February 23rd has come and gone and so has our first seminar....

We had a really interesting group of speakers and attendees from a broad range of sectors and organisations.

The evening kicked off with a presentation from Gary Mahon, Director at Enovation Solutions (our technical partner) with an overview of extensions and integrations that we can now offer to Moodle users to manage different groups of users across the site into programmes with a host of additional management options such as dependencies, course catalogues, waiting lists and periodic reminders (which is really handy for the compliance type scenarios). Gary also provided an overview of integrations with Alfresco to overcome the long standing issue of sharing files across courses and JasperReports a business intelligence application that enables the ability to generate a vast array of reports from the data already captured across a Moodle site.

My overview of new course based functionality that's coming up in Moodle 2.0 was an interesting one as we'd fully expected that Moodle 2.0 would be in beta by the end of February. Nonetheless there are enough interesting tweaks that should be in the eventual beta and subsequent full release to talk about. However one feels about the programmed release of activities and resources as a method of managing learners' progress through a course, there's no doubt that this is some of the most frequently requested functionality for Moodle. The "conditional activities" code has been developed at the Open University and has been around for quite a while and works very nicely (I can now reveal that there was a bug that caused me a lot of issues when testing my demonstration setup that was only fixed on the day of the seminar. Phew!). What's more this dovetails nicely with the dependencies between courses that Gary covered in his presentation.

Our final speaker of the evening was Squadron Leader Andy Perkins of the Royal Air Force. I first met Andy in September 2008 when we were asked to deliver some training by BT (who host the RAF's Moodle site which links into the Defence Learning Portal) at the Defence Academy, Shrivenham. It's great to hear how Andy and the wider RAF team have embraced the challenges they have in their move to transition to online learning.

Separately from the onsite training that we provided, we were commissioned to develop a course to develop the online facilitation skills of the RAF personnel. Andy recounted the impact the online discussions had in moving the understanding of the issues forward, especially as there had been countless internal meeting and many of the participants were physically located just a few feet from each other or in office next door! We have a case study that expands upon this which will be in the HowToMoodle website soon.

Edit: RAF Case Study now on website.

I can't remember all of the HowToMoodle inspired tips that hade found their way into the RAF's own courses, but one that stuck out was the use of the Moodle wiki to create spaces for reflection. Apparently these are put to good use and are very popular. Great stuff!

So, on the list for the next seminar on 22nd June are to find a more spacious venue and to look into some food for the evening (early feedback is that this would be welcome. June will soon be here!