Moodling at the Moot
Last month Tim Hodson went to Dublin to get involved in the annual UK and Ireland Moodle Moot. Being his first Moot he can’t do the usual comparison and say this was the best ever, but he’s adamant that the Moot was a great event and well worth the visit to Dublin City University.
His main observations were:
- That learning analytics is a hot topic, with many unanswered questions about exactly what this means to different people: students, academics, admin staff and management. An excellent session by Gavin Hendrick unlocked this Pandora’s box.
- That any data extracted from Moodle should be used, useful and actionable.
- That there is an interesting debate to be had around whether students should be able to see learning analytics about their own performance, and whether this motivates or demotivates them.
- That building a course in moodle was a process with many similarities to product management in the software world. The user feedback cycle of testing, piloting, tracking and tweaking of course content is exactly what Talis do when developing new software.
Those of you using Moodle should take a look at using our LTI tool with it’s associated activity module plugin that allows academics to embed reading lists directly into their Moodle course content. We’d be interested to hear student and academic feedback about this tool.
If you want to know more, we have an excellent knowledge base article about how Talis products integrate with Moodle.
