Using discussion forums to create ‘Stretch and Challenge’ activities

I am currently working with various different clients, helping them to develop their use of the VLE system Moodle.

One of the techniques that I show people is how a discussion forum can be used to create an effective ‘stretch and challenge’ activity. Stretch and challenge, is a term that is used by Ofsted, and relates to ‘does the tutor provide an opportunity for the more able learners to be sufficiently challenged – beyond the core learning objectives that they expect everyone in the class to meet?’ A few years ago – this area of work seemed to be one of the key questions being asked by inspectors, and something that caused many tutors problems. Other factors in the Ofsted inspection regime are currently more important, but stretch and challenge is still observed and commented on.

When I was teaching, I used the VLE extensively to support my delivery. I would organise each course by topic, which was often (but not always) structured with 1 topic per week. Within each topic, I would provide certain common items – e.g. some notes related to the topic, relevant links, some form of activity and as the last item within each topic, I would pose a challenging question related to that topic. For this I used the discussion forum mechanism to pose the question. This was for me a convenient mechanism as easy to set up, and I was providing an opportunity for the learners to engage in discussion during or after the session. In reality – in most cases no actual discussion took place within the forum itself, however this didn’t matter – as I knew from observing the students behaviour and from verbal conversations that took place during the session or at the start of the following session that they had read the question, and some had thought about an answer to it. On some occasions discussion within the forum did take place – which was great as it gave the ‘quieter’ learners a chance to air their opinion, as well as giving learners access to other learners opinions (which then helped with their assignment writing where they had to present a balanced viewpoint on a topic – not just their own viewpoint).

Examples of some of the questions that I used in my teaching were:

• There were discussions in the media about sexual inequality within sport, and it was highlighted that women tennis players at Wimbledon got paid significantly less than the men. Tim Henman then contributed to this debate, by stating that it was right that men get paid more as they play best of 5 sets, compared to women playing best of 3. I was able to use Tim Henman’s opinion as an opener for the discussion – which did evoke a huge response from both the males and females in the group – without me having to offer my opinion on the topic.
• In biomechanics (science of sports movement) I carried out an experiment to estimate the force that the bicep has to exert to move the forearm. The reality is that the muscle itself has to exert a much greater force than the end movement (as this is a type 3 lever which gives mechanical disadvantage) – so the challenging question was ‘Why has the human biceps muscle evolved as it has which gives such huge mechanical disadvantage – which hasn’t evolution moved the muscles attachment to the forum further from elbow, which would allow greater forces to exerted by the forearm? (Please comment on this blog post if you want to offer an answer).

The hard part of this process was thinking of a good challenging question, here are a few tips:

• When starting a discussion, making a statement and then ending it with the word “discuss” – often doesn’t open a discussion. Instead ask a more specific question to open the discussions.
• If applicable – asking topical questions (e.g. relating to something currently in the news) will more likely evoke a discussion.
• It is possible to ask a question from a viewpoint that isn’t your own – which allows you to ask more ‘risky’ questions (see the Tim Henman example above).
• Asking a question from someone else’s viewpoint also allows you to ask a question that is more likely to create an emotional response – which in turn is more likely to attract an answer.
• If students do post – you can contribute to the discussion to further develop it, explore other avenues/opinion, reference articles or webpages that are relevant.
• If you do respond to posts – be careful not to ‘kill’ a discussion by giving the students the ‘correct answer’ straight away, instead try to lead them through further questions.
• Questions don’t have to have a right and wrong answer (again, think about the Tim Henman question.
• Think of a series of questions in one go – rather than one at a time. This is much quicker, and it is often possible to relate questions together. Most VLE systems will have the option to time release the dicsussions, or you can manually hide them, and make them visible as required.

If  you can think of other tips, then please add to the comments below.

Using my phone to record audio for Moodle

This blog post is about how a mobile phone and a free internet service called iPadio, helped me to recover an awkward situation by recording audio from my phone – then adding this to a Moodle course.

I was running Moodle training for a client in Worcester. The day that was arranged I had access to my car so planned to drive – however due to the floods we had to postpone the training to a different day when I didn’t have my car, so had to rely on the train network. I was a little nervous as had to catch 3 separate trains, with not much time for changes – so if any of the 3 trains were delayed I risked turning up late. The client accepted this risk – so we went ahead.

As it happened my nervousness was justified as my first train was significantly late, meaning that I knew I would be late for the training. Many people in this situation (including me a few years ago) would at best find this distressing and at worst enter a mild panic – but I was able to execute a plan:

Because the first part of the Moodle training involved attendees accessing an ice breaker activity – this could be started without me – all I needed to do was introduce myself and session to the delegates, and luckily I own a phone that gave me all the tools that I needed.

I used a service called iPadio (I have blogged about this in the past on numerous occasions) – this is a free service which I had previously subscribed to – and it allowed me to record an audio file simply by dialling a London phone number (therefore free to me as part of my minutes allocation) and talk to an answerphone to record my welcome message.

As soon as I had finished recording, I went to the iPadio website (via my phone) located the recording, and copied the URL for that recording. I then went into the Moodle course that I was using during the training and added this at the top of the course as a link. Ideally I would have downloaded the audio file, and then uploaded it as an MP3 file to the Moodle course,  but I couldn’t quite do this from my iPhone – so had to settle for linking to it instead

Then the final part of the plan was for me to phone my contact at the centre – explain the situation, and ask them if they could start the session for me – by simply finding the Moodle course, and playing the audio message I had left for them.

All of this I completed in less than 10 minutes from my phone whilst stood on a cold and windy platform at Leicester Railway Station, and I hadn’t even had breakfast or a cup of coffee at this point (and those that know me well, know that I don’t function until after my second cup of coffee)

Although not an ideal way to start a days training – it did show the attendees one of the powers of Moodle – to be used in situations where the teacher isn’t present (either planned or not planned) but where the teacher is still able to influence the class.

Usually when I do audio recordings, I am sat in my quiet office, with a headset on and using either Audacity (PC) or Garageband (Apple) – which gives me good quality audio recordings, however there are often situations when I want to record an audio recording when I don’t have this set up, and for this using iPadio is great – as all I need is my phone, the final file will be an MP3 which is the best for most purposes (if I used the built in sound recorder in my phone, it saves it in a proprietary format that can only be accessed by people with the same make of phone), and I can do various things including downloading, linking to, or embedding which covers all possible bases.

Reversing the order of a Moodle Course

Many years ago, when I was teaching at a college, and at the same time responsible for the ILT/e-learning provision within that area, I used to hold regular course rep meetings with students (I would give them a free lunch as an incentive) so that I could find out things about what they liked or didn’t like about the things we were doing. These proved really useful meetings and many things were changed or implemented as a result.

Upside down

One thing that came up in a meeting, was a student suggested that it would be better if the content on the VLE was displayed in reverse chronological order – e.g. the most recent stuff appeared at the top and older stuff moved down accordingly. At the time I had never seen this done before and the other students thought it was a stupid idea, but I saw where he was coming from, and as services like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, News Feed etc have evolved the norm is for the most recent content to appear at the top of the list and everything else to move down – so it makes sense that the VLE could do the same – if a course is 30+ weeks long, why are we asking the learners to scroll down through content and resources that they covered 9 months ago?

I have tried this technique with a few courses that I have been involved in, and I think it is a better way of working – the only problem was that within Moodle there wasn’t an automatic way to do this, I either had to pre-create my weeks in reverse order and then set the restrict access settings for each week to make them appear at the right time, or I would create the weeks content as I went and would manually drag this topic to the top of the list when appropriate. Neither solution was ideal and not something that most teachers would have the time or inclination to do.

However – whilst searching for something else on the Moodle plugin site I came across something called ‘Weekly format reversed’ a plugin that will do exactly what I want – automatically reverse the course for me. I haven’t tried this yet as none of the moodles that I am working on at the moment want this approach, and looking at the comments it looks like there were a few bugs, but hopefully if enough people use and contribute to this plugin they will get sorted out. This way of working may not work for all people, but is certainly something that is worth trying, and things look very different when viewed the other way up.

If nothing else – this reduces the need for excessive scrolling, which is one of the main considerations when designing a VLE area.

Adding files to Moodle in multiple formats

In my previous 2 posts I have talked about:

 Adding a file into a content area in Moodle 2

Adding file type icons to Moodle

Another consideration when using files within any VLE system, is there is now a strong case to upload content in more than one format to take account of the fact that there are many different systems out there, and not all file types will be accessible from all computers or mobile devices.

e.g. a word document if opened on something like an iPhone or iPad although it will open, the layout and formatting may be changed and may make it unusable. If the word document is only ever going to be read and not interacted with by the learner, then the sensible thing is to save the file as a PDF – which will work on any device and will appear exactly as you want it. If I want the learner to edit the document – then I upload in both Word format and PDF format.

Again PowerPoint does not always work well on a non-microsoft device. If the presentation is very static with no animations or enhancements, then I will save this as a PDF and upload in that format instead. If the PowerPoint does have things like animations then I will upload this as a PowerPoint show – so that those with PowerPoint have the benefit of this functionality, but I will also upload a PDF version immediately below it – the animations won’t work, but they will be able to read the content on the screen – and if the presentation is well designed then they will still be able to access all of the information. Hyperlinks within PowerPoint will still work when exported as a PDF – although is complex hyperlinks have been created from non-rectangular shapes, then these will be converted to rectangles which may reduce the functionality.

This is where using the Adding file type icons to Moodle technique really comes in as it becomes clear to the user which file they want to download.

I have tested this method on various projects and the feedback from the learners has always been really positive.

In my next post, I will talk about another way to add links to files within Moodle.

Adding file type icons to Moodle

In my previous post on ‘Adding files into a Moodle 2 content area’ I described how files can be added into the middle of text, so that they appear as links with a narration around them.

One downside of this, is that sometimes the links aren’t as obvious as they could be (depending on the theme being used and any personalisations to the CSS) – and also the student doesn’t know what type of file they are downloading – which when accessing on things like mobile devices, can be a useful piece of information.

So what I often do to make the links to files stand out , and to give the user an idea of what sort of file it is that they are downloading – I add the hyperlink on a separate line and add an icon before it to identify the file type. This improves the layout of the page, works really well on mobile devices and increases the usability considerably.

There are various sources of icons, your Moodle administrator should be able to locate the icons used by your system, so that they match – or I often use the following website, which helps search for creative commons icons:

https://www.iconfinder.com/

Once you have your icons, you can keep adding the icon the same way that you add any other image, or another option which I have used with a few projects is to upload the icons to an area of webspace, then add this once to Moodle by adding an image by URL. I then set the ALT text (e.g. set this to “PowerPoint icon”, or “PDF icon”. I then go into the html view, and copy the piece of code that relates to that icon – and I paste this into a word document or similar. Then in the future when I want to re-use the icon, I can just go into the word document, copy the code for the desired icon, and paste this into the html editor in Moodle.

e.g. the code that I use to keep re-using the internet icon above looks something like:

 

 

This may sound a little complicated but it is actually a much quicker way of doing this, and you will know that everytime you add an icon, it will have the correct ALT text associated with it, which is really good for consistency and makes it a lot easier for a visually impaired learner to navigate around the area.

Adding a file into a Moodle 2 content area

Many people that use Moodle will know how to add files directly into a Moodle course, which works fine for some situations, but there is a risk that one ends up with a long list of files appearing on the course page, without guidance to the learners as to what to do with them.

Personally I hate seeing Moodle (or any other VLE system) courses that look like this, as it doesn’t make for good teaching and learning (we don’t usually go into a teaching session, give the students 3 or 4 handouts, and then let them get on with it – we usually explain and talk to the learners what we want them to do with the resources).

So – rather than uploading files in a long list – what I like to do is to add a narration around the files, explaining to the learners what I want them to do with each of the files or resources that I am sharing with them. For this I need to choose a Moodle resource or activity type. If it is a very simple topic, I may add a ‘page’, other times I add a ‘book’ (which allows me to have multiple pages within the resource), or I could use a discussion ‘forum’, ‘lesson’, ‘Quiz’, or ‘assignment’. As long as whatever I choose gives me the WYSIWYG editor (the row of icons that looks a bit like a word processor), then I can use this technique.

The following video will take you through the process:

Part of the beauty of this technique, is it becomes very easy to move content around within the Moodle course – in that if I want to re-arrange my teaching order, I may have 1 link for the topic (which itself links to 4 or 5 other files) – I only have to move this one link and the files go with it, rather than having to move the 4 or 5 files in turn.

Another place where I use this technique a lot is with the assignment tool. If I want students to submit work through Moodle, and I am giving them an assignment brief (e.g. in the form of a word document) I can create an assignment within Moodle. Add the link to the assignment brief and any other required documents into the description, and then the learners are accessing the brief in the same place that they will be submitting their work – which is much neater than putting the briefs in one place and them submitting their work in another.

Why I stopped using a commerical VLE and made my own

In my last 2 blog posts, I have described my early forays into online learning, and using a VLE to support my face to face delivery.

• https://davefoord.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/what-got-me-started-in-online-learning/
• https://davefoord.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/my-first-experiences-with-a-vle/

In the second post I mentioned some of the problems that the VLE we were using at the time presented, and how these barriers were undermining the benefits that the VLE could bring, there was also a problem with the accessibility of the VLE, and with the the college that I was at having an RNIB college associated with it, making sure the VLE would work with things like screenreaders and magnification software was essential. So I decided to make my own! I sat down with the college webmaster and designed what we wanted, he did the clever stuff for me in Dreamweaver to create the pages, CSS files etc, and then I edited the pages using Microsoft Frontpage – which people will laugh at (and I was ridiculed by many ay the time) – but it was simple enough for a non web developer like me to use – and by creating a set of templates, all I had to do was copy and paste, then change the text and hyperlink to the desired files.

What we created did not have the functionality of a modern VLE – (e.g. tracking, assessment, integrated forums, etc) but at the time was a very effective way of making resources available to the learners. To this day it is still in my opinion the ‘best looking’ VLE that I have ever worked with – and I tested it extensively with a variety of visually impaired learners, and it did very well for them. The downside was it wasn’t as easy for the average tutor to upload – which is why we only used it for 2 years before changing to another system.

When I first started using a VLE there were only 3 commercial products available at the time. In the early 2000s the Government threw money at colleges to buy VLE systems, and as a result within a year there were over 100 systems that one could buy. Having built my own VLE and used it effectively for most of a year, the college principal told me I had to go and buy a commercial system – because we had been given money to do so. I spent many days visiting other colleges, going to presentations from companies like Blackboard and WebCT and each system that I saw had a fundamental problem – they hadn’t considered accessibility, and I wasn’t prepared to spend lots of money on something that was less accessible than what I (a PE teacher) and a web developer had put together effectively in our spare time.

So I told the principal that we didn’t want a commercial VLE, and suggested that he gave the money back to the Government. This didn’t go down very well, so I asked if we could use the money for anything else, which we were told no, so I contacted whichever government department or organisation was handling the money (to explain why I wasn’t going to buy a commercial VLE – which would have been breaking the law, by discriminating against disabled learners) and eventually we compromised that we could have half the money as long as it was invested in developing our in house system.

This decision to not invest in a commercial VLE was one of the best decisions that I made in my early career (not that I knew it at the time). Many colleges having jumped on the VLE bandwagon, didn’t pick the best product. Of the 100+ available, most didn’t last more than about a year, with a core of 10 main providers dominating the market, and many colleges ended up switching systems early on, others found the systems were just too complex for the tutors needs and abilities at the time, and many didn’t understand their potential so just used them as very expensive file dumps. The decision to not go commercial, meant the college could easily change what it was doing, and as a result the VLE use could evolve over the next few years. At the time that all this was happening, I started a debate on the ILT Champions mailing list about ‘do we really need a commercial VLE’ and what started off as me just asking a rhetorical question for the sake of discussion, turned into quite a profound thought process – and I am pleased that based on that discussion, at few other colleges also didn’t jump straight away into the commercial VLE quagmire.

Having started the debate about me not liking commercial VLEs, someone put me in touch with an Australian called Martin Dougiamas who was developing an open source system called ‘Moodle’. He gave me access to a sandbox area of his system and asked me to test it for him which I did. I gave him some feedback – and made a few suggestions, (and we spoke on the phone a few times) – the most important one being to consider accessibility, which Martin hadn’t thought of. Anyway things went very quiet on the Moodle front, until about 2 years later when it suddenly became widely available, and maverick teaching staff at various organisations who were frustrated with the limitations of whichever VLE they had, started to use Moodle instead. Over the next few years most FE organisations switched to Moodle, with many HE and Schools also doing the same.

It feels to me that many organisations took a similar journey (although later on and slightly slower) to myself as an individual with the VLE evolution and use. It will be interesting to see what the next few years bring – there have been many debates about ‘The VLE is dead’ but I cannot see that happening for many years yet. What is important is the way that it is used – and making use of the wonderful array of tools that a modern VLE has to interact with and engage learners, and not just use it as a file repository (which was where I started) – but sadly seems to be the norm for far to many education providers.

My first experiences with a VLE

In my last post, I talked about ‘What got me started in online learning?‘ with my first foray (in the late 1990s) into this area of work being the use of a joint drive to share files with learners, so that they complete self directed tasks – either assignments or other activities.

Although OK at the time, the obvious drawback of this technique was that the learners had to be in the college to be able to access the resources – what I wanted was a mechanism to give them access outside of college – the idea of learning anytime and anywhere! I spoke to the then college webmaster @KirstieC, who put me in touch with @Lesleywprice  who was at the time responsible for the online courses that the college was running, and for that they were using a VLE called LearningSpace by Lotus (although I think we referred to it as an MLE back then). I quickly saw the potential of this way of working, and set up areas on there to support my face to face teaching (which not many people were doing back then).

At first I added things to the VLE in a very Ad-hoc fashion, so there was no continuity, things took ages to upload, and in hindsight the software can only be described as a complete dog to use. However I persevered, and in my next year of teaching, I was a little cleverer – rather than adding files ad-hoc, I created a ‘template’ for each week or topic that I taught – this was a simple table that contained a box for key things such as a presentation, notes, web links, tasks for the students to do, a challenging question, and joke of the week (which I have blogged about previously – https://davefoord.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/using-bad-jokes-to-get-learners-to-engage-with-a-vle/ ).

All I did was copy this template then add the files and hyperlink them to the relevant area. This wasn’t rocket science but it made my life easier as was quicker and made the learners lives easier as they knew where to look for things, and in many ways I use the idea of creating a template to this day with my VLE work.

What I was doing at this time, was definitely revolutionary, as wasn’t the norm by any means, but there were still many problems:

• Learners had difficulty getting logged in – for some reason the software was a bit clunky and flakey and sometimes students could login, other times they couldn’t.
• Learners would get confused with login details – when this was set up we didn’t have single sign on, so learners had a different username and password to their college login, which confused them no end and if they changed one they assumed it changed both.
• I had to manage enrolments – The system was such that users had to be manually set up on the system, which meant sending details to a techy who was very good at spelling their names wrong and associating them with the wrong courses, and often taking 2 weeks to do this. This caused huge headaches at the start of term, and put many off before they had got going.

Although there were many problems, and in reality I expect very few learners actually accessed the resources when off-site – this period was an important area for me, in my understanding of VLE use, thinking about the purpose of why to use the VLE, and recognising the real factors that stopped the VLE from working.

In my next post in this series, I will detail the next stage of my journey which was to stop using the ‘purchased’ VLE and instead make my own, to overcome the problems listed above.

The idea of a learner being able to learn where ever and when ever was best for them as per the picture above, always appealed to me as a teacher.

 

What got me started in online learning

Earlier in the summer I was running some staff development, and a reluctant attendee asked how a sport science lecturer (as I was) ended up getting into online learning, so I told them about my first foray into this area of work.

In my first full year of teaching (1998), one of my units was a level 3 ‘diet and nutrition’ and one of the assignments was to carry out a basic analysis of a week’s diet, compare this to energy expenditure and then make suggestions of how to improve the diet. Or in other words the assignment from hell for a Level 3 sport student. Even though this should have been completed earlier in the year, I hardly had any work handed in on time as most students tactically worked out they were only ever going to get a pass, therefore there was no point in doing the assignment on time, instead they would wait until the end of the year and finish the assignment once teaching had finished. The problem was that I had about 40 students, and every single one came to see me for help with the assignment, and although I willingly helped them, if I spent 30 minutes with each student, that equated to 20 hours of my time – and I was still teaching on other courses – so for about 2 weeks at the end of term, if I wasn’t teaching I had a permanent queue of students outside the office waiting to see me (and I was part-time so wasn’t get paid for all this extra work).

I realised that the help that I was giving the learners was effectively the same over and over again, so the following year (and I now had 3 groups to teach, so 60+ students) I decided to create some information and instructions on how to complete the assignment. This included a worked example (Excel), a template diary they could use (Excel), an animated presentation that explained the steps that were needed (PowerPoint) and an instruction sheet (Word) which hyperlinked to the other files and a few useful websites as well. I didn’t have a VLE at my disposal, but we did have a shared network drive that I could upload files to and the students could access. So I uploaded the work to there, created a simple printed instruction sheet of how to locate this shared drive which I gave to the learners when the assignment was handed out. The result was that a larger percentage completed the assignments on time, some even got merit and distinction grades. Those that still waited until the end of term, when they came to see me, I gave them the instruction sheet again, sent them away to find a computer and come back if still not clear, most were able to follow the online support so I only had about 2 students to work with 1:1.

So my first foray into online learning (even though many would argue this isn’t online learning) was motivated by time saving potential for me. It took me about 2 or 3 hours to set up, but saved probably 30 hours (of my unpaid time!) in student support, and the quality of the work was significantly better.

Having created the folder structure on the joint drive I realised that there was potential in this way of working, and I uploaded more and more resources throughout the year, and started to create a resource bank to support the subjects I was teaching.

In my next blog post I will continue the story of how this behaviour evolved into me using (and creating) a VLE to support my classroom delivery, in what would now be identified as blended learning with elements of flipped classroom – but over 14 years ago and about 10 years before these 2 terms became fashionable!

Taken from http://farm5.static.flickr.com/8258/8671894359_891da1da8b_b.jpg on 2013-9-13
Original URL – http://www.flickr.com/50251161@N08/8671894359/ created on 2013-04-21 12:50:39
Orin BlombergCC BY-NC 2.0

Why a VLE is like a pizza

Earlier this week I was presenting at an event on behalf of the HE Academy, and one of the fellow presenters Santanu Vasant quoted that a VLE is a bit like a pizza, which I thought was an excellent analogy which I will build upon here:

Image of a pizza

Many educational establishments including schools, colleges and universities will have a VLE or Virtual Learning Environment (e.g. Moodle, Blakboard, Frog, Fronter etc) and these are used to a lesser or greater extent (sadly usually lesser) with a varying range of some just using it as a place to dump files others using it to its full potential.

So

1. If we think of a blank course on the VLE itself as the pizza base – this is technically edible but not very tasty or useful on its own.
2. To improve the pizza we will put some tomato puree and cheese on top and make this into a basic cheese and tomato pizza, a bit more tasty but not very exciting. The VLE analogy would be adding some basic content to the VLE – e.g. PowerPoint presentations, course notes, links to a few websites and assignment information. This is now edible and you could live on this, but not very exciting, challenging or demanding and not likely to make you lots of money if the only thing offered on the menu. This sadly is where most people get to.
3. The next step is to add toppings to the pizza – and by having a different selection of toppings used in different quantities we can create an almost infinite combination of  pizza flavours, from hot and spicy, to meat feast, to cheese supreme or a seafood special. In VLE terms, all of the different activity types that are available (discussion forums, quizzes, wiki activities etc. each being a different topping).

So the skill of the tutor is to be more like a master pizza chef and knowing which toppings to use and how much of each to create the ‘perfect pizza’. Jalapeno peppers I think are a great pizza toping, but if that was the only topping on the pizza and there were lots of them it wouldn’t make for a pleasant meal – similarly with VLE use – activities like quizzes are great, but if that is the only activity used then students will start to disengage.