The Friday Mailing Postings

1. Trailer

From Friday Mailing 1st October 2021

I am pleased to be back after a short break. Let me start with an encouragement to you all to take time off! The last two years have been hard for everyone, and obviously for some people particularly hard. We all need to recognise the need to step away from our work and give time for refreshment. For me this meant travelling around the East coast of Scotland, swimming in lochs and having two weeks not looking at a computer once. Over the coming months, I intend to do a series of posts in this column looking in some detail at using particular tools in online learning.

More next week. Ken

And as a bonus, here is a holiday snap

2. Introduction

From Friday Mailing 8th October 2021

As promised, this week I am beginning a series that will guide you through the Moodle learning tools. Forgive me if I sound like one of those adverts for expensive magazines – “week by week this will build into an invaluable reference guide to using Moodle, as you enter the exciting world of VLEs”.

• “What is a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and why use Moodle?” Here is pdf explanation that I shared on Friday mailing last year.
• “Give me a quick overview.” Here is a pdf that summarizes all the Moodle learning activities, analyses their strengths and weaknesses, links them to various guides, and maps them to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Seriously this is a resource you will want to keep handy. Feel free to share it.

Next week, I will begin with the humble label – the foundation stone for all Moodle courses.

Pro Tip – This Moodle course is currently set to allow Guest access, so anyone can see it without logging on. See how much can be done before you require users to log on.

3. Introducing labels

From Friday Mailing 22nd October 2021

New sections have been added to the online course “Teaching with Moodle”. This includes a guide to creating labels in Moodle. There is also a section with some basic computer skills that you might not know already, but probably do, so if you want to understand URLs or don’t know what “ctrl V” means check it out.

Last week I said that labels are the foundation of Moodle courses. This is true in two ways

1. The label allows you to lay out your course, add logical headings and sub headings and add images or even videos. This means your course is not just a line of text.
2. The way you create labels uses an editor with various tools which is very similar to a simple word processor such as “Word”. This same editor appears as part of the tools set when you create other resources and activities, so if you create a questionnaire you will probably have a label for each question. So learning to use the label editor will help throughout Moodle.

4. The Scroll of Death

From Friday Mailing 5th November 2021

Has the scroll of death died? Until recently the advice was to keep your main course (or module) page short in Moodle with most of the content in sub-pages. This was to avoid users having to move way down the page to find the section they were working on – the so-called scroll of death. There has been a slight change in attitude given the way Facebook and other platforms have embraced the idea of scrolling that truly never ends. However, it will be a short course that can display all its content on just a single page. This is where the Moodle “Page” resource comes in. A Page resource has a title and two “labels”. The first label is the description and can be displayed on the main course page, the second is the main page content, and like any label can contain text, images, links or even videos. A Page Resource section has been added to the course and more information has been added to the label section. https://example.commonawards.org/course/view.php?id=77
 
Pro Tip: You will notice that my course has been set up using what is known as the “grid format” so that all the sections are listed at the top with an image to link to open them on a new page. You can change the format of a whole course at any time.
 
Finally, something we can all learn from Facebook is the importance of images. How long would you keep scrolling if it was just text? Ken

5. Creative Commons and copyright

From Friday Mailing 19th November 2021

If you take nothing else from what I share, copy and save this link https://search.creativecommons.org/. It is a way to find images that you may use free of charge in your teaching and on your website or Moodle site. There is much more information in the Book resource on copyright in the course on how to use of Moodle. There is even a video by U2 with an explanation as to why I know I can share it. This also serves as an example of the Book Resource. Last week we talked about page resources, and book resources are collections of pages, usually shown with a contents list in a block on the top right or top left of the screen. There is a new section in the course showing how to create a book resource. Ken

6. Choice Activity

From Friday Mailing 26th November 2021

I have added a bit of information on the choice activity to the gradually growing course on Teaching with Moodle. In brief, choice allows you to ask students just one question (yes/no or multiple choice) whereas feedback allows multiple questions including text answers.

Pro Tip – It is possible to create an anonymous Feedback activity on the Front Page of Moodle that people can access without logging in, but you cannot do this with “Choice” or “Questionnaire” and it has to be on the front page. Ken

7. The difference between the feedback and questionnaire activities

From Friday Mailing 3rd December 2021

This week I want to talk about the difference between the feedback activity and the questionnaire activity. The first difference will be something most users will not notice but it illustrates how addons to Moodle can be written by users who need them. Feedback is a standard part of Moodle, but the questionnaire is an extra plugin created by a Moodle user – in this case the Open University. They clearly thought that there were some limitations in the feedback activity, and I would agree, that is why we include the questionnaire plugin in all Moodle sites. 

So, what are the limitations of feedback? The problem is that you have to save the answer to all the questions in one go. So DO NOT use Feedback to get students to fill in 20 text boxes with their detailed thoughts on something. The questionnaire fixes this by allowing page breaks with the ability to save and carry on later. Another clever feature is adding branching questions, so you can ask if people have food allergies and then ask only those who answer yes to give details. 

I do still recommend the feedback activity for shortlist of questions. One of my favourites uses is to put a video into the first question for people to watch, and then ask one or two multiple-choice questions about the video and a paragraph answer to another question. It is amazing how much more attention students give to a video if they are going to answer questions after it.  Ken

8. My priorities for on-site meetings and events

From Friday Mailing 10th December 2021

We are being encouraged to work from home again. This reminds us of how limited on-site events might be over the coming months. I offer the following rough guide to how to use that time effectively:

• Don’t waste onsite time delivering content. Prioritise worshipping together and building relationships (eating together, informal discussion and perhaps a seminar based on learning done online)
• There is a limit to how much Zoom people can cope with. Consider using video and other online activities to deliver content in advance and using Zoom time for small group discussion, ideally with a tutor. Remember up to about 6 people on Zoom means you can all have your microphone on and can talk almost normally

9. Flipped Classroom

From Friday Mailing 14th January 2022

This week I have added two new sections to the open access “Teaching with Moodle” course. The first is some material on the flipped classroom. If you don’t know what this is then do check this out. One of my favourite quotes is from a part-time theology student who said that the flipped classroom meant she now asked the questions in class that previous only occurred to her on the way home. The other section is on “Creating Online Learning Communities” and comprises a series of videos recorded by Dr Alison Le Cornu for a session for TEIs offered at the start of lockdown on 2020. Both of these can be found here https://example.commonawards.org/course/view.php?id=77

10. Moodle Quizzes

From Friday Mailing 21st January 2022

What is the difference between a quiz and a test or an exam? Imagine your local pub giving over Thursday nights for teams of people to come in and sit a test. Would BBC2 have Monday night as exam night? There is something quite fun about quizzes. If you keep them light, and not too intimidating, they can be a part of your online teaching that participants might look forward to. One tutor I know used a quick online quiz after each session. Students complained about the first one but found that it was quick and not to onerous. By week 7, when there was no quiz, they were complaining about its absence. 

If you have been following the “Moodle Activity Guide for teachers” you will see that Moodle’s quiz activity is the first to get a red background for “ease of use”. But if you have managed to produce a feedback or questionnaire activity, then a quiz is just adding one further step – a way of indicating the “correct” answer and keeping a score (if you want to). Here is a guide and a video about Moodle quizzes. Do remember that you can reuse quizzes you have created, or indeed reuse individual questions.

11. Free Online Books

From Friday Mailing 28th January 2022

A slightly different tack this week. I wanted to share with you two of my favourite sites that offer free online books. The first is CCEL.org which I am sure many of you are familiar with. It stands for Christian Classics Ethereal Library and contains digital versions of out of copyright books. It includes a huge range of classic spirituality texts (eg Julian of Norwich) and historical texts (eg most of John Wesley’s writings) as well as the complete Early Church Fathers.
 
The other site is archive.org which aims to offer an Internet Archive. It covers all subjects, but there is a great deal of theology among its 34 million books. Some are fully open access, but those in copyright are restricted. It is not the place to look for the latest publications, but there is a lot of quality material here. You need to create a free account and can then “borrow” books for a particular period. I used it to look at Lamin Sanneh’s “Translating the Message” (1989) which I could borrow for an hour at a time. Ken

12. H5P part 1

From Friday Mailing 4th February 2022

Can you list the Minor Prophets in order? Try out two interactive tasks and see if you can. If you struggle a bit, then you may find that by the time you get it right you have “accidently” memorised a summary of each of the prophet’s main themes. You will find the activities here https://example.commonawards.org/course/view.php?id=77&section=10. They were created using H5P which I am just starting to understand how useful it can be. H5P stands for “HTML5 Package” and is a way of putting complex interactive material into a package that can be copied easily. The key thing to note is that Moodle has an H5P tool to receive packages built in, but there is an extra plugin called “H5P Interactive content” that you need to actually create content. We make this available to all the Moodle sites we support, but if you cannot see it in your list of tools, ask whoever runs your Moodle site. First time I used it I was able to create one of these activities in 5 minutes on the “sort these paragraphs” tool. In the next months I am going to try out the graphic tools (image hotspots, flash cards, image sequencing etc), but if any of you have created something on H5P that I can share with other people drop me an email and a link to where you created it.

13. H5P part 2

From Friday Mailing 11th February 2022

Coventry Diocese have been using H5P (interactive content) for a while now and have sent me half a dozen to show you. You can find them here https://example.commonawards.org/course/view.php?id=77&section=10. They are happy for you to reuse and amend them. I spent a while trying to work out what is the easiest way to allow you to add them to your own Moodle site, before realising that an easy way is built in. If you look at the bottom left of any of the H5P activities you will see a “reuse” link (ignore the “embed” link that will not work). The reuse button allows you to download the H5P file. You can then upload it into a H5P interactive content activity in your own Moodle where you can use is as is, or edit it first. I discovered that you can just drag and drop the file into Moodle however that will use the standard H5P activity -this works but will not let you edit the content. So copying and reusing H5P activities is as easy as copying a picture, indeed it is easier to edit than a picture.