City staff pave the way forward in Moodle 2

With the Moodle 2 upgrade not far off, many of our ed. tech teams in each of the ETC working groups, have been working hard to provide all staff and students with an easier, friendlier, enjoyable experience on Moodle 2.  So what better then to commend the work being put into this change. Well there are many working to achieve this, but I wanted to draw your attention to some of the work that has been written about and presented at a recent Moodlemoot.

Some say Moodle moot, some prefer Moodle conference, either way you get the gist. According to wikipedia, Moodle moots are a gathering or conference relating to the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. Till this day, Moodle Moots have been run all over the world the recent one ran in Dublin. You can view more information about the Moodle moot 2013 programme here.  At this recent event, a few members of our ed. tech teams went along. To get an overview of the conference, you can go to Gavin Hendrick’s blog.

In brief, Mike Hughes, Strategic Learning Environment Project Manager provided a summation of City University’s story in terms of the Moodle journey and his presentation below sums this up.

Mike also spoke about City’s experiences in finding out what staff and students want in order to help redesign Moodle’s course format and mymoodle pages. using pecha kucha principles.

Along with that, there were other members of our ed. tech teams; Leona Norris from CASS & Amanda Doughty from I.S who had produced an infographic on how City University has influenced the design of new features in Moodle. This was a visual map of how end users can directly impact on the Moodle eco-system locally and globally and give back to the community. It illustrates how small improvements, direct from the end users themselves, that are fed back into moodle.org can produce tangible results. It included statistics from the university, the Moodle community and tracker and offered guidance for others also wanting similar results. It also highlighted the importance of involvement from others in moodle.org and tracker and recommended areas for further improvement. It most certainly caught our eye with the star trek theme!