Distance Education Committee Newsletter September 2010 Bethany Schaarschmidt and Roger Gerard Topic of the Month: joule A little background: Why are we switching so soon? Most of you recall that we “just s witched” to ANGEL from Web CT. This happened in 2007 b ecause Blackboard, a parent company, purchased Web CT, and Blackboard was not interested in continuing with that product. We a ll had an “interesting” time moving to ANGEL b ecause in our case Web CT was corrupt, thus we were unable to migrate our courses into ANGEL, the n ew learning management s ystem (LMS) at the time. In May 2009, Blackboard announced its acquisition and discontinuation of t he ANGEL platform. Shasta College has received limited support and customer s ervice from Blackboard in the past, which has had a n egative impact on course offerings. For this reason, and the fact that Blackboard is the most expensive option available, the college has chosen not to consider any Blackboard LMS product offerings. To avoid this happening to the n ext LMS we choose, “open source” LMS options were considered. What is a hosted solution? A hosted solution is one where the hardware and software are installed at and supported from a location other than one owned and operated b y the District. Until joule, the college has hosted our LMS in-­‐house; the a mount of back-­‐end work n eeded to offer the volume of online, h ybrid and web enhanced classes that we offer is extensive. This and because of the reality of working with a limited budget, the college decided to go with an external h osted solution for the LMS. An extensive review of the options revealed that Moodlerooms was providing integration with Datatel with joule; this led the college to s eriously look at Moodlerooms as a hosting solution. Although MOODLE is open-­‐source (free-­‐ware), we require a host; this requires a contract and costs money. Moodlerooms offers a hosted LMS solution based on Moodle. Their integrated package is called Joule and pairs products that integrate a nd work with Moodle to complete or otherwise enhance Moodle to allow for a more complete LMS solution. It might b e easier to think of Joule as 98% Moodle; the other 2% are administrative tools that assist with reporting, course conversion, user enrollments, etc. Challenges of hosting in-­‐house: The primary challenge of h osting “in-­‐house” is our ability to provide the necessary resources (physical resources -­‐ servers, and support resources for installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc.) Over the past s everal years, we have had excellent s erver up time on our LMS s ystem, and we and our students have b ecome very accustomed to that. When the s ystem went down, we (I.T., actually) get a notification via pager, and get right onto fixing it. This means that I.T. has to b e “on call” 24/7. Challenges of hosting outside: The biggest challenge is our d ependence on the reliability of the “contracted” environments and the veracity of the “contracted” support p ersonnel, and the fact that we don’t have control over the down-­‐
time. Moodlerooms has gone down s everal times; I.T. and the joule p ilots have not b een impressed with their s ervice. This, on top of the limited customer service the college has b een receiving from Moodlerooms, has driven the college to consider other hosted solutions. Where we are in the process: A joule pilot program was established – 6 instructors, Kevin Fox, Amanda Schwerdt, Ken Nolte, Sara McCurry, Roger Gerard, and Bethany Schaarschmidt were selected to teach one of their sections in joule for this semester. Only six instructors were asked due to budgetary concerns. Selections were based upon students in the courses that will be sequencing to a second course in the Spring 2011 semester. Moodlerooms charges Shasta College on a per student basis within the school year. A carryover of the same student to the 2011 semester would be the cost of only one student in two different courses, as an example. The purpose of this p ilot group is two-­‐fold • Experience the software to see how user-­‐friendly it is, and identify the positive and negative points of the LMS both from the instructor and the student p erspective. • Experience the outside hosting b y Moodlerooms, to decide if we want to enter into a multi-­‐year contract. A nice thing about using joule is they have a course migration tool that works incredibly well. With a few exceptions, m ost of the ANGEL elements ( excluding puzzles and games) can b e moved a ll together into a joule class. It’s the equivalent of moving your h ouse, but the movers relocate a ll your b elongings all a t once – they are in order, but they leave it all on the front porch of your n ew house. The instructor then n eeds to re-­‐arrange everything into weeks or topics (whatever view they choose). From the user e nd, things have gone well. We have all experienced the “rocky road” of learning a new LMS, especially one that is not “locked down” like ANGEL is. The b iggest challenges that the p ilots have identified are as follows: • Server down time. Aside from the outages that the p ilots experienced while going through Moodlerooms training over the summer, the entire s ystem was down for the first Friday in the s emester – for the whole day. Faculty had to find a way to contact their students (couldn’t email from inside the course…), to keep them informed. Instructors a lso had to extend due dates to make accommodation for the outage. Moodlerooms assured us this was an unusual occurrence that they were actively (and urgently) addressing. We have s ince learned that this is not an uncommon occurrence •
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in Moodlerooms – another college using it report that this type of outage has happened at the b eginning of s emesters in the past. Seeing the whole class. When s tudents log in the s ettings were set to bring them to a “My Dashboard” page, which lists some of the a ctivities due that week – s ort of a “to do list”. Some students saw the Dashboard, and thought THAT was the class. They n eed to click on the class title to enter the course – which is not obvious. The joule p ilots a greed to change the settings such that when students log in, they go directly to a course list that looks similar to what they s ee now in ANGEL ( with no assignment list). We feel this will eliminate confusion. JOULE looks somewhat different from ANGEL, and s tudents have s truggled with navigation. The titles of documents and links are fixed a t a s mall, non-­‐bold font, making it d ifficult for some s tudents to recognize it as a link that they should click on. This has resulted in some pilot instructors having to re-­‐think how their course is organized, with additional “design” work to point the students in the right d irection of an assignment. There are no folders. As a result, a ll the course content is listed in a column in the center of the course. It is possible to set up the course to make only one topic/week viewable a t a time, but there are no folders, so some p ilots have had to re-­‐think how they organize their courses during this p ilot p hase. Limited selective release. Pilots have had to manually show content they want the students to s ee, and then go h ide any content they don’t want showing – this is b ecause there is currently n o s elective release for these items, meaning there is no way to s et a content item to b ecome viewable on a certain date/time and then go a way on a future date. However, a time window can b e chosen which dictates when a student can take a quiz (assessment). We have b een told that the n ew u pgrade, Moodle 2.0, will have a folder feature as well as content s elective release. Gradebook-­‐ The gradebook appears not as easy to use as in ANGEL. The instructor needs to b e cautious in s etting the categories for accurate calculation of student grades and reporting. Email. One thing lacking is the ability to mark a message as “high” or “low” priority. Also, emails which are s ent inside the joule mail go automatically to the student’s external email address -­‐ this creates a problem when a student d oes not have a valid and/or unique email on file with the college. Invalid email addresses (such as “[email protected]”) trigger error messages which are s ent to I.T. What this means is that Moodle is s et u p with the assumption that students ALL have valid, u nique email addresses (“unique” meaning two students cannot share an email address). Some positive t hings about joule: Because joule is a moodle-­‐based platform, what the instructor uses and what the student sees is really very similar in form and function to Moodle. • Adding content is e asy. The p ilots are finding that joule is quite easy to use once you get used to using a n ew platform. Change is always difficult. • The email tool is b etter than the one in ANGEL. The email tool in joule color codes email messages – unread mail is bold ( like ANGEL), but read email is highlighted gray, while replied to email is highlighted light green. This makes organization a snap. Adding a student in the “to” field requires fewer s teps than in ANGEL. Like in ANGEL, folders can b e created in the inbox. • Feedback from students has been positive. Once they realized this was different from ANGEL, and once they found the course home page, students s eem to find navigating in JOULE to b e easier than in ANGEL. To date, the b iggest challenge we have encountered in this pilot program has been with Moodlerooms on three levels: 1. One is s erver d ependability – we have b een less than impressed. 2. The second, and probably more importantly, is that the customer s ervice we have b een receiving from Moodlerooms has b een p oor. They have failed to communicate adequate instructions, they have n ot replied promptly to critical inquiries, and have not provided adequate support. I.T. reports that “their [Moodlerooms] implementation team does not live up to the standard that was provided with our ANGEL implementation team. They have misdirected/misinformed us on s everal occasions that in turn have resulted in server access issues with our students and faculty”. These two items alone have driven I.T. to research other, more reliable hosting solutions. 3. A third challenge is the fact that b ecause of Moodle requiring an email address of students, the college n eeds to look at the possibility of adopting a campus policy that requires a student to have a active, unique (not shared) email address upon registration. Resources and Training Opportunities for Online Instructors Streaming video The Shasta College Library offers streaming video! •
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Go to the Library homepage: http://shastacollege.edu/library Enter your 14-­‐digit library card (omit spaces). Click on submit Query. Scroll down to the Database Menu and select either Films on Demand – Streaming V ideo or INTELECOM Online Resources Network – Streaming V ideo Questions about accessing streaming video can b e directed to Carolyn Salus-­‐Singh a t [email protected] or b y calling 242-­‐7751. Additional Training Opportunities These Desktop Seminars are free from @ONE: o
Make it Visual with Free Video Tools ( Wednesday, S eptember 29) Grab students’ attention by easily creating short videos that promote courses, explain complex topics, or demonstrate how-­‐to’s. Learn to create video without even using a video camera. o
Rethinking Your Course for an Online Audience (Thursday, September 30) Learn how to rethink and restructure your face-­‐to-­‐face courses for the online environment, starting with the syllabus. o
Interactive Online Assignments to Engage All Learning Styles (Fri, 10/22/2010 -­‐ 12:00pm) Search the @One website foe many other “Learn at Lunch Desktop Seminars”