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MUGGL comes to QMUL

30 March 2016 Posted in: News By: Gill Ritchie

On the morning of Wednesday 16th March, we had the pleasure of hosting a meeting of the Moodle User Group Greater London (MUGGL). This group has been running for a number of years and is attended by people from universities across London who make use of the Moodle online learning environment (QMplus is Moodle). Those who attend are largely speaking in support roles with job titles such as Learning Technologist or Educational Developer. It is a very supportive community and provides a great place for sharing knowledge and ideas.

The meeting was expertly run by Steve Bond from the London School of Economics and was titled “Improving users vs improving design”. It was divided into two sections, one on approaches to training and support and one on Moodle design and user experience. We were lucky to get a large turnout with many people attending for the first time and several of our own learning technologist community being able to join in too.

The meeting was split into:

There was a smaller meeting after the main event where MUGGLx was discussed. All of the presentations were recorded and the recordings can be found in the resources section along with more information about the MUGGL group.

Approaches to training and support

helenThe demographic of the MUGGL membership means that many of us are actively involved in supporting staff and students in their use of Moodle, perhaps more skewed towards supporting staff. Lots of us are therefore interested in sharing approaches to staff development and in finding out about initiatives that have worked well for others.

There were 3 presentations in this section, Sultan Wadud from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Helen Axe from the London School of Economics (LSE) and Karen Shackleford-Cesare from the University of Roehampton. Sultan and Helen focussed more on face-to-face support, although also mentioning areas such as user guides and Moodle information portals. There was a common message about us “getting ourselves out there”, meeting staff and being approachable with Sultan describing success with their mainly solution focussed and 1-2-1 support. Helen discussed providing funding for staff to go further with their use of Moodle, another way to provide staff with really practical support. Karen focussed on Roehampton’s online Moodle course used in conjunction with a face-to-face session, which raised the issue of using the tools to teach the tools. How many staff have actually experienced learning through Moodle?

It’s clear from these talks that staff development has to go beyond the “2 hours in a training room” approach, particularly for members of academic staff. We are all trying to adopt a mixture of different types of development opportunity from the traditional “everyone together in a room” (sometimes it’s good to be in a room together), to drop-in sessions, to giving presentations at departmental meetings, to the dissemination of case studies and the provision of funding…and much more.

You can watch the approaches to training and support presentation recordings.

Swap shop and challenge MUGGL

damianThis section is a regular feature of MUGGL meetings. It allows people to either share development work that they are doing or to describe an issue that they are struggling with to use the collective wisdom of the room to find a solution.

Our own Damian Hippisley, a developer in the Academic Applications team in IT Services at QMUL, shared some ongoing development work he is involved with called Gradesplus. This work is intended to improve the display of grades and feedback to students through QMplus. The development is currently being piloted in two Schools in QMUL and we hope to develop it further for the next academic year.

Watch Damian’s presentation. Unfortunately some live student data was used during the presentation so we’ve had to remove the screen from the recording.

Moodle design and UX (user experience)

andyThe user experience of Moodle is a hot topic in the community more generally. Moodle is often criticised for its user interface and “clunky” design, especially when compared to the experiences that users are used to on the web more generally. The custodians of Moodle, known as Moodle HQ, are often criticised for not prioritising usability issues however this is changing, slowly.

There were 4 presentations in this session. Tim Morgan from the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Andy Hoang and Jiri Motejlek from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), both gave talks which were very example focussed. Tim showed a highly visual course structure that he’d developed for UAL, including his use of the “tabbed” course format. Andy and Jiri, presented their Moodle “skin”, including some very nice work around navigation and iconography. Thomas Hanley from City University gave a great talk about usability testing which made it clear that very few of us do any proper usability testing. He also included a great rant about the lack of design and user experience literacy in HE. Leonard Houx from the Cass Business School gave an entertaining talk on the 10 Moodle commandments as laid down by famous Learning Technologist, the Notorious B.I.G. Both of these really made us, or me certainly, remember that there is a world beyond Moodle that we really should be paying attention to.

Here at QMUL we have spent a good deal of time and effort on trying to improve the user experience of QMplus. It’s something we continue to work on, not just in terms of what the system looks like but also in how it behaves and how it can be more user centric.

You can watch the Moodle design and UX presentation recordings.

MUGGLx

MUGGLx is the early spark of an idea relating to how MUGGL might organise itself to support Moodle development work. Main MUGGLer Sarah Sherman asked that those present who were interested gather together after the official meeting to discuss possible ways forward with this. In the meeting, we briefly discussed how MUGGLx might work. The general feeling being that the ethos of the group would be to share development effort and support. Developments could be “MUGGL supported”, i.e. supported by the MUGGL community. The issue of how developments are supported is one that is often off putting for organisations, they do not necessarily want the burden of providing ongoing support. Acting to provide support as a MUGGL community could be helpful. There was general agreement around the fact that any developments undertaken by MUGGLx would have to be relatively small and well defined. Attempting to tackle large projects such as e-assessment, are likely to be too large and nebulous. Small projects which might be do-able through events such as “hack-fests” were thought to be most likely to be successful. It was also agreed that MUGGLx would not look at funding developments e.g. through crowdsourcing. The only way this is likely to work is through those organisations who have development capability being able to give some of that capability to the community.

It’s not yet clear whether MUGGLx will be something that will take off. Further discussion amongst interested parties will need to happen to determine the detail. It’s a case of “watch this space” at the moment.

Resources

Recordings of the event

The event was recorded and all of the recordings can be found on our Q-Review lecture capture system.

More information on MUGGL

More information on the MUGGL group, including details of how to join, can be found on the MUGGL website

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