Phone Ownership survey

Survey has been launched amongst our joint students to see what kinds of phones and other mobile devices they own. Response has been strong now, after a slow start - over 170 responses now. Suprisingly Apple has featured strongly - IPhones make up a third of all responses.

Moodle Hub

We demonstrated the workings of a Moodle Hub to the Scottish Moodle Users Group at a meeting in Forth Valley College on 4th October. At that point our Moodle Hub was still only functioning between Anniesland and Cardonald Colleges.

However, since then we have hard a working meeting of the partners, and we have managed to extend the Moodle Hub to Langside College as well. Thus we now have a Moodle Hub - a common network - between three instances of Moodle in three separate Colleges. We are inclined to think that we are the first College partnership in Scotland to do this.

JISC RSC Webinar

Took part in a JISC RSC Webinar yesterday, as part of the ongoing programme of dissemination of the project. There was a limited audience, but I managed to give a reasonably concise overview of the project. A considerable number of Moodle users amongst the audience.

A second piece of dissemination will take place next week at the Scottish Moodle Users Group (SMUG) meeting, which is happening on 4th October at Forth Valley College. Roughly the same presentation will be given.

First Videos

Our Complementary Therapy staff at Cardonald College have been working at a great rate, and have produced 17 short video clips, roughly 1 minute each, covering two separate Indian Head Massage routines. We've done a first production of the learning materials from these sequences which are now posted in Moodle. We've produced full screen and mobile versions of the materials.

There was a technical problem with the full screen version using our chosen tool, Camtasia. When I added captions to the video they appeared in the editing version, but did not show up in the final web-based package. This same problem was not the case with the mobile versions, also produced in Camtasia. Therefore as a temporary expedient I used Captivate to produce the full screen versions and added a title slide, instead of a caption, which works just as well. However I will look at this issue. I am temporarily using Camtasia 7, rather than 8 the new version, so it may be an issue with this version.

We will let the students look at the full screen materials this week hopefully, but then run a proper trial with the mobile versions of the materials.

New Toys

We got the Google Nexus 7 Android tablets delivered towards the end of last week, one device per college, and we are now testing these. Took ours to the E-Assessment event in Dundee on Friday and it seemed very impressive. For speed and size it is hard to beat at that price. We anticipate a lot of students will have android phones and we want to test our materials on these devices.

Term Begins

The 2012/13 Academic Term has started for all three College partners. What have we been doing during the summer break to get the project underway?   We have:

1. Set up and tested our Moodle Hub between two of the partners, Anniesland and Cardonald;

2. We have all upgraded to Moodle 2.2.3.

3. We tested a number of alternative working methodologies for creating learning materials and settled on a combination of:

For intial learning materials

• Producing simple videos or powerpoints
• Repackaging these with Camtasia as MP4 or M4V files

For learning summaries

• Using Moodle webpages

For Quizzes

• Creating quizzes on html templates
• Importing them into Moodle quizzes via Respondus

4. We have created a number of sample learning materials which are now available through the Anniesland Moodle, under the Moodle2Go heading.

5. We have created a Moodle2Go logo.

6. We have ordered the software needed by the various College partners.

7. We have ordered 3 Google Nexus tablets as the test devices for materials via the Android operating system.

The Moodle2Go Project

Moodle2Go is a joint project between Cardonald College, Anniesland College and Langside College to develop and test mobile learning materials which will be distributed through a Moodle Hub. The materials will be configured to be usuable by students on a range of mobile devices and will cover three areas of the curriculum - Complementary Therapies, Catering and Computing.

The project is funded at £15k by the JISC Advance FE and Skills – Development and Resources Programme, and will last until December 2012.