Lots of useful anecdotal presentations with regard to the joys of Moodle from various Universities (e.g. LSE, ULCC, Porto, Coventry of course). Everyone seemed happy with Moodle and rather disasppointed with Blackboard, particularly in terms of support. High cost little support seemed to be a fairly standard theme. Manchester waved the Blackboard flag a bit but that did feel a bit forced. No surprised for me personally with regard to how Moodle is being used at various institutions but it was still useful. I do feel slightly guilty for making our LTT past in plain text in to our Moodle install when there is a HTML cleanup button however (you learn something new everyday). Apparently this bit of functionality is a bit patchy, ahem moving on.
The staff development strand was a nice chance to see what was happening at other Universities, although did stray off the Moodle topic somewhat. The lady leading the session from Coventry, Anne Dickinson, gave a very nice presentation beforehand with regard to staff dev using Prezi.
My overwhelming impression of the staff dev strand was the amount of time and effort required in order to bring staff up to speed. The emphasis did seem to be initially on skill and drill style session with pedagogy coming after the initial training session. Makes sense to me in my techy mind as where is the value in pedagogy if basic navigation and functionality is not understand. Perhaps somewhere in the middle is where we should aim to be.
The Moodle-do poster was arguably a bit twee but a very useful resource for raising awareness to change. Nice video for supporting users though in basica functionality.
Another example of a nice piece of documentation produced at Coventry was that ‘flipping book’. Basically Coventry produced some student documentation with regard to Moold and Blackboard. One side being Moodle and the other being Blackboard based, hence the flipping reference. Nice idea and not overly expensive. It also appears to completly replace student inductions which can be quite time consuming.
City Universitys’ idea of calling there Moodle installation a ‘Strategic Learning Environment’ perhaps has merit as it does imply buy in at high level. Rather than the grass roots approach that appears fairly common when attempting to kick start Moodle migration. If interested there is more info on the City website with regard to their SLE
http://www.city.ac.uk/ldc/Projects/VLEEvaluation.html (Careful the videos killed my browser)
All in all a useful day and definitely came away with a few new ideas.
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