Tag: internal (Page 14 of 21)

Moodle Baseline – A new standardised template for all Moodle modules

January 25, 2019 / Mike Wilson / 0 Comments

In recent student surveys it’s become clear that students want more consistency to the layout of their Moodle modules. Students want it to be easier to find key information such as what the module is about, what they will learn and how they will be assessed.

It’s increasingly important that we present content for students in an accessible way so everyone can engage with content easily.

TEL and AcDev have led a feedback exercise with staff from all University faculties, along with a pilot with academics and students on Nursing Degrees delivered by Science. These exercises have helped us establish what the key requirements would be for a standardised approach to the layout of Moodle modules and the development of the Moodle Baseline template.

The Moodle Baseline represents the basic building blocks for starting to build a Moodle module. Here’s a summary of main tabs available within the template.

The Welcome tab allows staff to add a welcome message to students in html format (this could include a welcome video or perhaps link to a discussion forum).

The Module Overview tab allows a plain text description of the module to be added.

A list of Learning Outcomes can be added to the third tab.

The Assessment Summary tab allows for a description of the assessments that a student will be required to complete. There is also a table to keep track of submissions. Students will be able to see the status of their assessment submissions and upcoming important dates. Staff will see progress bars representing how many submissions have been made along with an indicator of how many assignments require marking.

All new and rolled-over Moodle modules will have the Moodle Baseline template added automatically from March 1st 2019, giving staff time to add content in advance of September 2019.

When the Moodle Baseline launches on March 1st we will also release a web-based resource for guidance on how to complete the template along with useful best practise advice for populating your Moodle module including topics such as marking online and giving effective feedback.

We hope you find the Moodle Baseline a useful tool for creating rich and engaging Moodle modules. If you have any questions please get in contact at elearn@port.ac.uk

industrial building work — Photo taken by Fancycrave from https://unsplash.com/photos/1R3UnJcBCa8

Scenario Based Learning

January 25, 2019 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

What is scenario based learning?

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, in their influential book Situated Learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) argued that learning is most effective when it occurs within the context in which it is going to be used. Scenario based learning (SBL) is rooted in this idea. SBL, according to the definition provided by Massey University, “uses interactive scenarios to support active learning strategies such as problem-based and case-based learning”. The course developer creates a narrative – typically based on a complex, real-world problem – that the student works through and solves. SBL thus provides a safe yet realistic environment for the student to demonstrate their subject-specific knowledge and problem-solving skills. Furthermore, because SBL is often non-linear, it can provide numerous feedback opportunities to students, based on the decisions they make at each stage of the narrative.

I’m a course developer. When should I use scenario based learning?

Sometimes – in cases, for example, where students are required to make decisions and display critical thinking in complex situations – it can be difficult to provide realistic practice opportunities within the confines of a traditional course. In these cases, SBL comes into its own. Amongst countless other examples, SBL has been used successfully in engineering, nursing and business studies. It can be used to support both formative and summative assessment – but note that, for routine tasks that don’t require decision-making or critical thinking, there are more appropriate methods of assessment.

What tools can help me develop scenario based learning?

Moodle contains several tools that can be used to develop an SBL approach. The four tools I’d suggest can be used to build a learning narrative are: Database, Workshop, Forum and Lesson. (This is only a suggestion. The most important thing is to connect various activities and reinforce student learning.)

Below is one model that would permit the assessment process to become a wider, more holistic approach over the duration of a course. A range of short, targeted activities would give the students time to research their next task and help them develop their own learning profile.

Database -> Workshop -> Forum -> Lesson

The student writes a short essay, based on their own experiences relating to a given task, and submits to the Database tool. Then, from these submissions, the academic allocates each student a different piece of work to mark/analyse.
After assessing their assigned piece of work, each student submits their analysis to the Workshop tool (following criteria defined by the academic). The Workshop tool allows students to peer assess the submissions and get a final grade based on both their submission and their ability to assess others’ work.
Once all this is finished, the Forum is used to get the students to discuss their experiences of the subject and how they could each improve certain aspects of their work.
Lastly, the Lesson tool presents a high-risk situation to the student. The lesson can be developed to provide a realistic yet safe environment to explore the situation. The Lesson tool allows for either a branching or a linear format.

Each phase offers the student the chance to reflect on what they have learned and offers them ideas on what they should now do with the new information and theory they have researched as part of the unit.

These various elements could be done one straight after the other, or spaced out over the course of a unit. My recommendation would be to allow time between each assessment, which would give students the chance to develop and learn from what they have previously done.

If you are considering SBL as a means of assessment but would like to have a discussion about how you can implement within your teaching the TEL team runs a training session called “Facilitating Scenario Based Learning” or you can contact me tom.langston@port.ac.uk

Reference

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Cambridge: CUP.

Image credits: Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

Fancycrave

Accessibility of digital learning content at UoP

January 17, 2019 / Stephen Webb / 0 Comments

On 15 January 2019, following a two-month pilot, the TEL team switched on the Blackboard Ally plug-in across all modules on Moodle. In brief, if a lecturer has uploaded some digital course content to Moodle (typically Word documents, Powerpoint presentations or PDF files) then Ally permits students to download that content in an alternative format (electronic Braille, html, epub, tagged pdf, or mp3). This is great for accessibility, of course, but this is also an inclusive approach: any student, not just one with a particular need, might choose to download a Word document in mp3 format (to listen to on the go) or in epub format (to get the benefit of reflowable text on a e-reader). The TEL team will be providing students with more information about Ally over the coming weeks, but in this post I want to mention a feature of Ally that is of interest to authors of digital course content.

Ally generates an institutional report about the accessibility of course content on the institution’s VLE. So we now know what the most common accessibility issues are for the 38,462 course content files on Moodle. The top five are (drum-roll please):

The document has contrast issues. Just under half of all documents (48%, to be precise) have contrast issues.
The document contains images without a description. Roughly 43% of all documents commit this accessibility sin.
The document has tables that don’t have any headers. Just over a quarter (26%) of all documents have this issue; I suspect that the documents without this issue are simply those without tables.
The document does not have any headers. This is a problem for 24% of documents.
The document is missing a title. Again, 24% of documents have this problem.

The first four are classed as major accessibility issues; the fifth issue is classed as minor.

At first glance this seems shocking: about half of all documents suffer from a major accessibility issue to do with contrast. When we compare ourselves against other institutions, however, we learn that these issues seem to be common across the HE sector; indeed, we seem to be doing slightly better than many institutions. And the important thing is, now that we know what the issues are, we can start to address them. Over time, we should be able to drastically reduce the number of documents with these common – and easily fixable – problems.

One piece of good news: we have a relatively small number of documents that possess accessibility issues classed as severe. The most common severe issue at Portsmouth – just as it is at other universities – involves scanned PDFs that have not been put through OCR. There might be good, valid reasons why a scanned PDF has been used. But accessibility would certainly improve if authors minimised their use of such files.

Header image taken from Blackboard.com link. Retrieved from https://www.blackboard.com/accessibility/blackboard-ally.htmlpng

(Assessed: 17th January 2019). Thank you to Ally for giving us permission to use their image.

Thinking about accessibility

January 8, 2019 / Tom Cripps / 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about accessibility and Moodle recently as we move the Moodle Baseline project into the pilot stage. It’s become clear that many of us don’t make our responsibility to create accessible content a top priority when all that’s needed is a small amount of extra time to ensure a vast improvement in the ability of differently abled users to consume your Moodle content. I’m not going to call any specific Moodle sites out here, but some of the most prevalent bad practice that somewhat surprisingly still seems to exist includes using HTML tables for navigation & layout, and using images for headings or navigation.

Both of these issues become problematic to users who use screen readers. Whilst it is true that screen reader support for tables has improved, they should still not be used for navigation or layout. Every time the screen reader box enters a table cell, the screen reader will tell the user which cell they are in. You can easily see how this is not a good user experience if you have to work your way through a four by five table, with a link (or more than one link) in each cell. Using something more appropriate such as an HTML list for this navigation properly give the nav role in the html, as well as a more streamlined experience, a screen reader can also use this information to offer it’s user the option to skip the navigation and go straight to page content, or not. for some more information on this have a look at the W3 Schools page detailing the nav role.

Using an image for heading isn’t automatically a terrible thing. If it’s used in conjunction with either HTML alt text, or if at all possible an ARIA attribute to notify to a screen reader how the image is being used. Using CSS to replace a text link with an image, which will also allow the image to be seen by those browsing visually, but also mean the HTML text link is visible to those with a screen reader It just so happens that Bootstrap 4 has an easy way to do this which everyone can use after the Moodle upgrade in August. Bootstrap also offers ways to totally hide elements in your HTML content from everyone except those using screen readers, so you can really go the extra mile to offer content that’s easier to digest audibly.

There are reasons why you’d need to use a custom navigation, there are also times however that the topic jump list should be more than sufficient for navigating between topics on a Moodle site. If you find that this is almost good enough – but not quite – please talk to us and we’ll try and make it totally good enough for you to use. If you’d like to find out more about accessibility I would heartily recommend the Digital Accessibility MOOC on FutureLearn, it really opened my eyes to accessibility issues I’d never considered – it made me realise what I thought I was doing to enable differently abled people to read my content, wasn’t in fact enough.

I’ll leave you with this from our Moodle content guide which will arrived with the new theme after the upgrade in the summer:

Accessibility for Moodle content means that your content is available to be consumed by all users, regardless of their ability. Creating accessible learning content is the responsibility of us all – It’s not something that should be left until later, or for us to think that it’s the responsibility of someone else.

New Modules for Moodle 2018-19

August 7, 2018 / Mandy Harcup / 0 Comments

You may remember that we introduced a new way to request new Moodle modules last year, since then the service desk has been updated so we thought we’d show you a refresher on how to request your site.

All you have to do is complete the New Moodle Module Request form on the Service Desk Landing Portal. To start, select Log a service request.

This will bring you to the ‘My Services’ page, firstly make sure that you are on the All My Services tab, then select the Moodle link

You’ll then see the Moodle service page, click on Moodle Request on the lower half of the screen, Click on the blue Moodle Request link.

You’ll then see the Moodle Request page, click on the drop down arrow alongside What would you like to do? Select Request a new module to be created on Moodle, then click Next.

Use the page that appears to input the details of your module. Please make sure that all mandatory fields (denoted by a red asterisk) are completed.

When you’re happy with the information you’ve supplied click Finish. Once the form has been submitted you’ll receive an email confirming your request and a reference number.

We’ll get to work creating your site for you and then we’ll send you an email to confirm when it’s ready for you to use. Don’t forget to ask for help from your faculty Online Course Developers should you need it.

Dog with an edible small bone on his nose

Guest Blogger: Carole Phillips – Old Dog – New Tricks

July 24, 2018 / Carole Phillips / 0 Comments

Blog following TEL Training sessions:

The saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks isn’t quite true in my case.

I am a 50-something senior lecturer PT and an Advanced Nurse Practitioner PT. I have spent the whole of my nursing career gaining knowledge to develop my clinical skill and then passing them on through clinical teaching. I ventured into HE back in the early noughties … only to find I missed clinical practice. This was at the start of online resources for teaching and learning – I thought, “bugger that, I want to be hands on…” Fifteen years later, somewhat at a loss having done clinical practice full-time, I found I missed my students and formal teaching – and landed a PT role here at UoP (#Nursing).

The last year has been a massive learning curve for me. Gone are the big lecture theatres; instead we have small lecture rooms, with satellites and facilitators, and more online activities and learning. I thought, “Oh no, I’m too old to learn how to do that – keep a group of students in another room engaged with my lectures whilst not actually in the room!”

Then I found the TEL training sessions and Tom. He’s not quite a knight in shining armour, but he’s definitely taught this old dog new tricks.

I am about to embark on a PhD (well an EDD, but you know what I mean) in using online activities in undergraduate nurse education (“OMG” you cry; me too!). But I am so enamoured by all the resources I am keen to learn and use this in my teaching – my head is spinning!

I couldn’t do all the TEL sessions in order as I’m PT, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Tom has been patient and listened to me, and I’ve been developing lots of activities through Moodle to enhance my teaching.

I have been promising a blog for a few months – so here is the first, and hopefully not the last. And whilst I’m an academic, I’m not your traditional academic – and over time, if I continue with blogs, you’ll find out why. So keep reading!

Image credits: Photo by McDobbie Hu on Unsplash

The Portsmouth Moodle – Accessibility Snapshot

July 11, 2018 / Stephen Webb / 0 Comments

In January 2018 we were lucky enough to host a visit from Alistair McNaught, a JISC subject specialist on accessibility and inclusion. Alistair spent a day at the University as a “mystery shopper”, playing the role of a student with disabilities who was trying to access various digital resources and services. He looked at the full range of services – prospectus, website, Library platforms and Moodle – but here I’ll focus on his observations about the VLE.

The first thing to note is that Alistair had difficulty logging on to a PC in the morning: it took more than ten minutes for the desktop to appear. The student sitting next to him confirmed that, after the initial boot, it often did take a long time before a public PC was in a state that allowed work to take place. Not good for a student with ADHD!

Alistair confirmed that tab order (for keyboard navigation) works well in Moodle and the visual tracking of focus is good. There’s easy navigation with breadcrumb trails and a navigation side panel; this is important because good navigation assists all users, especially assistive technology users. The Moodle accessibility block is available and obvious on all pages, and Equality and Diversity information is easily discoverable. The self-enrol E&D course has lots of very good, easily accessible, generic awareness-raising resources; and there are easy-to-find PDF resources on equality data – these have good reflow and colour change possibilities. All this is good news and it allows us to build on – in Alistair’s words – conscious competence.

However, there are some things we need to think about. For example, some of our third-party resources have accessibility issues; we are to some extent a hostage to fortune in these cases, but at least now we are in a position to raise the points with the suppliers. Another issue was that some of our generic units have poor colour contrast; Alistair pointed us to a tool – the Colour Contrast Analyser from the Paciello group – which will help us identify these problems more readily. And once we are aware of them, it’s easier to fix.

Alistair also took a look (with the consent of the academics involved) at a couple of teaching units from ICJS. He was highly impressed with the pedagogical approach taken in these units, and he praised a number of aspects. A “lovely human [video-based] introduction adds value for many students” – but he added that it “would be even better with transcript or captions”. It was “great to see active use of rich media and a nice visual key to resources”; the “direct links to reading resource and final assessment” were useful; and the “impressive range of resources” were “well organised” and had “clearly scaffolded teaching with explanations and pointers to the purpose of the resources”. Where resources could cause access issues this has been recognised and a genuine attempt made to remedy it with a PDF alternative (however, the PDF had its own accessibility issues and so does the ‘Click here’ link text). Finally, a Useful News and Information block showed “great currency, with tie-in to contemporaneous issues”. So, again, there is a lot of conscious competence on which we can build.

These units had some issues; fortunately, they are easily fixed. For example, hyperlinks need unique and meaningful link text so that assistive technologies that gather page links together can give users meaningful information. If an author writes “Click here to browse an interactive timeline of key events” then the result from assistive technologies might be a long list of “Click here”s – which is entirely uninformative. Much better to write: “Click here to browse an interactive timeline of key events”. Another problem came from an interactive Articulate resource that failed to load; even if it did load, Articulate generally produces output with limited accessibility. And some structures had untitled navigation elements, which would cause problems for some users. (This last issue might be down to an underlying Moodle template issue; Alistair pointed us to another tool – the HTML5 Outliner plugin for Chrome – that will help us investigate this further.)

All in all this was a tremendously useful visit. We know there are areas of good practice we can build on, and there are issues we can fix. And it truly is worth pursuing this: if we take an inclusive approach to Moodle and the content on it, all learners will benefit.

Feature image title: Web Accessibility Word Cloud by Jill Wright is licensed by CC-BY 2.0 on Flickr

A rabbit with a flower in his mouth and a hen's egg

Guest Blogger: Julian Ingle – The Green Zone Rabbit

June 27, 2018 / Julian Ingle / 0 Comments

In the Green Zone, a safe area where politicians live, Hajjar and his friend are hiding in a villa preparing for an attack. To pass the time, Hajjar is looking after a rabbit. When he goes to clean the hutch one morning the rabbit appears to have laid an egg. Absurd events like these run alongside moments of horror and violence in Hassan Blasim’s collection of short stories about Iraq called The Corpse Exhibition.

These stories of the everyday devastation of people’s lives caught in war zones became reality at a recent talk about the work of The Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) by its director, Stephen Wordsworth. The talk was part of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Learning and Teaching day and was, without doubt, the most moving event I’ve been to at this kind of conference. I’ve just joined the University of Portsmouth and have been fortunate that it’s the conference season. I’ve seen interesting work, met lots of people, who’ve been welcoming and friendly and been to some excellent talks.

What stands out were the accounts of their recent lives by three academics who were supported by CARA (http://www.cara.ngo/). Each of them talked about how their academic careers were closed down by the war in Syria. CARA helped them to escape, got them visas and has found them work at the University of Portsmouth so that they could continue their careers as academics until such time as they can return to their country. Their families and friends remain in Syria.

There has been more debate recently about academic freedom in UK HE, often raising concerns about the introduction of the ’Prevent duty’ in 2015. Under threat was academics’ right ‘to question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or the privileges they may have’ (1988 Education Reform Act). Hearing the stories of these three people, their struggle to survive and to pursue their careers in higher education, put some of these debates – and our privileged position – into perspective.

Julian Ingle has just joined the University of Portsmouth as the new Deputy Head of ASK. Prior to this he worked at Queen Mary University of London as part of the Thinking Writing initiative, and as an educational developer and lecturer at several London universities.

Image credits: Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

People either side of a map, a camera, a laptop, some writing paper and pens

New Features of Moodle and Bespoke TEL Training Sessions

June 13, 2018 / Mandy Harcup / 0 Comments

During August TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) will be offering New Features of Moodle 3.5 and bespoke training sessions only. The usual timetabled TEL training sessions will resume in September.

New Features of Moodle 3.5 sessions

Each year new features are added and old tools are upgraded to improve functionality. The New Features of Moodle sessions will look at the latest features of Moodle that have changed since the roll over. Any updates or new features of our latest Moodle will be included in the session to help you keep up to date with the workings of the system.

To view our training sessions, please see the TEL Training Calendar.

Bespoke Sessions

Informal 1-2-1 sessions can be held at your desk, or if there are several of you interested in a session we have a room available where you can request a more structured group session. Topics for bespoke sessions can be based around our traditional TEL programme, or we can tailor the session to answer any specific questions or needs that you require.

Please complete a Bespoke Training Request form (see below) and simply tick the box next to the session you would like training on. If you tick ‘Other’ please give a brief explanation of the topic you wished to be covered in the session. Complete with the date on which you would like your training session to take place, along with your preferred time and finish it by clicking ‘SUBMIT’.

Please click here for the Bespoke Training Request form:

Bespoke Training Request Form

Once we receive your form, a member of the TEL team will contact you to confirm your training arrangements.

NB: Bespoke TEL training sessions can also be arranged throughout the year.

Background image credits: https://www.pexels.com/photo/adult-book-business-cactus-297755/

New Moodle theme

June 6, 2018 / Mike Wilson / 0 Comments

Over the past academic year members of TEL have been talking to people across the University about what Moodle should look like and what it should do.

We’ve conducted focus groups and had meetings with students, academics, support staff, “powers users”, IS, Marketing and Department of Student and Academic Administration (DSAA). This has allowed us to produce a requirements list of what Moodle users need in terms of the interface.

Drum roll please… we’re very pleased to announce that early adopters can now switch to the new theme for their Moodle units. This will enable academics and Online Course Developers to start developing content in time for September. Units will be automatically switched to the new theme when they are rolled over this summer.

(click image to enlarge)

To switch to the new theme manually press Course administration > Editing Settings > Appearance > UoP Boost

You can also view a demo course featuring the new theme by visiting this link.

We’d very much welcome your feedback on the new theme. Please complete this form if you have any ideas for us.

Tag: internal (Page 14 of 21)

Moodle Baseline – A new standardised template for all Moodle modules

Scenario Based Learning

Accessibility of digital learning content at UoP

Thinking about accessibility

New Modules for Moodle 2018-19

Guest Blogger: Carole Phillips – Old Dog – New Tricks

The Portsmouth Moodle – Accessibility Snapshot

Guest Blogger: Julian Ingle – The Green Zone Rabbit

New Features of Moodle and Bespoke TEL Training Sessions

New Moodle theme

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