Book Review: "Moodle Gradebook" by Rebecca Barrington

Moodle teachers and administrators have needed a good book on the Moodle Gradebook for a long time. Finally, Rebecca Barrington fulfilled this need with Moodle Gradebook, from Packt Publishing.

As an author, I know that it can be tempting to inflate a book's page count with unneeded text. Thicker books sell for higher prices, which means more money for the author. That's why I appreciate an author who writes a book that presents the information that I need, and then gets out of the way so I can get on with my work. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a classic example of this kind of user-friendly writing. Rebecca Barrington's Moodle Gradebook is another.

Barrington begins with a tour of the gradebook, including a list of the Moodle activities that can be graded. Many Moodle teachers don't know that forum posts and glossary entries can be graded. Barrington also tells the reader early in the book that you can create custom scales for the gradebook, while avoiding the temptation to go into detail about those custom scales. After Barrington explains the standard numberic and letter scales, she gives us details about custom scales.

Barrington also covers using outcomes, which might be the Gradebook's most underused feature. If you're a corporate user of Moodle, you will be especially interested in using outcomes. That's because and outcome can be measured by several different graded activities. For example, suppose resolving customer complaints is an important skill in your company. Your company might have a speicfic course on that skill, "How to Handle Customer Complaints." Also, that skill might be a part of several courses, such as a topic in "Dealing with Angry Customers" and also a topic in "Routing Calls to the Proper Department." You could create an outcoome for Resolving Customer Complaints, and apply that to graded activities in all three courses. Then, you can track your students' progress for that skill as they progress through your catalog of courses.

Rubrics are also covered. A rubric is an element of a grade. It enables you to separate a grade into individual criteria, and assign a specific number of points to each criteria. Barrington uses the example of a writing assingment, where the word count, number of quotes, and number of elements covered are all critera that are graded.

Barrington covers several kinds of grading reports from both the teacher's and student's point of view. Knowing what the students will see when they look at their invidividual gradebook is very useful for the teacher.

If you want to get more insight into your students' progress, the Moodle Gradebook can be a valuable tool. Barrington's book does a good job of explaining and demonstrating how to make full use of the gradebook. I ensourage you to read the detailed table of contents on Packt's website.

10 Brain-Based Learning Laws

I am especially interested in taking teaching techniques that work in the classroom, and adapting them for online teaching. My book Moodle Teaching Techniques began as a long list of classroom teaching techniques that worked for me. I chose techniques from that list, and show the reader how to apply them online.

Jeff Hurt's blog entry, 10 Brain-Based Learning Laws That Trump Traditional Education, suggests 10 research-based principles for effective teaching. His article is intended for classroom teachers and presenters. These principles, or laws of learning, can be accomplished online with some specific techniques. So just like we can take traditional teaching techniques and adapt them for online teaching, we can take the latest research-based teaching principles and apply them online using specific techniques.

Let's look at one of these brain-based laws of learning, and figure out how we can apply it online. 

Law 2: Emotions trumps facts.

Hurt writes that, "Neuroscience has proven that everything the brain learns is filtered through emotions. There are no exceptions. How we use emotion to aide learning determines learning’s success."

To apply this law, we should bring the emotion to class early. Get the student into the desired emotional state first, and then start teaching the student. We can bring an emotional component to our online classes in several ways.

Consider putting an emotional, motivational video into the introduction of your course. For example you could begin a course about the oceans with the traditional course description and list of learing objectives. Or, you could begin it with a fun video:

In 1992, a freighter hit a storm in the Pacific Ocean sending two containers packed with 29,000 plastic ducks overboard. Dr Iain Stewart tells the story of how the mighty ocean currents sent them on an epic journey to the four corners of the Earth.

Then, you can state the learning objectives in terms that refer back to this video. For example, instead of saying,

We will learn to identify the major ocean currents, and how they organize themselves into gyres.

we could say:

We will learn about the major ocean currents that probably carried the rubber ducks on their journey, and how the gyres formed by the currents could take the ducks on an endless cicular journey.

Because we are not there to set the emotional tone for our online class, we need to use a proxy to set the tone. Video and audio can set the emotional stage for us.

In future posts, I'll talk about how we can apply some more of Hurt's ten brain-based learning laws.

As always, I welcome your comments! 

The LMS must open itself to the Web or die

ArsTechnica.com has an article on the future of classroom technology. One quote from that article caught my attention:

"The LMS is a great management tool, but we don't see it as a teaching and learning tool," said Groom. "Spaces determine how you think and learn. Blackboard as an example doesn't exist on the Web. You wind up accessing it through an abstract login. It's a kind of cockroach motel, locked into a space outside of time, outside of the Web. Divorce the learning and collaboration from the Web and you're separating it from where most people are doing their learning."

Moodle, Blackboard, and other learning management systems keep adding new features and more capabilities. With each new version, the environment inside the LMS becomes more rich with features. But what are these LMSs doing to open themselves up to the Web? How are they bringing Web content into the LMS? What features are they using to send students out to Web content without losing the student?

One good answer is Moodle's IMS LTI Tool. IMS stands for "Instructional Managment Systems," and LTI stands for "Learning Tool Interopability."

I encourage you to learn more about Moodle's LTI Tool by reading the excellent blog post by Gavin Hendrick.

(cross posted in the blog of my new site at http://www.williamrice.com/blog)

Should you serve videos directly from Moodle, or use a video sharing service like Limelight or Vimeo?

In the LinkedIn group "Moodlers Online," one member posted a question about the best way to share videos in Moodle courses. This is a frequent question. So I'd like to repost the question, and my response, here.

I've paraphrased the question below:

I am creating a Moodle site where all of the training is either WebEx, swf or .wmv based. It will have hundreds of training videos. Would it be better to upload the files to a video repository service such as Limelight or Vimeo, or just upload to Moodle? What are the pros and cons of each approach? I am worried about the slow loading of videos if they are stored and served by Moodle, and about the ability of Moodle to adapt to a user's slow internet connection.

And my answer:

You appear to be caught between two conflicting technical requirements for this. One the one hand, your users would get the best performance if you host the videos and a dedicated video streaming service and link to them from within Moodle. On the other hand, you need to lock down these videos to prevent anyone with the link from accessing them on the video sharing site. There is a relatively easy, technical solution.

The service that you referred to, Limelight, has an optional feature called "Media Vault." It will prevent your students from sharing the URL to a video. See http://www.limelight.com/content-Delivery-security/. Vimeo.com, another video sharing site, has a similar feature for their Pro account. You can embed videos that you've uploaded to Vimeo directly on a Moodle page, and configure the video so it plays only from that Moodle page (only from that URL).

Moodle is a great learning management system, but it's not a streaming media delivery application. I suggest you upload the videos to a video delivery service like Limelight or Vimeo, embed the videos to keep your users inside Moodle, and use content security to prevent them from being played outside of Moodle.

Hope this was helpful, and good luck with your project!

(cross posted in the blog of my new site at http://www.williamrice.com/blog)

Review of My Moodle 1.9 Beginner's Guide

If you're still on Moodle 1.9, you might be interested in a review of my Moodle 1.9 Beginner's Guide. It was written by an e-learning student, so it is from a beginner's point of view. You'll find the review here.

It's just too creepy having Google read all my email and documents

Here's one reason I'm moving from Google Apps to Office 365 in the coming year. From Microsoft's Trust Center website: "No Advertising: Office 365 does not build advertising products out of Customer Data. We don’t scan your email or documents for building analytics, data mining, advertising, or improving the service." And, "Where: You know where Office 365’s major data centers and personnel are located and the logic used to determine where your data is stored. Who & What: We offer clear information on who can access your Office 365 Customer Data and under what circumstances they access it."

Sorry Google, but it's just too creepy to have you reading all my mail and documents. I'll pay extra for the privacy that Microsoft will give me.

How to Add the SRV Records for Lync Office 365 to Your Domain's DNS Records

I am in the process of switching from Google Apps to Office 365. I'll post more about my reasons, but for this post, I want to help you with one of the more difficult tasks in setting up Office 365: adding the correct records to your DNS zone file so that Lync will work with your domain.

The domain I use with Office 365 is williamrice.net. The administrative panel tells me to add these records to my domain's DNS zone file:

There's just one problem with that. My registrar, where I create these records, doesn't give me a user interface that has fields like Service, Protocol, Port, Weight, and Priority. My registrar assumes that if I'm modifying SRV records, I know what I'm doing. So they don't give me an easy, fill-in-the-blank interface for entering the SRV record. Fortunately, they do give me great technical support.

I sent my registrar the screenshot above, and they sent me the following lines to add to my zone file:

_sipfederationtls._tcp 3600 IN SRV 1 100 5061 sipfed.online.lync.com.

sip 3600 IN CNAME sipdir.online.lync.com. 

lyncdiscover 3600 IN CNAME webdir.online.lync.com.

Let me point out a few things about those lines. In the first line, notice that the Service and Protocol have been joined together, with a period between them. In each line, the TTL (Time To Live) setting of 1 Hour is written as 3600. And, each line ends with a period.

Let's translate the information that Microsoft gave me for the SRV record, into the line that my registrar gave me. Then you can make the same translation for your SRV record:

1. The record begins with the Service, _sipfederationtls.
2. Then, type a period (.).
3. Add the Protocol, _tcp.
4. Type a space.
5. Then the TTL, but instead of hours it is expressed in seconds, 3600.
6. Type a space.
7. Add IN.
8. Type a space.
9. Add the Type, SRV.
10. Type a space.
11. Add the Weight, 1.
12. Type a space.
13. Add the Priority, 100.
14. Type a space.
15. Add the Port, 5061.
16. Type a space.
17. Add the Target, sipfed.online.lync.com.
18. Type a period (.).

You're done. That's the line that you want to add for the SRV record, to enable Lync to work with your domain. Also, add the two CNAME records. Their format is much easier, and, your registrar probably has a fill-in-the-blank interface for adding CNAME records.

Remember to leave a comment if this is helpful (or not). I hope that Office 365 and Lync work as well for you as they have for me.