MoodleMoot 2018

 

This year MoodleMoot took place in Glasgow. MoodleMoot is an annual event that gathers educators, technologists, developers from across Europe showcasing innovation, best practices, new ideas based around teaching with Moodle. In this blog post, I’ll share few trends and things that I learned by attending this event.

This year’s conference focused on these key topics:

• Moodle development in terms of performance enhancements, Moodle in the clouds, modernisation of the UI/UX, Moodle Mobile and more
• GDPR compliance
• How Moodle can and is being used in unusual, creative and advanced ways throughout Europe

Highlights

Making Moodle AMAZING!

The opening presentation by Martin Dougiamas CEO and founder of Moodle focused on what is ahead of us educators and users of Moodle, particularly on goals and vision company has for the future to continue to advance the mission of empowering educators to improve the world. Apart from the goals that focus on sustainability and community around Moodle with few new projects and initiatives, Martin presented what can be expected in upcoming versions of Moodle. The new features in Moodle 3.4 include better calendar management including drag and drop of events, improved global search, improved activity navigation, clearer participation list and other changes in terms of GDPR compliance. One of the goals, I am particularly excited about is illustrated below:

GDPR changes

Few presentations were dedicated to GDPR changes that come to effect on 25 May 2018. These changes aim is to harmonise data privacy laws, set new standards for data privacy and empower individuals with control over their personal data. Moodle will help to meet these new law requirements by releasing two plugins. The policy plugin will help with new user sign up, accepting policy and tracking consent. The data privacy plugin will help to facilitate the workflow for users to submit subject access requests & for site administrators and privacy officers to process these requests.  For full Moodle HQ presentation including an overview of these two plugins please access this link.

Rapid Learning Design with ABC workshops

My highlight of this year’s Moot was a presentation by Jessica Gramp and Dr Clive Young (University College London) on ABC Learning Design project. ABC is an effective hands-on workshop that only takes 90 minutes and helps academics to redesign their modules using a game based approach. By the end of the workshop participants have storyboard’ outlining the type and sequence of learning activities (both online and offline) required to meet the module’s learning outcomes. To support the development of online activities by staff, UCL team created 53 educational technology mini-guides that are coded on the cards staff uses during the workshop. Academics can easily find information on how to start using a particular tool or feature.

Absolutely fascinating low tech approach to course design, quick, easy, intuitive. ABC approach definitely worth looking at more closely. #MootIEUK18 pic.twitter.com/jUGyROnSDi

— Chris Kennedy (@ChrisEKennedy) March 27, 2018

 

H5P is trending again this year…

There was lots of talk about using H5P for building interactive content for Moodle. Presenters shared different examples of questions used and tips on using the tool effectively. Using H5P can make a difference to the level of engagement as well as visual design of Moodle courses. The H5P tool is available to use in a pilot role on Moodle. For full information on how to get started with H5P, please see our guidance page available here.

Great to see @glynnmark giving #H5P the focus it deserves. It really is an amazing tool and all should explore its potential. Eg: have you seen the Essay activity? It’s awesome! https://t.co/4YEeoP0sZn

Sorry I’m not there today – looks like I’m missing out on loads! #MootIEUK18

— Dan Jeffries (@developwithdan) March 28, 2018

#MootIEUK18 @glynnmark explaining how to use H5P to create and embed interactive and multimedia content on your Moodle course. Excited to try this out for myself! pic.twitter.com/0UR5BErKbn

— Alicia Owen (@OwenMarie) March 28, 2018

Our work

This year, we presented a poster about Programme Administrator Training developed to help manage enrolling relevant administrative roles in Moodle better. The Educational Technology Team identified key knowledge and skills that are required by staff in the Programme Admin role at City. This has informed the development of a compliance module that all new Course Officers and Programme Administrators have to complete and pass in order to gain access to the relevant programme category on Moodle. The module is presented as a series of books with embedded H5P activities to provide participants with retrieval practice. To increase interaction in sections where content is passive and text heavy we used H5P elements such us flashcards, drag and drop and multiple choice questions. We also added few videos from Learn with Moodle MOOC.

My personal highlight of the conference was being able to meet and network with educators from other institutions. The connections built at MoodleMoot are invaluable as meeting with other professionals keeps me up to date with trends and new approaches in educational technology.