There was great buzz at our November Moodle Group evening. Around 70 delegates from a wide variety of commercial organisations, charities, schools, the public sector and others attended. Various stages of Moodle development were represented and there was much sharing of Moodle experiences. 

Alistair Cockroft (E-Learning Manager Salford Royal NHS foundation Trust) started off the evening outlining how he and his team had quickly implemented a Moodle site to support Manadatory and Statutory Training  at the Trust. Content for the project was authored in SCORM format using Adobe Captivate and Alistair expressed his delight it had all "just worked" with Moodle. The team will be exploring the wider functionality that Moodle offers in 2012. In question time after his presentation there was discussion about how to approach a similar project, although the benefits of planning we stressed, Alistair recommended delegates to get hands on early. He found Moodle forgiving and adaptable if revisions were needed.

Alistair used a Prezi presentation to illustrate his talk.

Carl Hodkinson from HowToMoodle related his experiences in implementing projects in the local government sector. Carl shared useful tips on ‘Getting it right first time’ and the importance of building the project on firm foundations such as agreed project objectives, stakeholder consultation etc. etc. In Carl's experience these aspects are often set aside in the rush to implement and can hamper the effectiveness of the implementation later. Carl's slides are here.

Tim Hunt Leading Developer at the Open University and Moodle Quiz Maintainer was our keynote speaker.

Tim provided an expert demonstration of the Moodle quiz and how to use it effectively, as well as introducing delegates to the expression "eating your own dog food" in the process! Of great interest was the new-in-2.1 Certainty Based Marking. Tim shared lots of tips and insights into current and future development of the question bank and quiz (too many to recall here...)