What’s new in Moodle 2?

1. Scan to download poster Introduction The VLE is integral to most higher educations with HE in Ireland no exception. More than half of the higher education institutions in Ireland use the open source product Moodle as their main Learning Management System (LMS) with the remainder using a commercial counterpart Blackboard. As Blackboard has evolved to Blackboard 9, Moodle has moved to Moodle 2. This evolution to Moodle 2 brings numerous changes for the lecturer and student. This poster will highlight some of the key changes for the lecturer leading with the pedagogical benefits and not the technology niceties. This poster only illustrates the tip of the iceberg when it comes to outlining the extensive changes. The entire navigation experience through Moodle 2 is completely changed for both the student and teacher. For more information visit http://enhancingteaching.com/moodle-2-how-to-tutorial-guides/ 1. Managing files 2. Conditional activities Dramatic changes have been made to the file structure in Moodle 2. The details behind this can be discussed elsewhere. But suffice to say for a teachers point of view the interface for uploading a file to share on your moodle course has changed significantly. What’s new in Moodle 2? It is now possible to access your files stored in your Google and dropbox accounts directly. The interface is simplified and more intuitive. Furthermore the dropdown menu for add a resource or activities have been replaced with a much cleaner interface The new “Conditional activities” feature within moodle allows the teacher to restrict access to a particular activity or resource i.e. Quiz or word document until the student meets specific criteria e.g activity 2 will be released to the student when they achieve a certain grade in activity 1. This has huge potential for providing students with individual learning pathways. In Moodle 2.3 an entire section can be conditionally released if required. 4. Quizzes 3. Rubrics The flexibility associated with online quizzes make them very attractive for both students and teachers. The new “override” feature in Moodle 2 increases that flexibility. Teachers can now give extra time to individual students for example if they have reading difficulties. Or you can set the same quiz to be available for different class groups at different times if required. A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. In Moodle 1.9 Rubrics were available through a plug-in. Rubrics are now available as standard. Rubrics in Moodle 2 are 100% customizable and can be made available as templates across a course, program or entire college if required.. When teachers use the rubric to assess some student's work, they select the level describing the student's performance best for each criterion. Currently selected levels are highlighted in light green. Dr Mark Glynn, Institutes of Technology of Ireland E-mail: mark@enhancingteaching.com Twitter: @glynnmark Blog: http://enhancingteaching.com Frequent quizzing reportedly maintains student study effort and promotes course engagement (Johnson, 2006). However quizzes can be time intensive to set up. Moodle 2 has another new feature enabling the teacher to “duplicate” a quiz once they have designed a quiz with the diverse range of features available through Moodle. Therefore saving the teacher significant time and effort. 6. Workshops 5. Seamlessly linking with other software Workshop is a peer assessment activity available as standard in Moodle 2. Students submit their work via an online text tool and attachments. There are two grades for a student: their own work and their peer assessments of other students' work. The progress of the activity is visualized in so called Workshop planner tool. It displays all workshop  IMS LTI is an IMS standard for Learning Tool Interoperability. This means that learning tools now have a set way in which they can seamlessly connect to each other. Moodle 2 has this capability. A lecturer can seamlessly connect to an external tool e.g. Wordpress or PB Wikis. and Moodle sets up user accounts for the student on this external tool automatically. It is then possible to transfer any grades or feedback that the student receives and import it directly into the Moodle gradebook. An alternative benefit of this functionality is that a student, while studying the majority of their modules in “college A” can study one module from “college B” accessing the VLE in college B using their own username and password from college A. The potential uses of this are amazing phases and highlights the current one. It also lists all the tasks the user has in the current phase with the information of whether the task is finished or not yet finished or even failed. The activity is much easier to use in Moodle 2. Conclusions There are numerous other changes in Moodle 2 that just could not fit on the one page, further changes to the features mentioned above and other features like Assignments, Cohorts, Community hubs, Wikis and the Comment block. Moodle 2 is a dramatic improvement on its predecessor and with structured updates released every six months i.e. Moodle 2.2 released in January 2012 and Moodle 2.3 released in July 2012, the evolution of Moodle 2 will continue to result in further benefits to both the student and teacher. References http://www.diigo.com/list/markglynn/moodle-2