Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013, open to ALL Malaysian Institution of Higher Learning

Originally posted at Facebook's "Moodle Malaysia Boleh" group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/188275691224821/

Assalamualaikum wr wb / Good Day!
Happy New Year!
Academic Development Centre (ADeC), University of Malaya is pleased to announce that we are organizing a one-day seminar entitled: Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013, open to ALL Malaysian Institution of Higher Learning (IPTA/IPTS). We would like to invite those who have been using Moodle to come and share how Moodle has helped them making learning and teaching more effective. Those who are just interested to find more ways in engaging learners are invited as participants.
We would appreciate it very much if you could share this invitation with other Moodle enthusiasts.
Please see the attached brochure and registration form.
Thank you.
A Halim Sulaiman
--
Warm regards,
Academic Development Centre (ADeC)
Level 14, Wisma R & D
University of Malaya
50603 Kuala Lumpur
Tel: +603-2246 3349 / +6017-388 4127
Fax : +603-2246 3352

Moodle 2013 seminar brochure with form.pdf
Download · Upload Revision

IMPORTANT UPDATE ON JANUARY 22ND 2013

Assalamualaikum wr wb / Good Day!

As announced earlier, Academic Development Centre (ADeC), University of Malaya is organizing a one-day seminar entitled: Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013.

This seminar is open to ALL Malaysian Institutions of Higher Learning (IPTA/IPTS). We would like to invite those who have been using Moodle to come and share how Moodle has helped in making learning and teaching more effective. Those who are just interested to find more ways in engaging learners are invited as participants.

Good news! We have received a very generous offer from Pukunui Malaysia (Thank you Vinny!) to partially sponsor the event. We are happy to inform you that registration fee has been reduced to RM50.

Vinny has also agreed to run a 50-minute workshop to show participants some of the lesser used Moodle features (e.g. conditional activities, course/activity completion tracking and orphaned activities).

For more information, please see the attached brochure.

To register online, please fill in the form below :

https://docs.google.com/a/um.edu.my/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE0zTlZDdnh6UGI5N3hKalNNVkJoUkE6MQ#gid=0

For inquiries, please contact 03 2246 3349/3350.

Thank you.
A Halim Sulaiman

Drag And Drop Upload and Collapsed Weeks course format combo to raise the usability of your Moodle 1.9.x site.

Graphic From:
http://dequitypartners.com.au/

syn·er·gy  

/ˈsinərjē/

Noun The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the...: "the synergy between artist and record company"

Davo Smith's brilliant Drag and Drop Upload (DADU) block is a must-have for any Moodle 1.9 site. I have yet to meet someone, new to Moodle, who wasn't impressed with the ease of adding a file to a Moodle course page by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer.

Equally brilliant is the Collapsed Weeks course format by Gareth J. Barnard. This course format is one way of beating the Moodle Scroll Of Death, brought about by the default Weekly or Topics course format. I am using a modified version of Gareth's Collapsed Weeks course format - one that shows the week dates as well as either the week number or a description of the week's topics.

Of course, Moodle 2.2 has the DADU feature built into it. So those of you who use Moodle 2.x are probably wondering what the fuss is all about. Anyway, yesterday, one of my colleagues wanted to know how to use Moodle and I wanted to impress him with the Drag and Drop feature of Moodle 1.9. Unfortunately I forgot that the original block only worked with the default Weekly or Topics format. So I had to switch to the Weekly course format to show him the feature.

Arriving back home from work, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if I could enable the DADU block to work with my beloved Collapsed Weeks course format. So I headed off to http://moodle.org and posted a question in the Course Formats forum. Gareth, the resident moderator and gatekeeper of the forum replied to my query. He informed me that there actually was a patch jointly written a year ago by both Davo and himself. The solution is to replace just two lines of code, as shown below.

Figure 1. Patch two lines of code of dndupload.js
of Davo Smith's Drag-and-Drop Upload block 

I then tested my course page by turning Settings to On. I then dragged two files from my PC's Desktop to Week8 area. Wola! It works.

Figure 2. The Drag and Drop Upload works in the
Collapsed Weeks course format on my Moodle 1.9.15 site.
Such synergy! This raises the usability of my site by a factor of at least 3.

So there you have it. For all half-fossilized dinosaurs running on Moodle 1.9.x (compared to Moodle 2.4 that is), you can raise the usability of your Moodle production site by several notches by combining both the DADU and Collapsed Weeks course format. I have on my site. 2+2 does equal to 5. What other examples of Moodle plugins synergy do you know of? Please share your discoveries with me. Now to impress a few more colleagues next Monday....

Keep Moodling
Frankie "Moodlesaurus" Kam

Journal-like feature of the Wall - ensuring privacy of students' posts

I made this one before the New Year deadline. Notch up one more feature for the ever-versatile Wonderwall on the  checklist. I have added a "Moodle Journal"-like Wall feature. This means that there is added level of privacy for students. The Teacher can also ask questions and a student responds without the benefit of seeing/viewing other students' answers/responses. Works like the Moodle 1.9 Journal mod. Sort of.

Using the parameter in the iframe code,

&Journal=1 

the student only can see messages on the wall that were posted by himself or the Course Administrator. Works pretty much the same as Moodle 1.9's venerable Journal mod. In this manner, the student enjoys a degree of privacy. His or her wall posts are hidden from other student users. Of course the Course Administatrator can view and reply to all wall posts from all students.

Check it out on:
http://www.moodurian.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=4326
Username: studentscm   -or-  me
Password: studentscm   -or-  me

Attached PNG screenshots hopefullly are self-explanatory.

The Wall with the parameter : &Journal=0
Everyone sees everyone's posts

Summary: now the Wall has Journal feature which hides other students' posts from any student user. The student user only sees Wall updates from himself/herself/Course Administrator/Teacher. Student now enjoys a level of privacy. The teacher can remove  the &Journal=1 parameter, or change it to &Journal=0 to revert the Wall to all-see-all content type of default wall.

What do you think of this feature?

Regards
Frankie Kam

P.S., Move your mouse cursor over the grayed-out avatar user account pic to see a nice effect.

Gamification and the Moodle Wonderwall.

I figured out the how to include sentence statistics and have added in a gamification element/dimension to the Wall. It's getting more interesting.

I. Giving feedback with word statistics for a Wall post. 
I thought that it might be useful if the number of words, sentences per post and the average words per sentences might be useful information to be shown after each Wall post.

Try this out:

http://www.moodurian.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=4274

Username: studentscm

Password: studentscm

My iframe embed code is:

<iframe width="90%" scrolling="auto" height="700px" frameborder="0" align="middle" name="Embedded Frame" src="http://www.moodurian.com/wall/index.php?Order=0&CourseId=28&Id=1&Likes=1&Datestamp=0&WordStats=1&WordLimit=200&AdminOnly=0&Email=2&Desc=Announcements&MinWords=10&MinSentences=3" marginheight="4px" marginwidth="4px"></iframe>

The interpretation is this: the teacher has told the class that his/her expectation is that every post to the wall must meet a minimum number of 10 words, and must have a minimum number of 3 sentences. Those posts to the Wall that meet these two criteria will be rewarded with an icon each (gamification element here).

 The student is awarded this stamp  If he or she
meets the minimum words per sentence average.

The student is awarded this stamp  If he or she 

meets the minimum number of sentences in the post.

Check it out. I've done it. That's a whole new element to the Wall. Lots of possibilities to create visual cues to the teacher as to who did what and who didn't achieve what. And lots of possibilities for students to be rewarded with stamps and icons and stuff for meeting the teacher's requirements/expectations.

II. Adding a Readability Score to a Wall post.
Every heard of the Flesch-Kincard Readbility score?

I also surfed over to these sites:

http://www.readability-score.com/  (nice site!)

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php

and implemented the Flesch-Kincaid Readability score test on the Wall.

(The website www.readability-score.com uses the PHP code available from https://github.com/DaveChild/Text-Statistics specifically from this download link: https://github.com/DaveChild/Text-Statistics/archive/master.zip)

So anyway, the readability scores translate as follows:

Flesch Reading Ease Score	Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level	Typical age	Style description
Elementary School *
	1	6-7
	2	7-8
	3	8-9
	4	9-10
Middle school *
90 to 100	5	10-11	very easy
80 to 90	6	11-12	easy
70 to 80	7	12-13	fairly easy
60 to 70	8	13-14	standard
High school *
60 to 70	9	14-15	standard
50 to 60	10	15-16	fairly difficult
50 to 60	11	16-17	fairly difficult
50 to 60	12	17-18	fairly difficult
Post-secondary education (College or University) *
30 to 40	13	18-19	difficult
30 to 40	14	19-20	difficult
30 to 40	15	20-21	difficult
30 to 40	16	21-22	difficult
Graduate education *
0 to 30		22+	very difficult

*) Education in the United States. 

Source:

http://www.mobilefish.com/services/readability_tester/readability_tester.php

Here's a simplified scale of the scores.

   if($n >= 90) return "Very easy";

   else if($n >= 80) return "Easy";

   else if($n >= 70) return "Fairly easy";

   else if($n >= 60) return "Standard";

   else if($n >= 50) return "Fairly difficult";

   else if($n >= 30) return "Difficult";

   else return "Very confusing";

I dumbed it down a bit, since I only have five icons (see attached gifs!), to this

slightly simplified structure:

   80-100 : Very Easy 

   70-89 : Easy  

   50-69 : Standard 

   20-49 : Difficult 

   0-19  : Very Difficult 

I programmed the PHP function from the github link into message_ajax.php of the Wall and you can take a look at the screenshot after a typical post. Mouseover your mouse cursor onto the icons and you have a nice popup text description.

So now, you have not only a numeric Readability score, you also have a set of visual colourful icons to indicate the level of readability of the student's wall post.

BTW, I tried the following speeches on the Wall, and here are the results:

Obama's speech at the memorial wake in Newtown, Connecticut = high 90s

Queen Elisabeth I's speech = low 40s

So the Flesch-Kincaid readability algorithm does seem to work fine.

The php code from the github link also allows me to program these readability scores functionality into the Wall:

          * Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease

          * Flesch Kincaid Grade Level

          * Gunning Fog Score

          * Coleman Liau Index

          * SMOG Index

          * Automated Reability Index

        The same code also can give:

          * String length

          * Letter count

          * Syllable count

          * Sentence count

          * Average words per sentence

          * Average syllables per word

Summary: I've added in visual cues to a student's post so that both the teacher and student will know if the post meets the teacher's expectations. In addition, a readability score is added to the post.

I'm sure that the Gamified Wall can be useful in language classes where feedback is important.

Regards

Frankie Kam