20 Moodle

Improvements Daniel McSweeney – Kyle Goslin

1

Real-time trending course content

Provide an insight to course material that students are

really interested in.

Could shine a light on material other students missed.

Lazy students will know something is up when they see

a surge in activity.

2 Advanced fine-grained logging framework*

Push the existing logging framework one step further.

Add hooks into existing modules

Simple API to allow integration

Unseen levels of data produced

* May need a lot of power

3

Stripped down “Mother Proof” interface

Prevent our “older” companions from getting overwhelmed with the amount of links and options available.

BIG fonts, Simple colours.

Simple terminology

Login?!? You mean “Let me in to that there page”

4

Virtual eyes / Poke

Similar concept to facebook poke feature

Small set of eyes appear

Student knows your watching them and better get

going with that work…

5

Open online usage monitor

Students can see how long they have each been online

for.

Idle time not counted, only actual usage.

At the end of the semester, graph pass rate to usage

monitor. Can be used as evidence in exam boards.

6

Integrated … to PDF renderer

Similar to gmail functionality

Allow any file type that has a general text layout to be

rendered and downloaded as a PDF.

If the student does not have .docx / .doc / .rtf ……

viewer, they can just convert to PDF.

7

3 Life System

Student has 3 lives.

If the student misses deadlines for submissions they

automatically loose a life.

If the student looses 3 lives they automatically are

summoned for a face to face progress meeting.

8

Integrated social bookmarking

Combination of module and browser plugin

Imagine finding a website or resource you like

Booking marking by relating it to a moodle course and even a topic/section of that course

Your bookmarks and other learners bookmarks can be visible to all course learners

Think of Moodle integrated with Delicious

Moodle meets informal group/social learning

9

Improved User Interface

Can a user tell the difference between Moodle 1.0 and 2.0 in terms of look and feel.

Has it changed much in the last 8 years

Can we make use of more AJAX functionality and HTML 5?

Can we speed up use and basic operations for all users.

10

Simplify the Gradebook

I get nosebleeds.

Can we simplify the gradebook and divide the functionality into easier to understand components.

It is by far the most difficult component to train staff to use.

Is there an argument for a basic grade tool and an advanced?

11 Assessment load balancer

A failing of many higher education courses is an inability to

schedule assessment across modules without causing overlap and

periods of excessive workload.

Can we expand the assignment types to allow staff to estimate the

amount of time it will take to complete an assignment.

Can we also allow course owners to set the weekly workload for a

module.

Moodle can then report on assignment clashes and periods of

excessive workload.

12 Student performance monitor

Another failing of many higher education courses is an inability to

spot a student failing a number of modules.

Can we develop an integrated alert system when a student has

failed a certain % of assignments or has not submitted.

13

Backup to repository

Allow moodle users to add a backup repository to their

user profiles (e.g. dropbox)

Automate course backups to to repositories.

14

Anonymous Usage for some Activities

There are instances when we may want to allow users to use activities in an anonymous guise

Questionnaires

Votes

Feedback

Forum postings

Assignment submissions

Peer review

15 Enhanced Student profile

Students tend to move upwards in third level across programme boards.

Not unusual to be managed by 20+ academic staff over course of 4 years of study.

Require a student information zone. Details on

Academic performance, attitude, behavior etc.

Medical needs

Learning needs

Past incidents etc.

16

Core Attendance Feature

Moodle is a course management system with no core

feature for managing real world attendance.

Issues with two existing modules.

Link attendance to previously suggested student profile

feature.

17

Cross server backup and restore

Many larger institutions take a snapshot of their moodle server and archive it (write protected)

Allow moodle courses to be backed to another moodle instance.

Allow moodle courses to be restored or migrated from another moodle instance.

Allow restore files to exceed course file upload limit.

Make migrations easier!!!!

18

Citation Manager for Moodle

Perhaps this is outgrowing the VLE

Useful to allow students to gather and manage citations

in one central location.

Moodle would be perfect!

Could be linked to assignment submissions, peer

sharing and review etc.

19

Make this a resource!

Sometimes you receive a student submission or

assignment that you would like to highlight or add to

your module as a good example.

Example to other students

All students to vote for submisisons etc

What about a ‘make this a resource’ button which

would copy the submission to the file area and allow

you to give it a title etc.

20 Suggestions for Moodle.org

Make it easier for people to suggest improvements (non tracker based)

Allow rating of modules

Show a list of top modules

Show modules by Download

Popularity

Age etc

Keep up the amazing work!!!

CONTACT DETAILS DANIEL MCSWEENEY

Institute of Technology Blanchardstown

Daniel.mcsweeney at itb.ie

Twitter: @DanielMcSweeney

KYLE GOSLIN

Institute of Technology Blanchardstown

Kylegoslin at gmail.com

Twitter: @kylegoslin