The project focussing on the following five areas:
The rationale behind the choice for each is given below; further details are given in the relevant page for each area.
What?
Why?
Issues
What?
Why?
Issues
What?
Why?
Issues
What?
Why?
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Overview
The aim was to replace the current paper system and outdated online assignment handling system by adapting the Moodle assignment handling module to fit our requirements. The Moodle adaptations have been made available to the wider Moodle community.
Technical development
Technical development implemented essential functionality not available in the standard Moodle assignment module. This included:
The pilot studies
The pilot studies enabled us to verify that the functionality developed fitted our requirements and that its usability is acceptable to tutors, students, Registry staff and IT support staff. To do this , we have had to traverse the test-tweak-retest cycle several times. Sometimes this has been required to redefine the way the system will coordinate with other Departmental activities when rolled out more widely. Along the way, we have developed guidance documentation for users of the system, and investigated ways to resolve any administrative issues around its implementation.
Conclusion
The new system is being piloted and will be availble more broadly for the 2011/12 academic year. Evidence suggests it can offer an enhanced service to students, who now can submit assignments at any time, where ever they are located. It also provides significant efficiencies in asignment handling time for the Registry staff as well as a reduction in paper handling and photocopying and better auditing and control. Reduction in paper storage is a further advantage both in terms of less physical space being required and also in terms of less staff time being required to retrieve data from the archive.
Overview
We aim to provide virtual learning environment (VLE) support for as many of the Department's award bearing courses as possible. These vary widely in terms of presentation format, academic level, subject area and diversity of students. To cater for this diversity, we aim to provide a set of template Moodles, each including a selection of administrative and academic content, both generic and course-specific. We will also produce guidelines and tools to enable full use to be made of the available material, including customising it for any particular course. An administrative front end will be developed to make it as easy as possible to set up a Moodle for a new course. Integration with our current Departmental database, InfoSys, will enable student enrolment to a Moodle to be semi-automated.
Purpose of the initial pilot studies
General approach
A Moodle will be set up for each course containing features and material considered to be potentially useful. These are determined by prior consultation with the appropriate members of the course teams and from previous experience of the TALL team. Surveys of students and staff prior to and at the end of the course, and logs of Moodle usage throughout the course, will provide information on the usefulness of each feature and whether there were any technical difficulties encountered in the use of the Moodle.
Overview
We aim to identify and/or develop reusable, customisable versions of generic content materials to be used within our virtual learning environments (VLEs).
Our initial stakeholder engagement activities, and the review of new course proposals, identified a large amount of generic content created by different teams across the Department. This content covers both administrative areas, such as that covered by our course handbooks, and basic skills training in what might be called 'academic literacies', especially in areas such as basic study skills and library and information skills. It was recognised that, in many cases, this information was delivered at the start of a course when students were not fully cognizant of its importance. Therefore, when students need a specific skill they often require retraining. Reusable online content addressing those areas that can be accessed by students at the point of need has much to offer. However, there is also a clear requirement that information and skills training needs to be discipline specific in order for it to be most valuable. We are working with the library and course teams to identify which topics would be most valuable to develop and how to ensure they are easily customisable to ensure greatest utility and uptake.
Purpose of the pilot study
Types of generic content being investigated
Overview
We aim to support the course design process to incorporate technology effectively from the outset.
A clear finding from many of the most successful uses of technology in curriculum delivery in recent years is that those which make a real difference tend to have been designed into the course from the start rather than added as an afterthought. Thus, whilst many of the technology developments being made by the project this year are being piloted within existing programmes, we also wanted to work with new programmes that are currently being designed for launch in autumn 2010.
Current state of progress
Our work in this area is dictated by the timing of new course proposals. We have worked with several course teams through this process and are currently developing a moodle with best practice examples from the department and links to course design tools such as Phoebe.
Overview
We aim to develop a web-based interface which enables students to register, enrol and pay for more courses online.
Currently, many courses can only be booked in person, by post or by fax. Manual processing of bookings is time consuming and labour intensive. While online enrolment and payment is well established for some of the Department’s programmes, such as online courses (http://onlinecourses.conted.ox.ac.uk/), other programmes have not been able to take advantage of this service. Expansion of online enrolment and payment services has not been straightforward due to the need to develop extra functionality to manage the specific enrolment requirements of different programme types. Our experience indicates that great savings in time can be made by allowing students to enrol and pay for their courses online. In addition, given the global nature of our audience, this functionality also offers a major improvement in the service we can offer our students. As such, this is a priority for development across as many of our activities as possible. We have focussed development in four main areas, as outlined below, with priorities set both by ease of implementation and commercial impact.
Purpose of the pilot study
To extend the functionality of the system in the areas of:
Current state of progress
The first two areas are working well. Development of the additional functionality of enabling students to login online and update their own information is due to come on-stream shortly. Speed of progress in this focus area has been sufficiently rapid that attention is now turning towards drawing up the technical specification for a 'shopping basket' facility.