This is probably the largest deployment of moodle globally to date. Read about it here. To quote
“The Open Polytechnic, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology, and six other polytechs are already using the system. Twelve other tertiary institutes, including four universities, will likely migrate to Moodle by July, Mr Wyles says. It’s also being deployed at 10 secondary schools.”
The modular (the m in moodle) nature was a real plus for them.
I almost forgot to mention here that I presented at the first Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges. Originally it was to be Diane Pike and myself presenting but the Midwest Sociological Society Annual meeting was the same weekend and Diane was an organizer. So it was up to me!
I presented a brief (20 minute) summary of the paper we submitted to the conference. The paper is titled “Student Evaluation of Courses: Kicking and Screaming into the 21st Century.” It was progress update of the ongoing online course evaluation project. The second pilot is currently in process, closing April 29. It’s been a great project and I’ve learned a lot.
The progress we’ve made would not have been possible without the excellent programming work by Robert Bill. His python code has made the process possible without having to rush into buying a product. Assuming the new form is approved by the faculty, as well as the online delivery, it looks like Flashlight Online is our best bet. Being a nonprofit and an organization dedicated to teaching and learning — as well as a resource for best practices — makes it a good fit for us. No product will be perfect, but Flashlight has the right approach to the endeavor and makes a good partner.
UPenn has resumed charging for printouts. I’m glad Augsburg has been able to keep printing free. The experiences of institutions similar to ours have generally been negative with print charging. Huge institutions may have less of a sense of community and personal accountability — who cares if you’re printing a book, no one knows who you are. For them, charges and quotas might be the best solution. But for small institutions, there are better options.
First, you have create a system to charge students for printing. That requires new hardware and software and time for linking it up to the accounting systems. There’s a bunch “savings” lost.
Second, charging for printing doesn’t really help change the real problem: student attitudes towards resource conservation. People just need to be less wasteful. Some institutions have seen an increase in printing after implementing a print quota (get 100 free, then pay) because students feel they need to spend their quota or lose it.
We’re moving our high-volume public printers to default to duplex (double-sided) printing. That will drastically reduce the number of pages coming out of it. Also, we’re talking to the student organizations concerned about resource conservation. The most effective way to change student attitudes is to have other students call them on it — not to have IT do something heavy-handed.
Steven Downes (he’s everywhere nowadays in my areas of interest) had started a column in the last issue of Innovate called Places to Go.
He reviews IncSub, a place to explore open source technologies like moodle, wordpress, tikiwiki, drupal, mambo,phpbb (the first 3 I’m using actively currently). They have all of these and more installed on their server. You can sign up to use their server and have access to all of these great tools (monthly fee of course).
As we’ve been testing moodle out we’ve also been tweaking the code to meet our needs. If anyone is interested in copies of the code snippets just let me know.
We have a few more minor changes in the pipeline but these were some of the main tweaks we wanted to do. The modular and open nature of the code makes these changes easier as you go along.