MYLES MADE THIS

At Catalyst, we’re doing some work as part of a larger project for the NZ Ministry of Education, helping to make Moodle easier for K12 (school) settings.

We’re looking to put together a special K12 blend of Moodle that:

• is easy for school system administrators to install & configure
• is already configured for typical K12 structures
• gives teachers a bit of a ‘leg-up’ to get moving quickly.

These suggestions are designed to guide and inform thinking about such a development

A special support site.

The Moodle.org forums, particularly the Moodle in K12 Schools forum, are particularly helpful, but they address an international audience, and (with the exception of that K12 forum) are predominantly geared towards large-scale university or corporate installations of Moodle. A support site will be created and managed with the goal of providing:

• Aggregations of content from existing sites (Moodle.org, MITIE (in Australia), and others.
• Specific community-driven content that is local to the Australian and NZ contexts
• Downloads of our ‘K12 special blend’ Moodle and possibly some special tools, themes, etc.

It would aim to be predominantly teacher-centered, with additional focus on school system administrators as well as school Principals and key decision-makers – enabling informed decisions to be made regarding the selection, adoption and support of Moodle. It is intended that this would augment not replace, the Moodle.org site.

Getting up and running (Installation and Configuration)

In K12 environments, the installers and managers of Moodle sites are often either teacher enthusiasts, or system administrators with little or no experience installing, configuring, securing and performance tuning web applications. Furthermore, system administrators are often working in Microsoft Windows™ environments, without experience working with the main, preferred building blocks of Moodle: Linux, Apache, PHP and open source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Suggested changes include:

1. The installation process could be modified to make it easier to choose sane/typical settings for schools (e.g. ’messaging disabled, self-registration disabled, etc.).
2. Many of the activity modules and filters useful for schools could be pre-selected, and possibly ‘bundled’ (subject to licensing). E.g. (Feedback and/or Questionnaire modules, Multimedia filters enabled).
3. Enrolment is a typical bug-bear of Administrators in schools. Key tasks here will be to (A) identify common systems of use in Australia & NZ and provide guidelines for how to automate enrolment and/or (B) to work on a flexible enrolment management tool to simplify integration and automated enrolment (more to come on this idea later). It may also be advantageous here to provide information on the Support site about which existing student information systems provide “out of the box” integration with Moodle.

Making Moodle more familiar for teachers and students

Often the presentation of Moodle sites (wording, sequencing, etc. is not that of the typical (is there such a thing) school setting.

Suggested changes include:

1. Change the terminology with specific language packs. The language of Moodle is often not intuitive for teachers. Customizations of the language pack could help make this clearer. E.g. (‘courses’ become ‘classes’, ‘Assign roles’ becomes ‘Class enrolment’ or ‘Class members’).
2. Develop / package some themes. Many standard Moodle themes are particularly formal and text-heavy. A further set of themes, specifically developed and/or licensed for distribution in schools, could be packaged, allowing for simple(?) customisation for schools. This could be incorporated together with the ‘course logo’ idea, outlined below. The “PETE” (Primary Education Through E-learning) theme at Sydney’s Northern Beaches Christian School is a great example of this.
3. Customise the course list pages to allow for a class ‘logo/icon’. One drawback of the standard lists of Moodle courses is the heavy reliance on text. One treatment for this is the development of a feature to allow a teacher to specify a class logo or icon image. This could be displayed in addition to the name when students are looking at lists of courses.
4. A class ‘default’ page. Particularly in the Primary / Elementary school level, students have a single class that forms the basis for all or most of their study. In such a context, the usual process of logging into a homepage and then either navigating the course/category hierarchy or selecting a course from the ‘My Courses’ block is of little use. A customisation to this could enable students to specify (of have specified for them) a ‘default’ or ‘home’ course – to which they are directed after login (unless of course they have arrived at the site by visiting a specific, deep link to particular Moodle content).
5. A new Course Format. From my post at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=120087:
   “I’ve worked in many K12 schools as a teacher and Moodle admin… and have found that the StudyCalendar course format (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Study_calendar_course_format) from Sam Marshall / the OU is almost right for what many teachers need… and similar to what’s being described here:

1. just shows the ‘current’ topic (e.g. ‘this lesson’) 2. allows teachers to ‘group’ together topics (into what we’d actually call topics). “What I’d like to see is this idea expanded to allow something a little more granular – where a ‘topic’ or ‘week’ is instead a ‘lesson’/‘class’… and could have a date/time attached to it. These could then be grouped together so that a student could see how or where this lesson fits into the current flow… but could look ahead (if it has been prepared) or back in time along the timeline to see upcoming or previous ‘classes’. Having AJAXy up/down scrollability of this would be VERY valuable…”

Further thoughts – E-Portfolio systems

One item under consideration is the simpler packaging of Moodle with the Mahara e-portfolio system. Whereas Moodle is predominantly centred on the classroom or ‘course’, Mahara provides an individualised learning environment, where students construct a personal space by bringing together items from the web, their classroom files, and their own profile. Mahara and Moodle already support tight integration, however this can be significantly simplified by either:

1. Providing simpler, step-by-step instructions that make more assumptions about how schools will configure the relationships between systems or (preferably)
2. Pre-configured, packaged installation (a “1-click” installer?) incorporating those assumptions. For example, an initial set of keys generated; Options for trust between systems pre-selected.