Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project

Professor Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci, Lafayette College
Course: Introduction to Women’s Studies

I teach Spanish, Women’s Studies, first-year seminar and VaST next year, so I am familiar with teaching a language people have no idea about. And women and gender studies is certainly a personal experience, but also a forum, a space, a class to talk and think in but it’s also a language of theory and history, a lot of which is completely unknown to students. And so in the texts we used in class, there was certainly vocabulary and terminology that was defined by someone else, but what I used the glossary for was to have students come up with their own definitions of words we were making use of.

As humanists we sometimes use 10-dollar words when a 5-dollar word would suffice. But I’m in the business of thinking about 10-dollar words, so I wanted my students to think about 10-dollar words and offer them with a rebate to their classmates. So now we have a way to keep track of the 10-dollar words they found useful or new, and these led to discussion in class.

To do this, I created two class glossaries to separate the sections of content we were covering, and students were asked at several times during the semester to submit entries to the appropriate glossary.

I also posted a Word document that is essentially a glossary criteria: here are my expectations, define the term and define it in the following way, and provide the citation if you’re citing directly. They were also allowed to use their own definitions where appropriate. We added definitions several times throughout the course, and had an extensive set of glossaries by the end of the semester.

You can rate definitions and add comments, and I choose to use a custom scale to rate these check, check plus and check minus, and also added comments where appropriate.

Cindy Evans, Director, Foreign Language Resource Center and Lecturer in French, Skidmore College

Skidmore’s model of LAC offers students the possibility of reading in the target language in conjunction with virtually any other course they are taking in English.  This individualized LAC model allows us to reach a wider student population than the more common model in which only certain courses carry a LAC component. The resulting “course,” essentially a group of students conducting independent studies, presents a challenge for curricular design. My approach to “teaching” the French LAC course has been to bring students’ work into a single forum through the use of moodle both in and outside of the classroom. Students submit weekly summaries and selected translations of their readings in the wiki to facilitate real-time revision in class.

We make use of the glossary feature in Moodle so that each student contributes vocabulary items that result in the building of a collective class glossary.

Glossary

While students are not responsible for learning all of the material, they do see other students’ entries that are featured on the main page in the block that displays randomized glossary entries.

Random glossary entry block

This option is a useful feature to include on the main page, along with the RSS feeds for French news that encourage students to read in the target language and keep up with current events in France, which we discuss in our weekly LAC sessions.

RSS feeds of French news

Professor Jennifer Talarico, Lafayette College
Course: Cognitive Psychology

An ongoing pre-exam question forum was maintained where students were encouraged to post questions they had while preparing for an exam. I would answer questions posted prior to 10 p.m. the night before an exam. Anything posted after 10 p.m. would be answered after the exam.

They would ask questions and I could respond as the instructor such that maybe another student didn’t even realize they had that question or were confused about a particular topic. They got in a habit of checking this, and they would post here rather than emailing me. I found this easy, and it kept everything contained and saved me from answering the same or similar questions multiple times.

Another thing that’s really nice is that when I teach this course again next year, and I know the types of things that are easily confused and maybe I can rephrase or reframe them in lecture. I can maintain these forums over time and create a shorthand FAQ that students in future classes can benefit from.

Pre-exam question forum

Professor Katalin Fabian, Lafayette College
Course: Politics of European Integration

Students are required to present their final work in class. Three days are set aside for this, and students need to sign up for the day they want to present. Using choice, I was able to allow students to do this in Moodle while limiting how many could sign up for a particular day. The results are easy to view, and the column for “not answered yet” let me know who in class was not taking care of business. The results can also be exported in Excel or text format so I have a copy to take into class so I know who should be presenting.

The first image shows what students see when they go to make a selection; the second image is how I see their responses. (click the images to take a closer look)

What students see when they go to make a selection.

How I see student responses

Hack/Doc Fest is coming soon, and we’re starting to put together our list of possible tasks for the event. We’re in the process of gathering and reviewing the usability tests that a number of schools conducted in the spring, and we expect a good chunk of our work to be guided by those results.

As always though, we’re looking for suggestions from the community about things *you* want us to look at and work on. These can be bug fixes, hacks, functionality improvements, documentation, road testing, etc. 

Note: You don’t have to be attending Hack/Doc Fest to make suggestions — we’d like suggestions from the entire community.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hack/Doc Fest III was held at Reed College, January 7-9, 2009. The big issues tackled at the event were the Gradebook and Moodle usability (with the two colliding more often than not). In the Gradebook, we’ve created documentation explaining how to simplify and streamline it using existing Moodle options and one or two easy-to-apply patches. Read the rest of this entry »

Our member colleges are conducting usability tests of Moodle 1.9 to evaluate problem areas with the software in Spring 2009. There are two tests, one for faculty, one for students, that evaluate common tasks that they are likely to encounter when working in Moodle (such as updating their profile, responding to forum assignments, creating assignments, grading assignments, etc.) Screen capture software is used to record the volunteer’s actions and faces during the tests, and data is collected in a central survey for later data crunching.

This manual script is used to verify that everything works the way we expect it to work when a new version of Moodle is release. It walks through the major areas of Moodle (assignments, forums, gradebooks, etc.) We have tried to cover everything, but you will need to tweak this document to fit your specific institution.

This document provides a rundown of simple steps you can take to streamline the Gradebook without modifying any code.

Hack/Doc Fest IV is now! It’s running June 3-5, 2009 at Smith College. We’ll be focusing on usability testing and a solid CLAMP version of Moodle 1.9.5 to run through the next academic year.

Logistics Update: We’ll be in Wright Hall, starting in Room 5.  There’ll be coffee and breakfast-snacks at 8:30 a .m. and lunch will be provided.  We typically work until around 5 p.m. and then break for dinner. We have no set dinner plans any particular night.

Leaving Friday: People will be leaving at various times on Friday, as travel arrangements require, but we should still be able to accomplish something Friday morning.

Contact: Jo Cannon is the Smith coordinator for Hack/Doc Fest; you can reach her at 413 585-3472.

When: June 3 -5 (Wednesday – Friday)

Where: Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063

Travel: Closest airport = Bradley (BRD)
Read the rest of this entry »