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...)

We had some great comments following this week's Moodle Group Seminar, as ever the blend of varied speakers and attendees made the presentations and networking slots fascinating. There were representatives from global educational organisations, independant schools, content developers, higher and further education, the charity and business sectors.

Ross Midgley from People and Business Developement kicked off the evening with a presentation about the path taken to establish an elearning site to complement PBD's thriving eportfolio based business. A key issue was to ensure there was a clear distinction between the elearning site and the eportfolio site where activity is evidenced and assessed. Ross explained how he commissioned a specialist author to write content and how he was able to licence soon to be defunct content from Learn Direct and adapt it to meet the revised qualifications.

The title of Ross's presentation was "Moodle Minimalism" and he explained how he carefully pared down the functionality used on the site so that it precisely matched his specific business requirements - Ross estimated that he's only using 5% of Moodle's functionality to achieve his objectives. Choosing the right 5% was crucial! Careful consideration of user managment techniques and a custom theme from HowToMoodle mean that Ross can provision a new client with a customised look and feel from within the site in no time at all.

When you're working with Moodle all the time it's easy to take some things for granted when designing courses, in my presentation I shared some tips that keep coming up with clients. My slides are below - there are some comments in the notes when you click through to SlideShare.

Rounding off the evening was Ruth Adams, Global Head of Online Professional at the International Baccalaureate Organisation. Ruth shared a wide range of insights from recent research that provided food for thought about how technology is used today and how that use has developed over time. Interesting facts included:

• 1994 was the year: Mid-year 2,738 websites, over 10,000 by the year end.
• 82% of the UK population are internet users.
• Between 2000 and 2010 the number of internet users in Nigeria grew by 21,891.1% (yes the comma is in the correct position!).
• Average time spent online per month in the US by age:
  • 12 - 17 yrs: 22.3 hours
  • 45 - 54 yrs: 39.3 hours

We're looking forward to the next event in November 2011 and will be confirming speakers here soon.

We're looking forward to our next Moodle Group Meeting on Tuesday 16th November 2010 we have an interesting range of speakers who will be sharing their real world experiences of implementing and maintaining Moodle sites.  Full details at:    http://www.howtomoodle.com/moodle-groups

Richard Summers, Pickfords Group Compliance Manager will be explaining how Pickfords made the decision to migrate to a Moodle based platform in 2009, migrating from an existing system. The entire evaluation, development and roll out has been achieved using internal resources and pre-existing materials.

Pickfords is the leading removals firm with a 400 year history. Both personal and business clients rely on high levels of knowledge and customer service to ensure that all goes well at this potentially stressful time. Pickfords are Commercial Mover of the Year 2010.

Lorne Stather, Director of Education at The Gemmological Association of Great Britain will share the issues faced by Gem-A as part of its migration, including choosing a system that could grow and expand to encompass future expectations while ensuring ease of use for both students and tutors, migration costs, database interaction with existing systems and the increased administration requirements of running an on-line system.

Gem-A offered its first on-line course on Moodle in September 2008 and two years later it is still developing and improving its on-line education facilities.

Plus I'll be doing a short session on considerations for managing a busy stand alone Moodle site.

We had great evening on Tuesday at June's seminar. Will blog about it more when I have a moment but in the mean time here are a few snaps from the evening.

Spotted this brand new development for themes added to Moodle 2.0 Preview 1.

As you can see in the screenshots the theme has some drop-down menus in the header. The neat thing is that these are already incorporated in the theme and can be edited and extended by the site administrator without access to the server.

Excellent. I'm sure this will be really popular and be massive aid to site navigation.

We have a situation where we want to allow a facilitator (who is assigned to the the Non-Editing Teacher role for the course) to be able to edit a label on the course page so that they can personalise their welcome message. However we don't want them to be able to have permission to be able to change any other aspect of the course design.

These are the steps:

1. Login as admin or another role that allows role assignment.

2. Create the label with the default welcome message, save and return to course.

3. Re-open the label.

4. Click the "Locally assigned roles" tab.

5. Click Teacher and assign the facilitator to that role.

The facilitator will now see the "Turn editing on" button and when in editng mode they will be able to edit the required label to personalise their welcome message. As the Teacher role was only assigned for the label they won't be able to adapt other resources or activites.

If you're using Moodle 1.9.x (sorry 1.8. users) tucked away at Bulk User actions (Home -> Administration -> Users -> Accounts -> Bulk user actions).

Filter users as required and add them to the "Selected" column and then from the "With selected users" drop-down select "Add / send message" to bring up the messaging interface.

One thing to watch out for is that the messaging system at Home -> Administration -> Security -> Site policies must be enabled.

Over the last year or so we've been working with Samaritans, a charity that offers 24-hour confidential emotional support via volunteers to anyone in emotional distress.

Samaritans has developed a series of elearning courses to provide a cost effective and convenient way for volunteers to be trained at home.

Read more in our case study here