners to add to the playlist. In Moodle 2, embedding video has become easier, through the settings and also how they are added through the WYSIWYG editor.
So all in all it seems as though that Moodle 2.0 could be the right tool for the job in this case. This new version is very different to previous versions, much more social, but also quite different from a technical point of view. I will go through some of these technical differences in my next post. In the meantime I recommend Moodle 2 First Look by Mary Cooch which should guide you successfully through the main points.