"According to the Australian Disability Clearninghouse on Education and Training (ADCET) The number of students with disability in university study has increased from 11,656 in 1995 to 42,111 in 2011 and that one in five people in Australia have one or more disabilities, which is increasing. This means that 1 in 20 students has a disability that impacts on their study. Improving student outcomes requires us to "build-in" equitable policies and practices across the organisation, as statistically as much as 20% of the student-body need it, and have a right to it."
A consortium of US universities got together last month and analysed Moodle 2.0.1 and, based on a number of factors, decided it was not yet ready for them.
The major show-stoppers for them included:
● Grade data is purged when a student is removed from the course
● Moodle 2.0 upgrades from 1.9 often fail or require manual intervention
● Moodle 1.9 backups can not be restored to Moodle 2.0 installations.
● Administrators can no longer perform mass uploads of files to courses.
Richard Wallace has 10 years experience in Web design and development. He develops, designs, maintains and hosts numerous Moodle and CMSMS sites for small, medium and large organisations in Australia, the U.S., and Canada. He has presented several papers on educational topics at conferences and training sessions, including the North American Moodle Conference in Edmonton.
Speaker at Moodle Symposium 2011
A video on how to clean up a Moodle course by changing a static web page (with a video and some notes) into an online activity without having to start from scratch.
Moodle site that explains some of the Web 2.0 tools and their applications in teaching and learning. Aimed at school teachers but a nice summary of some of the tools out there.
CompendiumLD is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence. Feedback from users suggests the process of visualising design makes their design ideas more explicit and highlights issues that they may not have noticed otherwise. It also provides a useful means of representing their designs so that they can be shared with others.
The CETL(NI) has developed a Hybrid Learning Model which can be used to describe learning activities as a series of understandable and universal set of learning events where the teachers and students experience and roles are clearly defined at each stage. The strength of this method is its transparency, use of plain English and its potential in breaking down effective complex learning activities into a generic, re-usable format so that good practice can be disseminated, reapplied and evaluated easily.