how to achieve 100% course adoption
TRANSCRIPT
Teaching & Learning ForumBy Moodlerooms
How to achieve 100% course adoption – a 7 year journey!
Heythrop College, University of London
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Who we are
• Heythrop College is 400 years old and whilst currently a college of the University of London, was founded by the Society of Jesus, and retains a strong Jesuit ethos – cura personalis
• It is one of the smallest universities in the UK, with around 40 members of teaching staff, and less than 400FTE students
• Students are roughly 50:50 between UG and PGR but from September 2015, Heythrop is ceasing to new UG teaching
• It only has courses in the areas of Philosophy, Theology and Ethics and is also host to the Bellarmine Institute which awards ecceslastical degrees in addition to UoL degrees
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Our Moodle Experience
• My first Moodle experience was around Moodle 1.0 in 2001/2 when I was working on a project that was looking at data reuse and SCORM! If I recall correctly Martin Dougimas came and gave my team a presentation about it – though sadly we wrote our own HTML based web site hosting the material (which is still online today!)
• Heythrop started using Moodle in 2006/7 – this was a pilot project using 5 courses / lecturers and around 80 students. One of the original modules still exists today!
• We ran on a Moodle server 1.7 (possibly?) that was a Linux box that lived under the Network Manager’s desk!
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Our Moodle Experience
• Key important initial decisions were taken during the pilot
• We needed a name that was better than Moodle - so we chose – HELIOS (which we tortuously decided stood for HEythrop Learning Interactive Online System)
• More importantly we ran the pilot which both UG modules and PG modules which was important as our UG student age profile is standard but our PG age profile has an average of 50+
• The lecturers involved were keen, but also not necessarily the most technological capable of our staff
• We vowed to not simply a document repository
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Our Moodlerooms Journey
• We were lucky that in 2007/8 after our successful pilot with the approval of our Academic Board we rolled out Moodle to ALL our students together with using Turnitin as a plugin to assist with online submission and plagiarism detection [I had to actively stop SLT from making online marking mandatory as well]
• Our first move in 2007 (seeing as we were now going to be running a Moodle server for the whole College) was to shared hosting to the really great elearning team that was run by Phil Butler and James at ULCC – we were attracted by their ethos as well as their expertise in running Moodle – one gzip file transfer and our new Moodle was up and running in no time at all (it took longer for the DNS to update!)
• It didn’t take long before we upgraded to our own dedicated server
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Our Moodlerooms Journey
• We upgraded along the way to Moodle 1.9 (and until we moved to Moodlerooms, I occasionally wish we’d never used any of the 2+ variations!
• Declaration of interest – Heythrop has a lot of services provided by ULCC, from network infrastructure, to publications, to library catalogue to web servers etc.)
• However we were becoming increasingly unhappy with the Moodle team, and increasingly frustrated that our initial success was falling behind – its really annoying attending Moodlemoot and not being able to do things because of hosting provider restrictions
• After 2 years of trying to negotiate we decided to leave
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Our Moodlerooms Journey
• Want we wanted – a Moodle partner
• Someone who understood what we were trying to do with Moodle and that could also help us in moving forward – in innovation and pedagogy
• An up-to-date, security patched Moodle with the plugins and tools that we wanted
• To save money!!!
• To be able to move within a space of a few weeks – before the start of the academic year
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What course adoption means to us?
• It changes from year to year – it’s not a static target, its an aspiration
• Its also different for the various stakeholders
• UG Students, PG Students, Research Students
• Teaching Staff
• Student Admin Staff
• Student Enrichment / Support Staff
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What course adoption means to us?
• Coursework submission Day – 2006!!
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What course adoption means to us?
• HELIOS circa 2007
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How we achieve it?
• Get the backing of SLT initially – but then use student pressure as well as key teaching staff to drive changes
• Its more than just Moodle – its our portal to student and staff services – email, helpdesk, library, student records (SITS), transcripts, alumni, staff information, careers, etc
• Student Intranet
• Using Moodle as a CMS and a portal (not just a VLE)
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How we achieve it?
• Plan ahead, but be careful to not try and do too much at one time – targets set by academic year
• Our first targets – electronic submission, plagiarism detection, mark entry, and course notes/reading
• Add/try a different Moodle feature (or what appears to be a Moodle feature) – some worked some didn’t – tutorial booking, electronic marking (this took 3 years), glossary, library resources, student transcripts, change of address, forums, etc
• Gave staff a target for each year – courses “graded” as Bronze, Silver and Gold (this needs careful explanation)
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How we achieve it? – Tutorial Booking
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How we achieve it? – Tutorial Booking
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How we achieve it? – Going for Gold!
• There was an advantage to doing in London leading up to 2012!
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How we achieve it? – Consistency
• We control some information and make it standard across all modules
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How we achieve it? – Help academic admin
• Do things to help academic admin – e.g. mark sheets
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How we achieve it? – Use Turnitin?!?!?
• We use grademark, as well as originality checking – 100% across the institution – student pressured forced the adoption of this and made us clarify marking turnaround and feedback
Feb 2008 – Feb 2009 : 3,300 (671)Feb 2009 – Feb 2010 : 6,900 (726)Feb 2010 – Feb 2011 : 7,800 (747)Feb 2011 – Feb 2012 : 9,550 (730)Feb 2012 – Feb 2013 : 8.675 (656)Feb 2013 – Feb 2014 : 7,722 (583)Feb 2014 – Feb 2015 : 7,259 (533)
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Student Feedback
• We constantly get student feedback (we do ask staff too!)
• Formal methods – Module Evaluations, Staff-Student Liaison Committee, National/Heythrop Student Survey, Have Your Say
• Informally – Programme Reps, Student IT Ambassadors
• Very Informally – students tell me directly as I see them on campus
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Where we are going
• We want to really use the SNAP theme as best we can – its popular, but has made us rethink how/why we do things
• We want to make more use of better comms – Blackboard Text
• Investigate the use of Collaborate / Big Blue Button / Connect
• Use video more effectively – Captivate
• Grade presentation improvements
• Conduit
• Office365
• The best Moodle we can make in the next 2 years…
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PH101 http://helios.heythrop.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1476
Frozen http://helios.heythrop.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1624#section-0
Grader Report http://helios.heythrop.ac.uk/grade/report/grader/index.php?id=1481
Student Induction http://helios.heythrop.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1453