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By creating content that has elements of real time associated with it, instructors can generate a sense of presence and freshness that are often missing in online courses.

A sense of time is created in discussion boards because they have only that week to complete the work and there is an understanding that the conversations happen in time. But often asynchronous discussions have wide gaps of time between student interactions. One way to bring time closer to the students is to allow them to subscribe to forum threads they are involved in. You can do this in most LMS solutions. Students get an email alerting them to activity in the thread they are active in and it brings them closer “in real time” to the events happening in the class. While this can be overwhelming in larger courses, in a class of 20 or 30 students it usually does not amount to an unreasonable amount of email notifications. One of the most effective ways to bring timeliness to an online course is do a quick recap of previous week, as well as provide a preview of what is expected for the current week. Using screen capture software to go through the course and set expectations is a great way to not only share a bit of yourself with students, but it is a pre-emptive way to answer questions students commonly ask.

 ”a lot of people find that giving students the ability to teach is a valuable learning process” – Martin Dougiamas.

A lot of people want that secure private place in the LMS with big gates, with students needing to gain competencies and knowledge.  Many people really want this “Content Pump” focus, becuase it is what they need. Others use it as a community of practitioners, connected activities, content created by students and teachers alike and many methods of assessment. These are the two ends of the spectrum of usage.

Moodle has two roles: to be progressive and integrate with things coming up, and a drag and drop UI, with innovate workflows and improve media handling and mobile platforms to be conservative and improve  security and usability and assessment , accredition, detailed management tracking and reports and performance and stability

Since Moodle 1.9 came out three years ago,  March 2008 and most are still using the three year old code which has had fixes applied since then (1.9.11 is the current release.) The support for 1.9 will continue until the middle of 2012 as it is understood that it will be a big move to Moodle2.   “If you are going to Moodle2, you may as well go to Moodle 2.1 as it is better with 6 months more work” .

However, the ongoing support for each release will be 1 yr moving to the future. Moodle will be released every 6 months which enables the organisations to plan their upgrade times ahead of time.

What will be in Moodle 2.1? Performance Restore 1.9 backups Quiz/question refactor Page course format Interface polishing Official Mobile app (there now is a Mobile division)

HQ are working on an official app which uses Moodle 2 built-in web services. This provides a secure access to the data in Moodle 2 for people who have accounts in Moodle which greatly benefits mobile apps.

Moodle HQ has looked at what is Mobile really good at and identified them one by one and implemented them.  This includes messaging, list of participants in your course, marking attendence (in class roll call). This will be for the iPhone first and then someone will make it for Android so it will lag behind, but will be the same.

What is going to happen in 2.2 and beyond?

Grading and Rubrics Competency Tracking (from activity level, course level, outside courses to generate a competency profile) Assignment (planning to combine all 4 into one type and simplify it) Forum (big upgrade probably based on OU Forum) Survey (to include feedback/questionnaire – being rewritten currently) Lesson Scorm 2 Improved reporting IMS LTI IMS CC (although it is in 1.9 needs to be redone)