Moodle Research Publications

In the past decades, the world has experienced major changes in the advancement of learning technologies which has enabled learners to engage in their learning activities anywhere. The penetration of mobile phone internet users in Tanzania has been increasing from 2 million in 2011 to 23mil in 2017 The adoption of mobile-based learning (M-learning) for students who are visually impaired in Tanzania has become a major bottleneck since most of the e-learning contents assume that learners have sight and thus include a lot of visualizations. This causes visually impaired students in higher learning Institutions (HLIs) to face challenges such as technical knowledge gaps. Lack of skills and inaccessibility of online contents, which then lead to drop out of the university. The aim of this study is to determine the awareness and usage levels of existing mobile assistive technologies for visual impairment, and the remaining challenges that visually impaired students face, when using such tools on smartphones to access m-learning content from HLIs. in Tanzania. The research was conducted an observational and contextual inquiry study at three major HLIs. We found that 67% of respondents did not have knowledge of m-learning assistive technologies, and their technology barriers for visually impaired students. Also, knowledge, accessibility of Assistive technology and affordability can hinder the adoption of m-learning in Higher Learning Institutions

This study assessed how students' perceptions of online quizzes and the use of three electronic devices to solve them affected their performance. A sample of 208 students enrolled in an introductory accounting course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona completed online quizzes as part of their evaluation and filled in a questionnaire on their perceptions of such quizzes and the electronic devices they used to do them on. Their scores were collected both for the online quizzes and their examinations, and the data were then analysed using a partial least square structural equation model. Findings suggest that a positive perception of online quizzes positively affected students' examination scores, but not their scores for the online quizzes. The findings also indicate that, while positive perceptions of computers and tablet PCs for doing online quizzes did not affect students' examination scores, those who reported positive perceptions of the use of mobile phones for online quizzes obtained significantly lower examination scores than their peers. Finally, perception of the use of any electronic device did not affect students' scores for online quizzes. Implications for instructors, faculty administrators, and students are provided based on the results.

With the integration of popular technologies such as social media, smartphones, and tablets in the education system, new online course delivery methods such as flipped classrooms have emerged to enhance teaching and learning. To understand implications of the integration of such technologies in education the study examined the responses of 550 preservice teachers. Participants took their regular classes on a flipped classroom during a semester. After this experience, the participants completed a survey instrument adapted for this study to measure their continuous intention to use flipped classroom. The research model, which is based on technology acceptance model and social cognitive theory, was tested by employing a structural equation modelling approach. Results indicated that self-regulation and self-efficacy have a positive impact on perceived ease of use (PEOU). Whereas, perceived anxiety has a negative impact on the PEOU and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy mediates the relationship between perceived anxiety and PEOU. Further, the results indicated that PEOU has a positive impact on perceived usefulness (PU). Both PU and PEOU have a positive impact on the continuous intention to use flipped classroom for teaching and learning. The findings suggested significant relationships between cognitive and technological factors and continuous intention to use flipped classroom.

Will open education replace traditional higher education, or augment it? Digital innovation in the higher education sector is fuelling speculation about the transformation of higher education and the future role of universities. Much of the speculation makes questionable implicit assumptions about current and future business models in the higher education sector. This conceptual paper applies an innovation management perspective to critically examine the use and misuse of the business model concept in the context of digital innovation in the higher education sector. Using Raymond’s metaphor of the cathedral and the bazaar which contrasted traditional commercial software development (the cathedral) with open source software development (the bazaar). We analogise this relationship with the relationship between ‘cathedral-type’ business models in traditional higher education (e.g. universities) and ‘bazaar-type’ business models in open education (e.g. open educational resource publishers). Using the historical perspective we now have on the software industry’s evolution we critique the ubiquitous replacement narrative of destruction and disruption of the sector, and propose an alternative narrative of interdependence and mutual innovative catalysis. We predict that higher education ecosystems will be based on synergistic relationships between organisations that represent many gradations on the continuum between ‘cathedral-type’ and ‘bazaar-type’ organisations.

Learning management systems have transformed the information delivery mechanism. The present study derives dimensions from technology acceptance model and assesses the association between the faculty's satisfaction, perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) in a Moodle-based learning management system. The data collection was done using a questionnaire from one hundred and ninety-nine faculty of B-Schools, using Moodle as the LMS. The findings indicate that both ease of use and perceived usefulness are significant predictors of faculty satisfaction from MOODLE LMS. In addition to the aforementioned TAM constructs, the study has measured moderating impact of demographic variables like city, gender and age. These variables are important differentiators in the Indian context, as LMS is a relatively new adoption in Indian education industry. The study reports that although age is a differentiator between two defined groups, it is however not significantly moderating the relationship between PEOU and satisfaction with Moodle. Gender and type of city (metro versus non-metro cities) have significantly moderated the relationship between PEOU and the satisfaction with Moodle. The study also labels constraints in terms of LMS usage and give suggestions towards its effective use. Henceforth, any similar system must incorporate these constructs to improve the satisfaction and adoption of the LMS by instructors.

E-learning is considered a leading application of digital technologies in educational systems. The aim of the paper is to explore the utilization and impact of digital technologies on an e-learning platform. For this purpose, research was conducted at the Moodle learning management system. Data from the e-learning platform were empirically evaluated in order to find key indicators of student performance in different courses. Student success with the e-learning system was evaluated using a mixed-method: Social Network Analysis, K-Means Clustering, and Multiple Linear Regression. The research was conducted at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Serbia. The results indicate a significant relationship between the performance of students and the use of digital educational resources from the e-learning platform.

In recent years, the growing popularity of gamification in learning-organization has shown that it will become an integral part of both traditional and online education at different educational levels. Schools have begun to recognize the value of a successful gamification strategy in motivating students and stimulating the effectiveness of the learning process. The article presents a kind of game-based teaching-learning environment, a solution for integrating digital games into the learning-teaching process, linking theoretical and practical knowledge by the game through e-learning of accounting skills with special emphasis on the experiential learning method. The game-based virtual classroom presented in the present article has been working successful in higher education for several years, the number of the active students grown from semester to semester, the gamification becomes more and more popular in this level of the education, too.

Over the past 10 years, a lot of universities worldwide have designed different online courses available to their students. The emergence of online courses makes Higher Education a more flexible and elastic concept. The present paper documents a qualitative study that examines motivating and demotivating factors in using Moodle for English language learning in higher schools. The survey encompasses data collected from 137 students and 20 teachers in a higher technical school (Russia) with a focus on students� and teachers� perception of Moodle-based learning. Analysis of the obtained data reveals a set of factors concerning pedagogical, technical, management approaches towards Moodle implementation. The results suggest further development of positive experiences and minimizing demotivating factors in online learning environment.

La presente investigación se ha realizado con el propósito de determinar el grado de relación entre el uso de la plataforma Moodle y el aprendizaje significativo de Post Producción de Ciencias de la Comunicación de una Universidad Privada de Trujillo, se realizó un análisis de la literatura e investigando cada variable para obtener un aporte significativo al momento de plasmar la investigación, mostrando diversos antecedentes, los cuales nos identifican, que, la plataforma Moodle es una herramienta importante para mejorar el aprendizaje de los estudiantes, en la investigación; se ha utilizado la técnica de la encuesta mediante el cual permite medir ambas variables con una población de 415 estudiantes y una muestra de 200 alumnos de la facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación, reconociendo la investigación, como básica, descriptivo, usando un método inductivo, analítico y diseño no experimental, transversal – correlacional. Los resultados obtenidos es que, existe un grado de relación es bajo o moderado según el 0.27, positivo y directa (r= 0.27) y significativo (p 0.05), donde mayor uso de la Plataforma Moodle, mayor aprendizaje significativo en los estudiantes de la carrera Ciencias de la Comunicación de una Universidad Particular de Trujillo, 2019 – I. El cual identifica que las dimensiones por parte de cada variable si tienen relación significativa positiva, demostrando que los estudiantes de la facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación, exactamente del taller de Post Producción si relacional las variables mencionadas

La classe inversée est une approche d’enseignement qui permet de penser différemment la façon dont le temps d'apprentissage est utilisé, à l'intérieur de la classe – l’espace collectif – et à l'extérieur de la classe – l’espace personnel (Bergmann & Sams, 2012; Thobois-Jacob, Christoffel, & Marquet, 2017). Si les étudiant-e-s peuvent acquérir la compréhension de base du contenu des cours en dehors de la salle de classe, le temps en classe peut être utilisé pour des activités qui les poussent à des niveaux d'apprentissage plus profonds (Lebrun, 2016 ; Lakrami, Labouidya, & Elkamoun, 2018). Préoccupés par la qualité de l’apprentissage de l’étudiant-e, nous avons voulu expérimenter le modèle de la classe inversée dans un cour de master en enseignement pour le secondaire 1 et 2 d’un auditoire d’une centaine d’inscrits à la Haute école pédagogique du Canton de Vaud (HEP-VD). Les étudiant-e-s n'acceptant pas toujours ce qu'ils perçoivent comme une implication accrue de leur part (Dumont, 2016) aussi bien que le changement imposé de leur mode d’étude, nous avons adapté au fur et à mesure cette pédagogie active à leurs besoins avec un dispositif légèrement simplifié (lightly blended) afin d'apporter un changement progressif dans le format du cours. Ainsi la technologie utilisée est dans un premier temps, limitée au Moodle et au Padlet pour l’encadrement de l’apprentissage dans l’espace personnel ; le cours dans sa version allégée de la classe inversée comprend des enseignements ex-cathédra, des travaux de groupe autour des apprentissages effectués à la maison et une tâche de production collaborative. En collaboration avec une conseillère pédagogique du Centre de soutien à l’enseignement, une recherche sur l’enseignement (le Scholarship of Teaching & Learning) a été lancée. Cette approche consiste à faire évoluer son enseignement sur la base d'une analyse de la pratique qui conduit à un changement dans celle-ci et enfin à l’évaluation de ce changement visant l’amélioration de l'apprentissage des étudiant-e-s (Bélisle, Lison, & Bédard, 2016). Notre communication portera sur les choix qui ont soutenu l’organisation de l’enseignement. Deux aspects sont abordés en particulier : les motivations et exigences de la professeure et la réception-perception du dispositif de la classe inversée de la part des étudiant-e-s appréhendées notamment via le Padlet et les résultats aux examens.

Vulnerability prediction is one of the critical issues for researchers in the software industry. Technically, a vulnerability predictor is a machine learning model trained to identify vulnerable and non-vulnerable modules. Recent studies have shown that the performance of these models can be affected when the default parameter settings are used. Unfortunately, most studies in literature present their results using the default parameter settings. This study investigates the extent to which parameter optimization affect the performance of vulnerability prediction models. To evaluate our procedure, we conducted an empirical study on three open-source vulnerability datasets, namely Drupal, Moodle and PHPMyAdmin using five machine learning algorithms. Surprisingly, we found that in all cases of the 3 datasets studied, our models provided a significant increase in precision and accuracy against the benchmark study. In conclusion, software engineers can use the results obtained from this study when building data miners for identifying vulnerable modules.

Moodle Course Management Workflow Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment), an open source learning management system (LMS) enables institutions and educators create collaborative, flexible and social learning environment. Moodle enables educators manage content, add resources (in multiple media), create activities (assignment, forum, quiz), enrol users, grade student’s performance, communicate with students and engage students in collaborative and constructive learning tasks.

This research aimed to verify if, among three themes, commonly used in teacher Education for Special Education, any would present greater potential to promote changes in social attitudes in undergraduate students. It was developed and implemented a teacher-preparation program in order to test this effect of the following themes: History, Policies and Pedagogical Practices. The training program was developed in Moodle and was divided into three units, each addressing one of the topics. Eighty-eight undergraduate students participated in the study, distributed in three Moodle rooms. The course environment was composed of three main tabs concentrating the three themes to be tested, and three separate virtual rooms were created. Each room started the course with a theme, which were addressed simultaneously and interspersed. Before and after the participation of the undergraduate students in the first unit of the course, their social attitudes were measured by Likert Scale of Social Attitudes in relation to inclusion (ELASI). By means of statistical tests, it was verified that there was no statistically significant difference in the attitudes of the students for each one of the subjects tested among the rooms, as well as intra-rooms. However, it should be considered that the majority of the students have already started the course with attitudes close to the extreme maximum of ELASI. The results suggest that the topics covered in undergraduate courses present some potential to promote changes in attitudes among undergraduates, but perhaps it is time to rethink the approach and significance given to these disciplines.

Conferencia en el III Encuentro de Experiencias en el Uso de Recursos Tecnológicos en el Aula. En La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, a través delInstituto de Docencia Universitaria (IDU) Moodle fue una tendencia de innovación educativa en la década de los 90, peroahora mismo no está en ninguna lista de las tendencias actuales. ¿Esto significa que no puedo utilizar Moodle en innovación educativa? O, lo que eslo mismo, ¿si utilizo Moodle no hago innovación educativa?En esta charla responderemos a estas preguntas. Para animar al profesorado a asistir, les adelanto la respuesta: Sí se puede hacer innovación educativa conMoodle pero ¿qué papel tiene? ¿qué tipo de innovación se puede hacer? Y además ¿esa innovación se podría publicar en una revista científica?

The flipped classroom approach has contributed to a significant shift in learning and teaching in higher education in recent years. This approach creates the opportunity for students to have increased input and control over their own learning, as opposed to the more traditional teacher-centred approach (Nottingham Trent University, 2013). Since the concept of flipped classroom came into a general use, a considerable number of methods strategies and technologies have been introduced to facilitate this type of blended learning. One of them is H5P, which is a free website that can also be embedded in other platforms such as Moodle. The presentation will introduce delegates to interactive materials that I have created using the Moodle Plugin, and will provide an insight into the development of the interactive content as well as its facilitation. I will provide analysis of student feedback on the usefulness of H5P, which is based on their experience of using the feature. This will provide an indication of how the feature may be further explored and/or developed to engage students in a more effective blended learning experience. Furthermore, I will describe how I have adapted the lesson’s material using the H5P Course presentation activity, creating a slide-based presentation for my English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. The slides include text, images, various quizzes and links to the class Moodle forum, that were added to enable students interact and support one another during the task. I believe that this Moodle feature enables students to work independently and make decisions on their learning. It offers interactive content and therefore students are likely to engage in the material given by the teacher. Finally, incorporating technology that provides students with the opportunity to manage their learning in a more ‘proactive way’ (HEA, 2017) promotes student-centred learning approach to teaching.

The unceasing development of the domestic informatization learning makes Moodle research have received the unprecedented attention, and simultaneously have also made the new progress and the breakthrough: the research of promoting process of Moodle localization from the original features of Moodle and installation of exploration enters the research stage to reflect on; the research of design and development of Moodle-based network curriculum pays more attention to research in the teaching practice foundation to propose the new design model; in the domain that the network teaching and the network collaborative learning are carried out by Moodle, empirical study is received more and more attention; the research of conducting teacher training by Moodle shifts to combine case and summary the model and method of optimization training; several new research areas can open up, including development technology of Moodle SCORM curriculum package, Moodle module re-design and re-development and so on.

This research report was to determine if a Learning Management System (LMS) could increase the self-directed studying hours of Diploma students who studied Information Technology (IT) at Stamford College Malacca (SCM). This was to solve the problem faced by facilitators where students were not engaged to do self-directed learning outside of scheduled lecture hours. A second objective was to determine if the number of hours a student spent online on the LMS would correlate with quiz scores. A third objective was to gauge the students’ level of interest of the course due to the LMS. In this study, an Moodle production site was set up for students to enrol in online IT courses. A comparison of LMSs, with emphasis on Moodle, learning methods, pedagogies and how best to engage students online was conducted. A detailed questionnaire was given to the students to determine if the LMS had an effect on their learning habits. In addition, their online quiz performances were correlated with time spent on the LMS. The finding reports a slight increase in the hours spent on self-study due to the LMS. The finding also suggests a moderate link between the amount of students’ online time and higher quiz scores.

The increasing potential and practice of collecting, analysing and using student data necessitates that higher education institutions (HEIs) critically examine their assumptions, paradigms and practices regarding student data. There is a real danger that some current approaches to learning analytics within higher education ignore the fiduciary duty of HEIs and the impact and scope of the asymmetrical power relationship between students and the institution. In the light of increasing concerns regarding surveillance, higher education cannot afford a simple paternalistic approach to the use of student data. Very few HEIs have regulatory frameworks in place and/or share information with students regarding the scope of data that may be collected, analysed, used and shared. It is clear from literature that basic opting in or opting out does not sufficiently allow for many of the complex issues in the nexus of privacy, consent, vulnerability and agency. The notion of vulnerability (institutional and individual) allows an interesting and useful lens on the collection and use of student data. Though both institutional and individual vulnerability needs to be considered, this paper focuses specifically on student vulnerability. An earlier framework developed by Prinsloo and Slade provides tentative pointers to consider a range of responses to decrease students� vulnerability, increase students� agency and move students as participants in learning analytics from quantified selves to qualified selves.

The European Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE) project is responsible for an ongoing series of workshops on ethics and privacy in learning analytics (EP4LA), which have been responsible for driving and transforming activity in these areas. Some of this activity has been brought together with other work in the papers that make up this special issue. These papers cover the creation and development of ethical frameworks, as well as tools and approaches that can be used to address issues of ethics and privacy. This editorial suggests that it is worth taking time to consider the often intertangled issues of ethics, data protection and privacy separately. The challenges mentioned within the special issue are summarised in a table of 22 challenges that are used to identify the values that underpin work in this area. Nine ethical goals are suggested as the editors� interpretation of the unstated values that lie behind the challenges raised in this paper.

In order to disseminate and encourage the use of remote experiments, their creation and deployment need to be simplified. This work presents a method to easily develop remote experiments interfaces in Javascript and to quickly embed them in Moodle. This solution requires the use of Easy Java/Javascript Simulations for the development of the interfaces and the EJSApp Moodle plugin to deploy them in the web platform. The proven flexibility of such solution has fostered the integration of two new experiments and also the easy adaptation of an already existing one, opening new remote labs flexibility to educational and/or training activities.

The project Learning Analytics for Secondary (LA4S) of inLab FIB is focused on measuring the motivation that students have for their studies, through digital traces. This digital traces are generated while students use web applications for supporting the learning process like Moodle or Blackboard, also known as Learning Management Systems (LMS). One of the problems that the project LA4S deals with, while developing the indicators of motivation, is the inconsistency of the naming of concepts used in the indicators� definition among the different LMS. The ontology proposed in this Treball Final de Grau (TFG) is an standarization of the concepts within the e-learning domain, and the relationships between them. This ontology is a generic result and suitable to any LMS, so that the Learning Analytics indicators will be developed using the ontology concepts. This means that the data will be extracted from the LMS and then transformed and loaded following the standard naming of the ontology. With the purpose of validating the ontology, a data extraction from a school that uses Agora as LMS (a Moodle version developed by UPCnet, organization which collaborates with inLab) participating in the LA4S pilot test has been performed. Then, the concepts had been mapped between the ontology and the LMS using Apache Hive.

The assessment of students' performance in e-learning environments is a challenging and demanding task for the teachers. Focusing on this challenge, a new assessment tool, called Learning Analytics Enriched Rubric (LAe-R) is presented in this paper. LAe-R is based on the concept of assessment rubrics which is a very popular assessment technique in education. LAe-R contains "enriched" criteria and grading levels that are associated to data extracted from the analysis of learners' interaction and learning behavior in an e-learning environment. LAe-R has been developed as a plug-in for the Moodle learning management system. Via an example, we will show how LAe-R can be used by teachers and students.

The discussion forum is a significant component of online courses. Instructors and students rely on these asynchronous forums to engage one another in ways that potentially promote critical thinking. This research investigates the relationships between critical thinking and teaching presence in an asynchronous discussion environment through quasi-experiment, pre-test-post-test design. The results demonstrate that when teaching presence was increased in the discussion forum there was a significant increase in learners� level of critical thinking.

Martin Dougiamas gave the keynote today �Back to the classroom� at the 1st Moodle Research Conference in Crete. This is an attempted summary. Martin set

�د�ت �ذ� ا�دراسة ا���ع�ة إ�� ت�ص� �ج�ات �ظر أعضاء ��ئة ا�تدر�س �� جا٠عة ا�زر�اء ا�خاصة �� ا�أرد�� ح�� بر�ا٠ج تدر�ب� �استخدا٠�ظا٠إدارة ا�تع�٠(ا�٠�د��)� �أثر �ذا ا�تدر�ب ع�� ٠٠ارسات�٠ا�تدر�س�ة. ��د ج�٠عت ا�ب�ا�ات ٠� خ�ا� ا�٠�اب�ات ا�شخص�ة ٠ع 23 عض� ��ئة تدر�س� � تح��� �٠اذج ٠� ا�٠�اد ا�تع��٠�ة ��٠.         ��د أشارت ا��تائج إ�� أ� أعضاء ��ئة ا�تدر�س �ا� �د��٠�ج�ات �ظر ٠خت��ة ��٠ا �تع�� با�بر�ا٠ج ا�تدر�ب� ا�خاص (با�٠�د��)� �ذ�� تبعا� �٠ست�� خبرات�٠�� استخدا٠ا�ت�����ج�ا. ��د رأ�ا أ� ا�بر�ا٠ج ا�تدر�ب� استرات�ج�ة �عا�ة �تز��د�٠با�٠عر�ة �ا�٠�ارات ا�أساس�ة �استخدا٠ا�ت�����ج�ا. ��� �بسبب ا�تزا٠ات�٠ا�أخر�� �أ�٠اط ا�تدر�س� �٠ست��ات�٠ا�٠خت��ة �� استخدا٠ا�ت�����ج�ا� �إ� بر�ا٠جا� ع٠�٠�ا� �احدا� ��ج٠�ع �ا �ح�� ا�أ�دا� ا�٠ط��بة.          ���ذا �إ� ا�دراسة - ��بد�� ���٠�ذج ا�ع٠�٠� ا�٠ستخد٠- ت�ترح استخدا٠أ�شطة تدر�ب�ة أخر� ٠ث� ا�تع��٠: �احد ��احد� �أشرطة ا���د�� ا�تع��٠�ة� �ا��رش ا�ع٠��ة ا�تطب���ة� �ا�تدر�ب ا�إ��تر���� ح�ث إ� �ذ� ا�أ�شطة تدع٠ج��د أعضاء ��ئة ا�تدر�س بص�رة أ�ثر �عا��ة �تطب�� أد�ات (ا�٠�د��) �� ا�ع٠��ة ا�تع��٠�ة ا�تع�٠�ة. This qualitative study investigated the faculty members� perceptions of a Moodle LMS training program and the impact of this training on their instructional practice at Zarqa Private University in Jordan. Data were collected via interviews with 23 faculty members and document analysis for samples of their teaching materials. The results indicated that faculty members had different perspectives toward the Moodle training according to their levels of technological expertise. They considered the Moodle training as an effective strategy for providing basic knowledge and skills about using technology. However, because of time commitments, teaching styles, and individual levels of proficiency with technology, a �one-size-fits-all� training program for faculty does not achieve the desired outcomes. As an alternative to the generic model of training, findings from the data suggest that training activities such as one-on-one instruction, instructional video tapes, hands-on workshops, and online training may better support faculty�s implementation of Moodle tools in the teaching and learning process.

Advances in medical knowledge and changing accreditation requirements present a challenge to fit a vast amount of new content within the curriculum. Various advanced learning methodologies have emerged to impart knowledge on the vast medical curriculum. As technology continues to advance, so does the demand for learning. Many educational programs have adopted various modalities to suit the needs of a diverse student population. Advancement in medicine has led to various new specialization courses being developed which are being delivered as online courses via a Learning Management System (LMS) that has software paired with the Internet to manage the interactions of students and teachers in delivering the course materials. Due to many competing demands on their time, academic faculty have less time for teaching and also physical distance among diverse health care delivery sites makes it a challenge for traditional face-to-face instruction. In such a scenario, one of the best e-learning platforms is Moodle. Many online programs have been designed with the Moodle LMS. Faculty need to develop a new comfort level using Moodle that they presently have with Blackboard and LCD screens as well as perfect their skills in using the system. It would be prudent to have a full-fledged training and tutorial on the Moodle LMS for the faculty as well as the students. The method of learning caters to adult learning principles and is designed to have an interactive instructional module which involves not only reviewing the instructional materials but also practicing through creation of similar activities. The present article gives a review on application of Moodle in e-learning platform of medical education and how to create a Moodle account and set up a course.

This study was designed to investigate hybrid teaching, which is a combination of traditional teaching with Moodle e-learning platform for classroom curriculum. Here, we will discuss the learning effectiveness and the learning attitude on special education students. This study analyzes the learning efficiency, motivation and satisfaction of 20 high school students before and after using Moodle online teaching modules. We evaluate the learning effectiveness on the hybrid teaching manner using a paper exam and a questionnaire to determine the learning attitudes of students. Our results show that the hybrid teaching model improves the learning effectiveness, and the students hold positive attitude towards learning.

We live in an e-learning era, where the fast growth of e-learning around the world is inspiring many educational and business institutions. The rapid growth of e-learning has changed the traditional learning behavior and presented a new situation to both lecturers and students. Lecturers find it harder to guide students to select suitable learning materials due to overdosed learning resources. In the other hand learners spend more time on browsing and filtering learning resources to identify the suitable materials, rather than focusing on learning all the materials. Hence, the learning material recommendation is an essential requirement for e-learning system, which would take the e-learning, to the next level. Though e-learning brings many benefits in comparison with the conventional learning paradigm, with the rapid increase of learning contents on the web, the e- learning lacks proper feedback or the guidance, which is a key in the traditional teaching process to identify the relevant resources. The students who do not have knowledge to find out the most suitable resources, links and references for their studies and the assignments, may waste most of their time on browsing in search of the relevant material, without any guidance. Some of the �good students� may indirectly act as good guides to their fellow friends. The fellow average learners could follow the methods adapted by good students in learning or accessing relevant learning material. They may refer to the mostly accessed �learning materials� by the �good learners�. The lack of feedback in e-learning systems could be overcome by evolving an intelligent feedback system that would recommend the heavily accessed resources by the good students to the average students and that is the aim of this project. The research collected the Moodle log data of the courses that contain a rich set of electronic course contents from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. This audited data of the collected courses have been used to construct �student classification� and �resource recommendation� models. The former classifies the students as �Good students� and �Average Students� and the latter recommends the �mostly accessed resources� by good students. The results show that the resources that are mostly accessed by good students are more probable to be recommendable resources. The learning resource recommendation framework helps the average students who fail to choose the relevant materials for their studies from the heaps of learning resources. By making the website interactive, the communication between faculty and students could be made more effective, hence that would promote active learning.

The interest in developing Learning Analytics tools that can be integrated into the well-known Moodle course management systems is increasing nowadays. These tools generally provide some type of basic analytics and graphs about users' interaction in the course. However, they do not enable a varied set of Data Mining techniques to be applied, such as approaches for classification, clustering, or association. To address this issue, a new and freely available Moodle Data Mining tool, named MDM, has been proposed in this paper. The proposed tool eases the whole knowledge discovery process, including tasks such as selection, data pre-processing, and data mining from Moodle courses. The proposed MDM tool has been developed in PHP programming language, so it can be easily integrated into Moodle as a module for a specific course. Its main features and architecture are described in depth, and a tutorial is also provided as a practical way of using the MDM interface. Finally, some experimental results using a real-life sample dataset of mechanical engineering students are analyzed. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:90–102, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21782

Blended learning that combines a modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (Moodle) with face-to-face teaching was applied to a medical statistics course to improve learning outcomes and evaluate the impact factors of students’ knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) relating to e-learning.

No abstract available.

Introduction: Research about student performance has traditionally considered academic procrastination as a behavior that has negative effects on academic achievement. Although there is much evidence for this in class-based environments, there is a lack of research on Computer Based Learning Environments (CBLEs). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate student behavior in a blended learning program and specifically procrastination behavior in relation to performance through Data Mining techniques. Method: A sample of 140 undergraduate students participated in a blended learning experience implemented in a Moodle Management System. Relevant interaction variables were selected for the study, taking into account student achievement and analyzing data by means of association rules, a mining technique. The association rules were arrived at and filtered through two selection criteria: 1, rules must have an accuracy over .8 and 2, they must be present in both sub-samples. Results: The findings of our study highlight the influence of time management in online learning environments, particularly on academic achievement, as there is an association between procrastination variables and student performance. Conclusions: Negative impact of procrastination in learning outcomes has been observed again but in virtual learning environments where practical implications, prevention of, and intervention in, are different from class-based learning. These aspects are discussed to help resolve student difficulties at various ages.

Educational Resource Information Communication (ERIC) API has been developed which enables the integration of two separate system and enhance their interoperability while keeping both systems working independently like they were. The proposed API can be easily inserted or attached to any system through making no or very little modifications to the system. With ERIC API’s help, educational technology researchers can make their research (i.e., educational games) available and accessible for the potential users as the stakeholders don’t need to put many efforts in terms of integrating their systems into the platform the stakeholders like schools are currently using. This paper mainly focuses on the workflow of the developed ERIC API and talks the case of integrating Moodle and Online Tests System (OTS) so students can grant Moodle permission to access the information of the tests they are supposed to take, whether or not they have completed particular tests, and how they performed in the tests.

The experience of setting up extracurricular independent student work on the discipline of Biological Physics with the application of Moodle Teaching Management System is described in the article. New innovation opportunities of computer teaching make it possible to increase the efficiency of student training in laboratory and practical classes, favorably influence shaping professional competences, provide continuity in teaching. The purpose of the article is to consider advantages of setting up extracurricular independent student work with the application of computer academic complex of Biological Physics which is worked out in Moodle system. Material and methods. Testing andanalytical and experimental studies of the computer academic complex of Biological Physics introduction results were done in the process of teaching first year Pharmacy students of Vitebsk State Medical University from 2014 to 2016.340 students participated in the research. A combination of theoretical and empiric study methods were used in the research: theoretical analysis and synthesis of empiric data, questionnaires, interviews, teaching experience generalization,statistic and mathematical methods, pedagogical experiment. Findings and their discussion.Issues of the development and introduction of the modernized computer academic complex of Biological Physics into the academic process are considered in the article. Attention is drawn to the provision of compatibility of this complex not only with personal computers but also with mobile devices. New functional possibilities for the improvement of the efficiency of studying Biological Physics through intensification of extracurricular independent student work are described. Findings of a pedagogical experiment, which testify to the fact that application of Moodle in the academic process makes it possible to efficiently set up student independent work and facilitates shaping competencies, i.e. satisfies the requirements of the contemporary educational standard, provides the creation of individual academic trajectories, improves the efficiency of the academic process, are described. Conclusion.The computer academic complex of Biological Physics, which is worked out with the application of Moodle Teaching Management System, makes it possible to efficiently set up extracurricular independent student work and improve the level of their training. Key words:Computer Teaching Management Complex, Moodle Teaching Management System, independent extracurricular student work, Biological Physics.

Moodle Game-Based Tool Trivioodle to Support the Learning of Programming Languages and Paradigms: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1034-5.ch011: The challenge of teaching programming languages and paradigms is a very complex task that requires of adequate strategies and educational tools. This chapter

Using online learning platforms for teaching and learning is common in this generation and development is driving innovation. The advances of information technology have significantly changed ways of teaching and learning in higher education. Online learning platforms take many forms depending on a particular application. In addition to Blackboard, Moodle is one of the most popular online learning platforms nowadays worldwide. Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments. In addition, the acceptance of the students to the online learning platform will affect the higher education information and the construction of modernization of education in a certain extent. A number of studies have indicated that the successful pedagogical use of technology depends on students’ attitudes and acceptance towards technology. Therefore, the prediction of students’ attitude and acceptance towards online learning platform is crucial for the teaching and learning quality in education. This study is to investigate the acceptance of using online learning platform, i.e. Moodle by using the augmented version of TAM model (A-TAM) to investigate their behavioral intention and use behavior of Moodle for their learning, as Moodle is one of the most common online learning platform in Hong Kong and there are a significant proportion of Institutes adopting Moodle in Hong Kong higher education. In other words, this study investigates how perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude towards behavior and subjective norm affect behavioral intention so as to actual behavior of using Moodle in Hong Kong higher education.

This article addresses the issue of improving user experience while redesigning Moodle for mobile use. We propose to use UCD for redesign along with usability guidelines, visual design and mobile web best practices. Students were asked to participate in a questionnaire aimed to gather their experience as a Moodle user. Questionnaire results allows us to validate the relevance of Moodle redesign for mobile devices. We conducted a usability test. Usability testing revealed that desktop version of Moodle present several problems related to visual design, accessibility, information architecture, navigation, simplicity and consistency. We propose to document the concrete design criteria, navigation map, and specifications for the mobile version of Moodle. These documents allowed the programmer to implement Moodle for mobile use. Our finding is that using UCD along with usability guidelines, visual design and mobile web practices we can improve user experience.

Both e-learning and in-person pedagogy has become more famous in higher education in recent years that is termed as blended learning. The paper will describe why blended learning is so significant in higher education. Blended learning is possible in modern era using information communication technology (ICT) based learning management tools. Learning Management tools can be classified as: commercial systems and open source systems. Open source system provides affordable solutions in effective way compared to the commercial ones. This paper will provide more advantages of open source learning management tools in comparison of commercial systems. The paper will also compare MOODLE with other open source learning management systems such as ATutor, Eliademy and Forma LMS. At last paper will provide a case study of MOODLE that demonstrate how it is an effective in blended learning in higher education.

This article reports results from a six-semester exploratory study that used genre theory, specifically the ideas that genres have particular formal characteristics tied to their uses in particular situations, to investigate how students understand and use my university’s CMS. The study sought to answer questions about why students struggle to navigate and utilize the CMS, and to investigate how students’ experiences with and knowledge of other digital interfaces shaped their interactions with the CMS interface. The guiding assumption was that people learn unfamiliar genres by determining how they are like and unlike genres they know and by observing how the unfamiliar genre is used in context (Bawarshi, 2003; Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984). Students in FYC were surveyed about the interfaces they use regularly and the devices they use to access the interfaces. What emerged is that students do develop expectations for how a CMS interface should function, based on their experience with and use of both the CMS other interfaces. Because our CMS interface blurs borders between various types of interfaces and because faculty use the interface in varying ways, students struggle to determine the purpose/function of the CMS and how to use it appropriately. Based on these results, this article argues that instructors need to (1) account for students previous experiences when designing a course CMS and (2) present the CMS interface to students as a genre and provide opportunities and motivation for students to engage with and learn about the CMS as a genre.

In the current Information Age, technology is taking the lead in moving teaching and learning beyond that which was once viewed as typically didactic approach to knowledge acquisition. The outcome of this research paper have explored the importance of MOODLE learning platform and its contribution in promoting flexible teaching, and the need for supported action (through bespoke CPD) to assist teachers / tutors develop differentiated learning resources that has a dual purpose of improving flexibility in learning and assessment outcomes for students. There is also the need to foster collaborative working partnership between curriculum areas through management intervention in appointing dedicated ILT Champions to increase teacher confidence in developing interactive teaching and learning resources. In order to make MOODLE learning platform an effective medium for the enhancement of teaching and learning, it is recommended that management incorporate into the college strategic plan(s), a focused induction at the beginning of the academic year for students to familiarise themselves with relevant features of learning / interactive tools available on the platform.

This poster presents a cross-platform learning analytics dashboard on Moodle and Open edX for monitoring outcome-based learning progress. The dashboard visualizes students' interactions with the platforms in near real-time, aiming to help teachers and students monitor students' learning progress. The dashboard has been used in four large-size general education courses in a comprehensive university in Hong Kong, undergoing evaluation and improvement.

This paper describes an experience with an e-learning tool for the organization of georeferenced activities. The idea arises as a result of the necessity to respond to the evolution of teaching methods, promoted by the quick progress of technologies and the new curricula. In this context, the treasure hunt game offers the possibility of combining the education out of the restrictions of the classroom, at the same time that it broadens the motivation and enthusiasm of both teachers and pupils. Thus, this work deals with the development of a new module for the educational platform Moodle that...

Despite the educational potential of Facebook and Moodle, there are still unanswered questions about their impact on the student learning experience in a well-defined instructional design framework. This study aimed to compare the learning experiences of students who used Moodle (control group) and Facebook (experimental group), in terms of Community of Inquiry (CoI) model presence indicators, that is, cognitive, teaching, and social presence. Several learning activities for the development of learning environments were carried out by ninety-seven (n = 97) students who were enrolled in instructional media design courses in higher education. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analysis indicated that students using either Moodle or Facebook as their learning platform had similar perceptions of teaching and cognitive presence; however, Facebook users had a better social presence using the CoI model than their Moodle counterparts. Another point worth noting is that the experimental group’s female participants had better teaching presence, cognitive presence, and overall learning experience than their male peers.

In this study, we aim to improve security awareness education by developing standard, multilanguage and sustainable online course. This talk focuses on as follows: (1) the management of e-learning services on Moodle even with limited system resources. (2) the improvement of the course content. (3) user's behavior analysis of 2013-2015 academic year. Our course "Learn with Princess Rin Rin" provided by Shibboleth federated Moodle, named "GakuNinMoodle" from November 2012. As of December 30, 2016, GakuNinMoodle was accessed 129,581 login attempts from 102 institutions. We obtained several findings of management Moodle and development online course through these years. First, database optimization is the best method for improving LMS performance with limited system resources. Second, Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard could be an obstacle to keep up-to-date content. Finally, the trial of analyze learning records to improve the course according to learner's behavior was presented.

During the phases of course construction, in Learning Management Systems, a teacher can be valuably helped by system's recommendations about learning objects to include in the course. A usual protocol is in that the teacher performs a query, looking for suitable learning material, and the system proposes a list of learning objects, with information shown for each one; then the teacher is supposed to make her choice, basing on the displayed information. Here we present a Recommender System for Learning Objects retrieved from Learning Objects Repositories, that is based on a ``social teacher model", based on the similarities with the teacher in the system, and the potential model evolutions over time. The proposed system is available as a Moodle plug-in. In the paper we show the details of the information decorating the learning objects retrieved after a query, the definition of the teacher model, and the similarity measure underlying the recommendation strategy.

Nowadays, there is a substantial growth in the use of e-learning platforms in higher education around the world. Currently, the use of e-learning technology has become necessity within the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Myanmar. Learning Management System (LMS) emerged as a tool in teaching and learning environment. LMS such as Modular Object Oriented term Developmental Learning Environment (Moodle) is a course management system through the Internet. This paper aims to investigate the undergraduate students’ and teachers’ perceptions on LMS (Moodle) usage in University of Computer Studies, Mandalay (UCSM). Quantitative data are collected through a questionnaire that is answered by undergraduate students and teachers in UCSM. The collected data was analyzed using the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). A total of 318 respondents answered the questionnaire. The results of this study indicate that Moodle is a real support for teaching and assessment evoluation in UCSM. However, there is no significant effect on improving students’ semester grades and the interaction between students and teachers before and after using Moodle.

This paper analyzes the content structure and Moodle milestone to classify the students' learning behavior for a basic desktop-tools on-line virtual course. The data collection phase is completed for a Learning Analytics (LA) process as a first step; by using the generated interactions among students, and with learning resources, assessments, and so on. A first exploratory data analysis study is also done with the extracted indicators (or features) of all interactions to classify them in five traits. A multidimensional parameter reduction has been implemented based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), an example of it is also given.

Factors Affecting University Students' Use of Moodle: An Empirical Study Based on TAM: 10.4018/IJICTE.2017010102: Higher education institutions are faced with the complex challenges of serving increased enrollment levels within tight budgets. This challenge is prompting

In the current digital era, education system has witness tremendous growth in data storage and efficient retrieval. Many Institutes have very huge databases which may be of terabytes of knowledge and information. The complexity of the data is an important issue as educational data consists of structural as well as non-structural type which includes various text editors like node pad, word, PDF files, images, video, etc. The problem lies in proper storage and correct retrieval of this information. Different types of learning platform like Moodle have implemented to integrate the requirement of educators, administrators and learner. Although this type of platforms are indeed a great support of educators, still mining of the large data is required to uncover various interesting patterns and facts for decision making process for the benefits of the students.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education has been associated with the need for cultivating students’ inquiry and problem-solving skills by exploiting appropriate student-centered teaching approaches. At the same time, the Flipped Classroom (FC) model has been proposed as a blended learning means to enhance such teaching approaches by effectively reallocating their learning activity distribution towards maximizing student engagement and scaffolding by the teachers. In order to reap the benefits of FC-enhanced teaching approaches when designing and delivering their STEM learning interventions, however, teachers (especially novices) could benefit from having access to “generic” teaching model templates that they can adjust in their specific needs. In this context, we have introduced a set of FC-enhanced teaching model templates focusing on two widely used STEM-appropriate teaching models, i.e., the Inquiry- and Problem-based teaching models. Capitalizing on this, the contribution of this chapter is the presentation of the implementations of the aforementioned teaching templates in Moodle, a widely used open source Learning Management System. The anticipated added value of the proposed adaptable Moodle templates is to provide support to (novice) STEM teachers, not only in their educational design (through the use of the proposed FC-enhanced teaching model templates), but also in the delivery of their lessons and/or educational scenarios.

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and therefore e-learning is becoming an ever more frequently used teaching and learning technique at all levels of education. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how introduction of Moodle e-learning platform as part of the teaching process is related with students' performance, i.e., the average grade and the average number of admissions to the exams. We also examined the same relationship among different groups of students (based on selected individual socio-demographic factors). The study included a member of the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Public Administration) in the period from 2008 till 2014. The results of the analysis (using a t-test) show a significant improvement in performance at the different (faculty-, student- and course-) levels after introducing the Moodle. The data show that the greatest improvement is seen among students with lower high school grades.

The first requirement for an online mathematics homework engine is to encourage students to practice and reinforce their mathematics skills in ways that are as good or better than traditional paper homework. The use of the computer and the internet should not limit the kind or quality of the mathematics that we teach and, if possible, it should expand it. Now that much of the homework practice takes place online we have the potential of a new and much better window into how students learn mathematics, but only if we continue to ensure that students are studying the mathematics we want them to learn and not just mathematics that is easily gradable. Learning Management Systems handle mathematics questions poorly in general but when properly combined with specialized mathematics question engines, they can do much better and still retain their own look and feel for managing a course and collecting data. This paper presents an overview of two interoperation mechanisms developed to connect Moodle (an LMS) and WeBWorK (a mathematics question engine) for use in the WEPS (World Educational Portals) Open Online Courses. It provides a preview of the type of data that can be collected using these tools.

During the last decades, as a result of the intensive development of digital technologies, significant changes have occurred in the field of higher education. The implementation of digital tools in the education process of future academics conditioned the development of a new learning culture based on the the theory of connectivism. The wave of changes in university education is increasingly present at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, a renowned institution for the education of young people in the field of language, literature and culture. One of the leading changes is the introduction of the Moodle platform, which, as an online open source platform, offers a variety of content for communication, learning, organization and thus provides significant support to the educational process for future members of the academic community. Moodle is a very popular e-learning software that can be used to create online dynamic applications that develop an active and creative approach to educational activities, which is particularly significant for the doctoral academic studies. Accordingly, the main objective of this paper is to examine the opinions of PhD students on the use of the Moodle Platform for educational activities. The research tasks include questions related to the level of studies when Moodle is used, the length of time, the purpose of use, and the type of downloaded materials. For the purpose of the research, a questionnaire was used, with open and closed type questions. The sample of the research was deliberately chosen, comprized of doctoral students at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, who were using Moodle during their academic studies. The research data were processed using a qualitative and quantitative method, using standard statistical procedures. The results of the research indicate that students recognize the role of this platform in their own academic development.

E-learning industry has experienced new dimensions given the technology progress. There are many platforms on the market that are based on systems that facilitate learning (LMS). One of the most used LMS platforms in Romanian academia is Moodle. Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is an open source platform that can be continuously improved but is mainly used in academic education while in pre-academic education it is used for conducting school competitions. The objective of this paper is to provide a solution that can be implemented in the current pre-academic education system in Romania to support students in the Diaspora in their integration in the education system nationwide. The analysis was conducted based on the number of students in the Diaspora who are registered annually in the Romanian pre-university education system and the problems they face in integrating / adaptation. The bottlenecks that they face in the preparation process have been identified and a mix of solutions was offered to be followed in order to enhance the graduating degree in the school education level. The main factors identified through analysis, leading to difficulties integrating students from diaspora in the national education system are determined by curricula in force in pre-university education in Romania and a poor knowledge of Romanian (reading, writing, spoken). Given that the legislation does not provide follow a preparatory year to ensure system integration of these students, they could be more easily integrated with new technologies that support collaborative learning. Additional training through the Moodle platform constitutes the proposed solution to these problems in order to help diaspora students return to Romania and complete their pre-university studies (primary and / or secondary) in the national education system. Moodle should provide students with both modules through which they acquire or improve their knowledge of Romanian and modules from the disciplines of curricula adapted to a lower level. Thus, students in the Diaspora can gradually assume the information and knowledge that allow them learning general skills and specific school programs provided.

Background The concept of community of practice (CoP) has been advocated widely as a means of professional development. These communities are usually composed of participants from diversified background. The diversity could lead to heterophily which is positive for diffusion of innovation, but negative for establishing effective communication as argued by Roger (2003). Good practices in Moodle use could be transferred through CoP, but there are few studies identified the influence of heterophily in the process. Methodology A CoP about Moodle use at a university was observed. Teachers, researchers and technical staff participated in the community voluntarily. There were 10 face-to-face sharing sessions conducted by 10 teachers. An online platform was designed for participants to further discuss and share resources. Modes of belonging from Wenger (1998) was adopted as a theoretical lens to observe the influence of heterophily on participants. Data Collection A survey was conducted to examine demographics, perception of diversity and modes of belonging about participants at the end of each session. Results Demographic diversity including age, faculty rank, teaching experience and Moodle experience was found in the community. Participants who did not perceive diversity showed higher level of alignment and willingness to transfer the knowledge gained to their practice comparing to participants who perceived. The influence of heterophily on participants could be potentially related to individual perception of diversity. The balance between settings of community and individual perception of diversity is suggested to be a factor for the successful transfer of good practices in Moodle use through CoP.

Moodle has become popular worldwide in all levels of education. Although several studies have focused on analyzing the use of the Moodle platform as a whole, few contributions have examined the use of each activity included in Moodle, and its potential impact in learning. The survey collected data from 132 teachers in 43 secondary schools in Catalonia (Spain), considering teachers’ individual information, teachers’ frequency of use of Moodle activities, and teachers’ perception of how the use of Moodle impacts learning. Findings from all teachers suggest that assignment, quiz, forum, lesson, and external tool are the activities used most by teachers, and providing new educational scenarios is the main perceived learning impact. Moreover, only teachers as users of a narrow range of activities perceived the teaching and learning impact of Moodle as significantly higher: database (creation and sharing information tool), forum (communication tool), glossary (collaboration tool), and quiz and survey (assessment tools).

The present study results from a reflection on pedagogy to teaching Research Paper Writing to undergraduate English majors in an EFL context. This paper outlines a conceptualized scaffold with a genre approach embedded and provides students with support for writing a research paper. Through Moodle, a free and open-source learning management system, language components and referencing skills were phased into the online course for students to progress in a systematic order. To raise students’ genre awareness, the teacher-researcher sought to make learners recognize the communicative purpose, structure and linguistic features of a research paper. Consequently, another goal of this research was to evaluate the proposed teaching framework. Results provide some evidence of the effectiveness of genre knowledge in organizing information and developing ideas. Questionnaires reflect a majority of students’ need for research literacy.

Current and emerging technologies enable Open Distance Learning (ODL) institutions integrate e-Learning in innovative ways and add value to the existing teaching-learning and assessment processes. ODL e-Assessment systems have evolved from Computer Assisted/Aided Assessment (CAA) systems through intelligent assessment and feedback systems. E-Assessment (electronic assessment) connotes using electronic technology and tools to design and administer assessments, collect and store students' assessment evidences, grade performance, provide feedback and generate reports. The widely recognized advantages of e-Assessment over traditional, paper-based assessment include: lower long-term costs, instant feedback to students, greater flexibility with respect to location and timing, improved reliability with machine marking, improved impartiality, and enhanced question styles that incorporate interactivity and multimedia. The advent of Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) paved the way for integrated advanced services for: interactive dialogue, controlling knowledge at different stages of distance process and e-Assessment systems. Moodle provides the complete integrated environment for handling all aspects of e-Assessment from authoring questions through to reports for course teams (Butcher, 2008). This study explores how Moodle functionality: supports diagnostic, formative, summative and competency-based assessments and facilitates ODL institutions design, administer and manage e-Assessments.

Moodle has been in use at a university in Japan over the last five years. Its purpose has been to assist first ! year language learners to have more frequent contact with the salient material. It was noticed that student and teacher participation waned within a program of nearly 600 students and 20 instructors. Subsequently, reports of some students harvesting answers from preparation and review quizzes seemed to have a cheapening effect on the overall intent. This article sets off to ask the question, what constitutes genuine cheating and where one can delineate the separation between a preferred learning style and cheating, report about the introduction of unit tests, and introduce readiness quizzes at the beginning of the academic year to reinforce syllabus goals. It is hoped that students will apply themselves to moodle on more of a weekly rather than a monthly or less frequent basis and that teachers will track student progress with greater regularity. Movement to these two ends needs to happen if compliance to curricular goals is to be met more fully. Findings indicate that Readiness Quizzes can perform effectively in keeping students informed and on schedule with curricular expectations.

The development of international cooperation requires cooperation in the sphere of education. An enhanced sharing of experience in the sphere of practical teaching activities implies the increase of the quality of teaching process and of scientific cooperation. Sharing of experience in educational activities implies understanding among representatives of different nations anywhere in the world. It means that through LSM teaching the principle of social constructivism is realized, when participants together create a narrow culture of common objects and senses. The article presents an example of practical application of electronic media to the process of a real lesson. The article describes the process of teaching students from different countries using the system of LMS Moodle, beginning with preparing study materials, giving lectures by foreign lecturers, practical tasks and ending with passing an examination. The training has included some full-time students from the Slovak Republic, the Republic of Dagestan and the Republic of Kazakhstan, and has been realized by applying the method of distance learning (LMS).

This research evaluated the usability of Moodle LMS and revealed the usability problems on its desktop and mobile interfaces from the viewpoint of students. A questionnaire was designed and uploaded to Moodle as homework for 155 students who had registered for two courses at one of the universities in Jordan. The results revealed 17 usability problems on Moodle's interfaces. The 17 problems consist of eleven common usability problems which the students identified on both the desktop and mobile interfaces of Moodle; four usability problems which the students identified uniquely on the desktop interface of Moodle; and two usability problems which the students identified uniquely on the mobile interface of Moodle. The results of this research provide useful guidance for academic institutions and universities which use Moodle regarding usability issues that should be addressed on Moodle's interfaces in order to reap the advantages of a usable LMS.

هدفت هذه الدراسة النوعية إلى تقصي وجهات نظر أعضاء هيئة التدريس في جامعة الزرقاء الخاصة في الأردن، حول برنامج تدريبي لاستخدام نظام إدارة التعلم (الموديل)، وأثر هذا التدريب على ممارساتهم التدريسية. وقد جُمعت البيانات من خلال المقابلات الشخصية مع 23 عضو هيئة تدريس، و تحليل نماذج من المواد التعليمية لهم. وقد أشارت النتائج إلى أن أعضاء هيئة التدريس كان لديهم وجهات نظر مختلفة فيما يتعلق بالبرنامج التدريبي الخاص (بالموديل)، وذلك تبعاً لمستوى خبراتهم في استخدام التكنولوجيا. وقد رأوا أن البرنامج التدريبي استراتيجية فعالة لتزويدهم بالمعرفة والمهارات الأساسية لاستخدام التكنولوجيا. لكن وبسبب التزاماتهم الأخرى، وأنماط التدريس، ومستوياتهم المختلفة في استخدام التكنولوجيا، فإن برنامجاً عمومياً واحداً للجميع لا يحقق الأهداف المطلوبة. ولهذا فإن الدراسة - وكبديل للنموذج العمومي المستخدم - تقترح استخدام أنشطة تدريبية أخرى مثل التعليم: واحد لواحد، وأشرطة الفيديو التعليمية، والورش العملية التطبيقية، والتدريب الإلكتروني، حيث إن هذه الأنشطة تدعم جهود أعضاء هيئة التدريس بصورة أكثر فعالية لتطبيق أدوات (الموديل) في العملية التعليمية التعلمية. This qualitative study investigated the faculty members’ perceptions of a Moodle LMS training program and the impact of this training on their instructional practice at Zarqa Private University in Jordan. Data were collected via interviews with 23 faculty members and document analysis for samples of their teaching materials. The results indicated that faculty members had different perspectives toward the Moodle training according to their levels of technological expertise. They considered the Moodle training as an effective strategy for providing basic knowledge and skills about using technology. However, because of time commitments, teaching styles, and individual levels of proficiency with technology, a “one-size-fits-all” training program for faculty does not achieve the desired outcomes. As an alternative to the generic model of training, findings from the data suggest that training activities such as one-on-one instruction, instructional video tapes, hands-on workshops, and online training may better support faculty’s implementation of Moodle tools in the teaching and learning process.

Advances in medical knowledge and changing accreditation requirements present a challenge to fit a vast amount of new content within the curriculum. Various advanced learning methodologies have emerged to impart knowledge on the vast medical curriculum. As technology continues to advance, so does the demand for learning. Many educational programs have adopted various modalities to suit the needs of a diverse student population. Advancement in medicine has led to various new specialization courses being developed which are being delivered as online courses via a Learning Management System (LMS) that has software paired with the Internet to manage the interactions of students and teachers in delivering the course materials. Due to many competing demands on their time, academic faculty have less time for teaching and also physical distance among diverse health care delivery sites makes it a challenge for traditional face-to-face instruction. In such a scenario, one of the best e-learning platforms is Moodle. Many online programs have been designed with the Moodle LMS. Faculty need to develop a new comfort level using Moodle that they presently have with Blackboard and LCD screens as well as perfect their skills in using the system. It would be prudent to have a full-fledged training and tutorial on the Moodle LMS for the faculty as well as the students. The method of learning caters to adult learning principles and is designed to have an interactive instructional module which involves not only reviewing the instructional materials but also practicing through creation of similar activities. The present article gives a review on application of Moodle in e-learning platform of medical education and how to create a Moodle account and set up a course.

Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle is an open source learning management system (LMS), meaning it is free to anybody under the terms of the General Public License (Brandi, 2005). Many institutions have moved to the Moodle system and usage has grown since its introduction in 2003. Familiarity with Blackboard and WebCT helps with the transition, but Moodle possesses some unique characteristics that make it both better as well as more frustrating than alternative course management systems. Moodle provides a platform to facilitate interaction and create a dynamic learning environment for face-to-face classroom and blended course formats, as well as online courses. However, it can be time-consuming for instructors to learn how to utilize its various features.

The search for ways to empower end users in activities such as programming and application customization has been subject of great effort among the research community, leading to the development of EUD environments, proper for end user’s activities. Among such environments there are the ones that have multiple layers of (distinct) users, consequently allowing multiple customizations. As an example, we have the Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), with focus on education. In the particular case of VLEs, we are interested in verifying the discourse continuity after multiple customizations by many users, looking at how it impacts on teacher’s self-expression at the end of this chain, and how this expression is perceived by the students while interacting with the product of their teacher’s effort. This is part of a qualitative and descriptive evaluation with theoretical fundamentals on the Semiotic Engineering theory, the self-expression phenomenon, and end-user development practices. We have conducted three studies using Moodle as the VLE of choice. The first one identified three ways by which teachers practice self-expression via Moodle: through written language, interface customization, and expression through content, and Study 2 revealed that students perceive these same ways of expression. Finally, the inspections and the analyses of the interviews and questionnaires applied during Study 3 have confirmed these results, even after many customizations. That is, the teacher’s self (e.g., personality) is present and recognizable via interface. By taking EUD under the perspective of the Semiotic Engineering theory and self-expression, we were able to study the metacommunication intrinsic to multilevel customization software such as Moodle.

The research proposes an analysis of Flipped Classroom Active Learning Methodology and Inverted Mastery Learning, which aims to help the student to perceive him/her responsibility for the construction of their own knowledge, promoting their autonomy and mobilizing their cognitive abilities to transform them into knowledge connected with the reality in which it is inserted. This study addresses the use of Flipped Classroom as a pedagogical methodology in Distance Education, exclusively on LMS Moodle forums. The results allow recognizing the theoretical references of Flipped Classroom and Inverted Mastery Learning, as well as the principles that support them: Flexible Environment, Learning Culture, Intentional or Directed Content and Qualified Educator, especially if they were used in the Planning and Structuring of the discussion forum addressed in this research. The potentialities and difficulties in the use of these Active Learning Methodologies in the teaching-learning process in Distance Education were also highlighted.

This study was conducted to remedy the shortcomings of the curriculum that the authors had developed for the course Consecutive Interpreting. The curriculum had been designed adopting a social constructivist framework and implemented for a semester to detect the imperfections. Since the main problems centered on the paucity of learners' interactions and ...

Understanding three-dimensional (3D) forms is very important for anatomy learning. Most methods of anatomy teaching are offered to students through two-dimensional (2D) resources, such as videos and images. In order to support anatomy teaching and learning, many software solutions have been developed to allow the interaction and visualization of 3D virtual models using several techniques and technologies. Even solutions that offer great visual resources lack common teaching and learning environments features. This article aims to present the SPackageCreator3D, a tool to create 3D SCORM packages to the Moodle platform, which is used by a large number of educational institutions, being one of the most popular teaching and learning management platforms, validated by educators and supported by pedagogical a methodology. In order to test the 3D SCORM packages created by the SPackageCreator3D, an evaluation with 32 students was performed, indicating potential uses and needed improvements.

This study was designed to investigate hybrid teaching, which is a combination of traditional teaching with Moodle e-learning platform for classroom curriculum. Here, we will discuss the learning effectiveness and the learning attitude on special education students. This study analyzes the learning efficiency, motivation and satisfaction of 20 high school students before and after using Moodle online teaching modules. We evaluate the learning effectiveness on the hybrid teaching manner using a paper exam and a questionnaire to determine the learning attitudes of students. Our results show that the hybrid teaching model improves the learning effectiveness, and the students hold positive attitude towards learning.

Effective Learning Through Moodle Management, Social Media, and Peer-Guided Learning: 10.4018/978-1-5225-4080-9.ch006: The old method of teacher-centric learning has been criticized as a less effective method of teaching and learning. Academics have been implementing newer and

Formal feedback on assessments is given to students half way through the semester for a lot of tertiary level courses. For some students, it can be too late to change their study habits and they might not have realised that they were struggling before getting the feedback. Receiving late feedback can also result in lowering learner’s motivation as well. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of providing regular feedback on students’ academic achievement. The sample group included 92 students from semester 2 2016 and 57 students from semester 1 2017. They were the first-year Bachelor Computer Science students at UNITEC Institute of Technology, New Zealand, doing an introductory database course. The course had three assessments in 2016 including two computers based tests and a final exam on paper. Weekly quizzes were introduced in 2017 with the aim of providing early regular feedback to students. Preliminary results show that providing this feedback early on did not significantly improve the results of their first formal assessment. More studies are needed to examine the effectiveness of weekly quizzes on students’ performance throughout the semester. Subjective evaluation showed that majority of students liked getting regular feedback in form of quizzes and found it valuable for their learning.

This study evaluates the impact of web-based blended learning in the physiology course at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Montenegro. The two main goals of the study were: to determine the impact of e-learning on student success in mastering the course, and to assess user satisfaction after the introduction of e-learning. The study compared a group of students who attended the physiology course before, with a group of students who attended the physiology course after the Moodle platform was fully implemented as an educational tool. Formative and summative assessment scores were compared between these two groups. The impact of high vs. low Moodle use on the assessment scores was analyzed. The satisfaction among Moodle users was assessed by the survey. The study found that attendance of face-to-face lectures had a positive impact on academic performance. The introduction of Moodle in the presented model of teaching increased interest of students, attendance of face-to-face lectures, as well as formative and summative scores. High frequency of Moodle use was not always associated with better academic performance, suggesting that the introduction of a new method of teaching was most likely equally accepted by low- and high-achieving students. Most of the students agreed that Moodle was easy to use and it complemented traditional teaching very well, but it could not completely replace traditional face-to-face lectures. The study supports continuing the use of web-based learning in a form of blended learning for physiology, as well as for other courses in medical education.

Regarding the problems existing in C Language teaching in Anshun College, we analyzed the current situation of NCRE and also analyzed the actual curriculum reform from course teaching, experiment, and practice by use of Moodle, in the hope of improving the actual teaching effect, exciting students’ interest in learning, cultivating students’ practical ability, and enhancing the NCRE passing rate.

This paper proposes an automatic approach that detects students’ learning styles in order to provide adaptive courses in Moodle. This approach is based on students’ responses to the ILS and the analysis of their interaction behavior within Moodle by applying a data mining technique. In conjunction to this, an adaptive mechanism that was implemented in Moodle is presented. This adaptive mechanism builds the user model based mainly on the proposed approach for automatic detection of learning styles in order to adapt the presentation and the proposed navigation to students’ different learning styles and educational objectives. An evaluation study was conducted to evaluate the proposed approach for automatic detection of learning styles and the effect of the adaptive mechanism. Two groups of students were formed, namely the experimental and the control. The first had access to a Moodle course that automatically detected their learning styles and exploited the adaptive mechanism, whilst the second had access to the standard version of a Moodle course. The results were promising since they indicated that our proposed approach for automatic detection of learning styles attained adequate precision compared to other works, even though the patterns considered are less complex. Additionally, the results indicated that the adaptive mechanism positively affected students’ motivation and performance.

The paper suggests the implementation of association analysis for improving the process of e-testing in blended learning environment. The research has been conducted using knowledge tests at the Computer Graphics Moodle Course. In the preprocessing phase, data matrices have been created and prepared for the process of discovering significant relationships and links between students' answers to the questions from preparatory tests and those for testing knowledge, the ways of doing, and achieved results. By implementing Apriori and Predictive Apriori algorithms, a great number of association rules has been discovered. Important and interesting rules have been singled out by implementing objective and subjective assessment measures. The examples of interesting rules, as well as discovered patterns in items' relationships, have also been presented. The contribution of the described case study is visible in providing important feedback which enables the teacher to get a better insight into the concepts of created tests and decide on how to make changes to improve testing.

A Moodle-based podcast teaching platform is designed for the course of aerobic gymnastics. Although abundant teaching tools and resources are available on the Moodle teaching platform, it doesn’t support playing video and audio. Thus, podcast module is added. Podcast, as an innovative medium form, is convenient for playing video and audio. The key to learning aerobic gymnastics is to master the essentials of movements. We adopted the patented technology of a method and device of real-time animation generation in video in teaching, to help learners comprehend movements of aerobic gymnastics and raise learning efficiency. We also performed contrast experiment to check the effect of the teaching platform in teaching practice. The results show that the experimental group performed better than the control group in respect of both routine and movement, and demonstration capability. The platform is largely helpful for learners to comprehend the movements and raise learning efficiency. Thus, these findings indicate the Moodle-based podcast teaching platform has a good application prospect in physical education.

Currently e-learning has become an integral part of university education. It is also an integral part of distant education, which is now rapidly developing. One of the most effective patterns of modern higher education is blended learning that combines traditional classroom activities with elements of distance training, and makes a wide use of modern information technology. The study covers the authors’ experience in the implementation of blended learning in teaching physics through LMS Moodle to undergraduates who follow the Professional Education program "Energetics". It focuses on the structure of the distant education modules developed by the authors as well as on the methods of their use. While analyzing the results, the authors came to the conclusion about educational expediency of blended learning modules in the framework of undergraduate programs. Actualmente el e-learning se ha convertido en parte integral de la educación universitaria. Es también una parte integral de la educación distante, que ahora se está desarrollando rápidamente. Uno de los patrones más efectivos de la educación superior moderna es la mezcla de aprendizaje que combina las actividades tradicionales de aula con elementos de formación a distancia, y hace un amplio uso de la tecnología de la información moderna. El estudio cubre la experiencia de los autores en la implementación de aprendizaje mixto en la enseñanza de la física a través de LMS moodle a los estudiantes universitarios que siguen el programa de educación profesional "energética". Se centra en la estructura de los módulos educativos distantes desarrollados por los autores así como en los métodos de su uso. Mientras analizaba los resultados, los autores llegaron a la conclusión acerca de la conveniencia educativa de los módulos de aprendizaje mixto en el marco de los programas de licenciatura.

This research is based on the vastness of Indonesia territory consisting of islands and uneven distribution of population to state education need to follow the development and technological progress which has changed the paradigm of the concept of learning that is conventional.Currently in the midst of technological advances required variations of methods that provide more opportunities for teachers and students to learn independently by utilizing various sources. Teaching and Learning Process is required by utilizing technological elements and utilizing wider learning resources by not abandoning the conventional pattern of direct guidance from the teacher. LESSON LEARNING AND LEARNING TEACHING to the global world today that has meaning in the learning pattern that contains elements of mixed, combined or combined patterns with other patterns to improve the quality of learning to improve. This concept is often also termed by mixing between e-learning with the conventional so-called blended e-learning. Based on the purpose of this study to produce Learning Device Development model by Using Moodle E-Learning Software in Operating System I Course at STMIK Hang Tuah Pekanbaru which valid, practical, and effective.This research is a research development (Reserch and Development) by using Borg and Gall design. The subject of this research is the second semester student (two) Information System Study Program and Informatics Engineering Study Program STMIK Hang Tuah Pekanbaru.The result of this research is the creation of learning tools that are valid, practical, and effective for the course of Operating System I at STMIK Hang Tuah Pekanbaru which is able to improve students' creativity abilities in accordance with validation results from the validators. Keywords : Blended Learning, Blended elearning, Elearning, Workplace learning

Quality and innovation are two key aspects in today’s higher educational systems. The rapid rise of online education in the European Higher Education Area context creates a challenge to maintain quality levels in learning processes and creates the need to develop new methodologies adapted to this type of education, in order to assess skills acquisition in a rigorous and participatory way. Quality guidelines from the European Model of Higher Education recommend the consideration of two key issues: Information management for decision-making processes and evaluation system capable of compiling student’s participation as well as autonomous learning processes. This research presents a methodology that evaluates the autonomous and online learning, using two statistical analyses: Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Goal Programming. To validate this evaluation methodology, we have used seven tools provided by Moodle. The research is conducted on a group of 71 students participating in an online higher education degree in two subjects related to quantitative studies. The “Tutorials” and “Solved Exercises” have been the best-valued tools for the acquisition of this competition, followed by the “Tasks”. The joint assessments have been validated according to the degree of agreement of the students, using an index of closeness. The results suggest that the multi-criteria analysis can be very useful for the evaluation of competences in the European Higher Education Area.

The school-based curriculum is composed of individual teachers, a school or a school teachers or all teachers according to the national education, based on the...

Moodle (along with other Learning Management Systems), are widely used within the education sector to facilitate content delivery, marking and student feedback. This paper describes a system which is designed to significantly increase efficiency, accuracy and security whilst reducing feedback latency for a laboratory marking environment. The MoodleNFC system described in this paper seeks to answer the question as to how to most efficiently record marks for students in a laboratory environment by considering aspects of efficiency, accuracy, data integrity and Moodle integration. For large laboratory environments the MoodleNFC system saves significant time by removing the need to search for and select the correct student requiring marking – instead a tutor simply scans a student’s ID card which automatically brings up the student record. The system is evaluated based on measured improvements in efficiency, accuracy and on evaluations completed by users of the system. Compared to a paper-based marking system benchmarking has demonstrated that efficiency increases in the order of 50% are attainable.

This study evaluates our security awareness education online course on GakuNinMoodle, which is a Shibboleth-federated Moodle platform used in Japan, via an analysis of learning data from more than 20,000 users in the 2013–2015 academic years. We develop a customized data collection method to aggregate the duration, completion status, and score of each learning object each year, which we use to evaluate changes in course design for the 2015 academic year. We further use text mining of user comments from the Moodle assignment modules to extract user opinions. We found an improvement in the completion rate and final test score obtained in the 2015 academic year compared with 2013–2014. We also found that users became polarized between those who allotted sufficient time for the course and those who did not. Additionally, we obtained user complaints about the duration required to complete the course and problems with the user interface of the Moodle SCORM module. This data analysis will be useful because Moodle is a global-standard learning management system. Further work is underway to analyze learning data and feedback in near-real time.

The online objective exam system that allows user to take online test atomically generates results based on answers mark by user. The system can be used for various online test conducted by school, colleges and institutes. The system is design to handle thousands of students concurrently at the same time without getting lagged and maintaining the ACID properties. The major goal behind the innovation of this project was to introduce a eco-friendly technique which can replace the traditional use of papers. Asp.net was used as the front end language whereas backend is SQL. It is very essential for an institute to handle their examinations and process the results effectively and essentially. To handle a multiple users at the same time and to manage their timing according to their login time, So each student gets equal time to attend the exam and gets instant result as the exam ends.

Moodle learning space is very important in learning because it forms the foundation for why students learn their modules or subjects. Moodle learning space is divided into personal or self, societal or social and professional or subject spaces. When students understand …

Gamification in education helps to enhance courses to increase user engagement, productivity and motivation. The current Information System Design course at Kaunas University of Technology covers a broad range of topics on UML and students tend to lose their motivation and engagement during the learning process. To combat this problem an idea of gamifying the course was proposed. In this paper we have presented an implementation of gamified UML and system design teaching course in Moodle environment. The Moodle course was developed, which utilizes additional plugins for implementing the required gamification elements. In 2017 autumn semester students were invited to participate in gamified course, their activity in the course was recorded and analyzed. Surveys’ results indicate that students enjoyed gamified course, and plan to continue using it in the future.

This paper presents and discusses the results of a study carried out with professors of the University of Aveiro, Portugal (UA), which aim is to characterize their acceptance of Moodle. The data were collected through the application of a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model. In general, the professors expressed a positive attitude towards the items that measure the Perceived Ease of Use, the Perceived Usefulness, the Attitude Toward Using and the Social Influence. There were defined groups of professors based on gender, scientific area and age group, and statistical tests were performed. Although the majority of the items did not show any statistical significant differences between the groups, probably revealing that the use of Moodle is already widespread in the teaching and learning process at UA, it was possible to identify some differences, mainly with respect to gender and scientific area.

Virtual learning environments represent an important step in enabling distance and blended education. Moodle's structure for content enables the identification of well-defined learning contexts. Nevertheless, Moodle currently does not provide standard features to leverage the use of such contextual information, nor does it provide a standard built-in search facility. This chapter presents a context-sensitive Moodle plug-in for the search of external resources that allows semantic-based retrieval of documents from any external repository that offers an OAI-PMH standard compliant interface. As a way to increase their potential use, the plug-in also retrieves Twitter messages (known as tweets), since social networks are shown as an important tool to support education. Retrieved resources are presented in order of importance according to both the query terms provided by the user and the current context derived from the Moodle content structure. Searches are semantically expanded by evaluating the query terms according to a specific ontology associated with the context.

English Journal Writing on Moodle for EFL College Learners: An Investigation of English Self-Efficacy and Writing Performance: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1882-2.ch002: The present study is to explore the effect of Moodle English journal writing for general purposes on language learners' writing performance, conjunction

The internet becomes an essential part of the modern life it effects all aspects of our lives. One of the industries that could be dramatically improved by the internet is the education industry resulting in the concept of e-learning. With the rapid development of networking technologies and the increase of mobile devices, the demand for mobile based education is experiencing a boost. The aim of this project is to implement a mobile eLearning environment for the University of Khartoum that allows students to engage in learning activities using their mobile phones. Which make the learning process much more efficient. At the beginning, an introduction to eLearningand learning management systems (LMS) used to achieve e-learning is presented followed by a comparison between three of the most popular open source LMS’s then the reasons of choosing Moodle over other LMS’s in implementing the project are stated. The delivered environment consists of a web app that mainly used by administrator and a branded mobile application for android smartphones that can access the server through the local network of the university.

The learning process, among its different phases, involves monitoring of users behaviour in order to extract knowledge. Details about users have significant weight to understand the interests and intentions and produce forward-looking statements, as well as keep track of the learning management system (LMS). In this work, a model to investigate and predict the behavior of users, taken to explore the additional knowledge information and predict the learning outcomes, is described. In the first instance, the information are extracted through a suitable tool, and, subsequently, are submitted to an analysis phase. Time series analysis techniques are adopted to detect partial similarities between the navigation data and, subsequently, to extract a classification. Finally, performance are measured through statistical measures to evaluate the goodness of proposed approach and test its significance. The results, obtained on Moodle platform, show that the proposed model leads to accurate outcome prediction about users behavior and can be adopted to improve the learning paths, both in its implementation and design.

Web-based devices and applications which have the potential to increase the motivation and engagement of students to in language learning have attracted much attention among the ELT community. On the brand new web-based technological devices which have been employed for the educational purposes is the Moodle, an open source virtual learning environment. Given the significance of technology in general and the potentially influential role of the E-learning Moodle in second language learning, the present study investigates the effect of Moodle-mediated second language instruction on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL students. In so doing, the EFL learners of two classes of English majors in an Islamic Azad university in Iran were recruited as the participants of the study. The students in the experimental group (n=18) made use of blended learning in which Moodle was added to in-class instruction, whereas the learners in the control group (n=21) were taught traditionally in which the learners just made use of in-class instruction. The experiment lasted for a period of one semester. The statistical analysis of the data revealed that the experimental group students outperformed those of the control group in terms of reading comprehension. The findings have significant implications for second language instruction.

We live in an e-learning era, where the fast growth of e-learning around the world is inspiring many educational and business institutions. The rapid growth of e-learning has changed the traditional learning behavior and presented a new situation to both lecturers and students. Lecturers find it harder to guide students to select suitable learning materials due to overdosed learning resources. In the other hand learners spend more time on browsing and filtering learning resources to identify the suitable materials, rather than focusing on learning all the materials. Hence, the learning material recommendation is an essential requirement for e-learning system, which would take the e-learning, to the next level. Though e-learning brings many benefits in comparison with the conventional learning paradigm, with the rapid increase of learning contents on the web, the e- learning lacks proper feedback or the guidance, which is a key in the traditional teaching process to identify the relevant resources. The students who do not have knowledge to find out the most suitable resources, links and references for their studies and the assignments, may waste most of their time on browsing in search of the relevant material, without any guidance. Some of the “good students” may indirectly act as good guides to their fellow friends. The fellow average learners could follow the methods adapted by good students in learning or accessing relevant learning material. They may refer to the mostly accessed “learning materials” by the “good learners”. The lack of feedback in e-learning systems could be overcome by evolving an intelligent feedback system that would recommend the heavily accessed resources by the good students to the average students and that is the aim of this project. The research collected the Moodle log data of the courses that contain a rich set of electronic course contents from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. This audited data of the collected courses have been used to construct “student classification” and “resource recommendation” models. The former classifies the students as “Good students” and “Average Students” and the latter recommends the “mostly accessed resources” by good students. The results show that the resources that are mostly accessed by good students are more probable to be recommendable resources. The learning resource recommendation framework helps the average students who fail to choose the relevant materials for their studies from the heaps of learning resources. By making the website interactive, the communication between faculty and students could be made more effective, hence that would promote active learning.

This study looks into the influence of mass media in the self-reflective entries of intercultural encounters made by 35 elementary school students and 41 university students. Detailed text analysis was done to spontaneous entries in the Council of Europe’s “Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters" (AIE), a self-reflective learning tool widely used in Europe after collecting subjects’ responses using the Moodle. Both adult and young learners’ versions of the AIE were used with university students and children respectively, to ascertain the influence of mass media’s depictions of foreigners and others who are different from the typical Japanese. The data analysis showed different perceptions of “otherness” that children and university students have in intercultural encounters as well as how mass media’s depictions affect their perceptions. It is especially interesting how various media depictions help strengthen the stereotypical images of people different from themselves.

Considering the high computer literacy of students and the need for being students centred, the MBBS programme of University of Kelaniya introduced a Moodle-based learning management system (LMS) as a supplementary component to its blended delivery approach of the curriculum. Accordingly, LMS is a parallel component to the curriculum delivered face-to-face. Each module of learning in the curriculum is represented in the LMS by giving lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations, web links and assignments. The broad aim of this study is to determine the relationship between the extent of interactively of learners with LMS and their exam performance. First-year medical students (172 from 2016 intake and 166 from 2017 intake) at University of Kelaniya were considered for the analysis. Student’s access to LMS during the first two modules of the MBBS curriculum and the results of the first continuous assessment were compared. Total LMS access for each student during the two modules were calculated by counting the number of views in the course log. The particular course logs of LMS were downloaded and filtered out the details pertaining to students in the above two modules in both batches. Total access during the two modules were calculated for individual student and used for the analysis. Continuous assessment results ranged from grades A to F and we assigned sequential numerical marks in the descending order from 6 to 1 to denote grade A to F. Total LMS access with respect to assessment grades were visualized using boxplots and median with interquartile ranges were calculated. Association between LMS access and assessment grades were investigated. Statistical analysis was done in R. Median (interquartile range) of LMS access of the students were 43.0 (12.25 – 72.0) times. The number of results grades for the students as follows; A – 3, B – 41, C – 117, D – 122, E – 51 and F – 4 and the respective number of median (interquartile range) access to LMS for the above grades were 110.0 (102.0 – 113.0), 51.0 (21.0 – 76.0), 49.0 (16.0 – 76.0), 39.0 (11.0 – 64.75), 29.0 (6.0 – 59.5) and 6.5 (3.0 – 16.0). There was significant correlation between LMS access and results grades (rho = 0.2, P \textless 0.01). Students with grade A showed significantly higher LMS access compared to the rest of groups. There was no difference in LMS access between students with grades B and C, C and D, D and E, D and F or E and F. However, grade B showed significantly higher LMS access compared to grades D, E and F; and grade C showed significantly higher LMS access compared to grades E and F. The findings demonstrate that students’ interaction with LMS were significantly associated with the performance in the examination. The learning management system has a positive impact on student performance.

The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development.

The emergence of smart devices such as smartphones (e.g., iPhone) and tablets (e.g., iPad) may enhance e-learning by increasing communication and collaborative learning outside the classroom. These devices also facilitate the use of online technologies such as Facebook. However, the adaptation of Learning Management System (LMS) services to mobile devices took longer than social networks or online tools such as Facebook and Twitter have already been long used via smartphone. The main purposes of this study are to explore students’ skill levels of LMS (Moodle) and their knowledge of online tools or technologies and then examine if there is a correlation between smartphone use and using of online tools and Moodle in learning. The study conducted among 173 students in the Department of Information Studies (DIS) in Oman, using online survey. The study found that most students demonstrated high levels of accessing course/subject materials and regularly engaging with studies of using LMSs. YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook were clearly recorded as the most popular sites among students while LinkedIn and Academia.edu were two online tools that had never been heard of by over half of the 142 participants. Emailing and searching are recorded the most popular online learning activities among students. The study concluded that students prefer to use smartphone for accessing these tools rather than using it to access LMSs, while a positive correlation was found between the use of these tools and smartphones, but there was no correlation between smartphones and using LMSs.

In this paper, we created a system to assess the skills of learners on an e-learning platform using semantic web technologies. Indeed, to supervise learners’ activities in an e-learning platform is a major challenge for teachers and tutors alike. Our approach is based on standards that fall within the area of the semantic web as ontologies, the JENA API, and the SPARQL query language that aim to help a tutor in the monitoring of the activities of learners. The main idea behind our approach is that an ontology can be useful not only as a learning tool, but it can also be used to assess learners’ skills.

This paper describes a data integration method for Moodle course logs and pivot table functions to analyze the behavior of students’ material page views in face-to-face blended learning using Moodle course materials. The developed method integrates the data with a pivot table by preprocessing Moodle course logs and generates a time series cross section (TSCS) table that visualizes the student’s course material page views. Experiments conducted on Moodle page views of actual materials collected during actual lessons found that the table visualizes both overall and individual viewpoints. Reactions to teacher instructions on course materials during class can also be visualized by the generated TSCS table. Moreover, because students who open course items late or do not open them can be identified clearly, the method can be used as a reference for improving future classes.

In this study we aim to find out whether a training program for secondary school science teachers which was organized based on the model of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), could improve their individual PCK for a specific scientific issue. The Evolution Theory (ET) and the Natural Selection (NS) were chosen as the scientific issues of interest. Both of them are fundamental in biology teaching, especially the ET which can be taught as a unifying theory of biology. The individual PCK of teachers can be improved by strengthening its components: knowledge, pedagogy and managing the context. The principals and content of the seminar were decided based on the results of another study among Greek teachers for the characteristics of their PCK about ET, NS and Nature Of Science (NoS). The seminar involved 16 secondary school teachers. We found that all trainees improved their individual PCK and felt adequate to teach more effectively the ET and the NS to their students. All participants through the activities they performed, moved to a more constructive and learner-centered teaching style compare to what they used to do before the training program.

Purpose – This paper proposes a novel approach for processing course log data obtained from Moodle-based blended courses in order to visualize patterns of student activity within the online environment and to determine whether these log data can be used to predict student academic performance.Method – Logs of student activities were summarized and processed using the Vector Space Model approach. This resulted in a novel vector-based form of representation which can be used to map students’ activity in a latent activity space given a set of activity dimensions. An enriched form of this representation was also generated by processing the DateTime and IP address metadata for the purpose of developing classification/predictive model of students’ performance. Results – The activity space coupled with a one-hot vector representation for each unique activity dimension can be used to visualize the differences in level and type of activity preferences of students. Experiments using several machine learning algorithms indicate that the generated model can modestly distinguish between sets of activities that lead to High, Low, or Failed performances.Conclusion – The development of easily interpretable graphics that can depict trends in student activity is a useful tool for instructors handling blended courses. It can provide constant monitoring of course progression with minimal effort and enable instructors to determine whether and how the environment actually affects student performance.Recommendations – Further work on refining the process applied to the data is recommended. The log data should be time-sliced and processed to determine whether and how the student’s level and type of activity changes over time. More powerful machine learning classification techniques shouldalso be tested to determine whether it can improve the classification accuracy.Research Implications – These types of visualizations and predictive models could be used to monitor the student or class which requires immediate and specific pedagogical adjustments.

This chapter introduces GraphFES, a Web service and application that processes data from forum activity in Moodle courses and transforms them into social graphs to enable social learning analytics in Gephi, a social network analysis application. The chapter gives an overview of social learning analytics in online and computer-supported collaborative learning and describes existing tools for social network analysis of educational data. The chapter also presents the main concepts associated to the data source (Moodle logs) and target (Gephi), and a more detailed explanation of GraphFES’s design and operation. An example with data from two courses illustrates how GraphFES and Gephi can combine to carry out social learning analytics in Moodle courses. The final section discusses the potential of this approach for effective social learning analytics.

Distance Learning is a system and the process of connecting users to distributed educational resources

La incorporación a la educación superior de herramientas como plataformas virtuales o redes sociales supone una nueva reformulación del proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Esta investigación analiza la utilidad didáctico-pedagógica de la plataforma educativa Moodle y de la red social Facebook para identificar sus potencialidades y controversias. Se presenta un estudio descriptivo e interpretativo que combina el diseño cualitativo y cuantitativo, para conocer la opinión del profesorado y alumnado de las titulaciones de grado de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Huelva (España). Los resultados profundizan en la importancia de la formación previa, la valoración positiva de su utilización como material didáctico, la potenciación de la colaboración o el debate en cuanto a su accesibilidad y uso. En conclusión, la información recabada apunta la pertinencia del uso de estas herramientas en el aprendizaje del alumnado y la necesidad de un cambio en las estructuras y la formación docente para mejorar la calidad de la enseñanza. Introduction of tools as virtual platforms or social network to the university means a new construction of learning-teaching process. This research analyzes the educational and didactic utility of Moodle platform and Facebook to identify its potentialities and controversies. It is presented a descriptive and interpretative study which combines qualitative and quantitative design, in order to know the opinion of the professors and students in degrees in the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Huelva (Spain). The results stress the importance of the previous training, the positive assessment of its didactic use, the increase of the collaboration due to its accessibility. In conclusion, the information we collected shows the relevance of using these tools in student learning and as the need for a change in both as much educational structures and teaching training in order to improve the quality of the teaching.

Evaluating user experience is a challenging task, particularly in e-learning. Existing e-learning systems are limited in their ability of being evaluated based on the user interfaces because current evaluation approaches are usually expensive in time and organization and require active users’ participation. Moreover, a usability assessment is needed whenever a new version of the “user interface tailored for a given type of device (e.g. laptop, tablet, smartphone) is developed”. In this paper, we get around the problem leveraging on the increasing adoption of analytics tools in e-learning and on logs transparently tracked by e-learning platforms. We introduce an automated analytics approach aiming at assessing the usability of both desktop and mobile user interfaces of a Learning Management System through specific native indicators (e.g. efficiency and satisfaction). They are defined as comparable scores and calculated automatically based on the tracked log files. In order to put the proposed approach into practice, we implemented it on the Moodle LMS. Our contribution promises to reduce both time and cost for usability assessment of user interfaces in e-learning, while ensuring adaptability to different devices and systems.

Moodle project http://moodle.org is one of the most widely used web application packages for delivering teaching materials in universities and colleges. Despite its popularity and high level of acceptance of teachers and decision-makers, the security aspects of Moodle has not been well-mentioned in publications; to our best knowledge, no active research has been conducted to assess the level of security assurance of Moodle. Because of this lack of Knowledge, many Moodle sites were, have been or are exploited in the following manner – propriety teaching materials were stolen, instructors or administrator’s credentials were compromised, student results were changes and so on. This paper demonstrates a security testing case for identifying security vulnerabilities of Moodle. Using automated, manual source code review and web application penetration testing we have demonstrated a sound PHP-based security assessment methodology for Moodle. As a result, we have identified nine security vulnerabilities from Moodle 2.6. The description and security analysis of these vulnerabilities are provided in details. In order to utilize this framework, the tester should have advanced technical skills in operating a source code scanner to differentiate the false positives the scanning results, advanced source code review skills to identify application logic related vulnerabilities and advanced web application penetration testing skills to validate the results from the automated/manual source code review and technical findings that were missed during the source code review. Readers of this paper are encouraged to use our methodology to perform security assessment for their versions of Moodle and to extend the features/functionalities of the testing methodology to further expand the test coverage.

The past decade has seen the rapid adoption and use of various Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Africa, and Tanzania in particular. Institutions have been spending thousands of dollars to implement these systems in a bid to improve the quality of education as well as increasing students’ enrolments through distance and blended learning. However, the impact of these system on improving students’ performance has been a popular subject of research in recent years. Studies have been relying on data from users’ opinions and subjective interpretation through surveys to determine the effectiveness of LMS usage on students’ learning performance. The use of such data is normally subject to the possibility of distortion or low reliability. Therefore, this study designed and developed Learning Analytics tool and used the tool to determine the causation between LMS usage and students’ performance. Data from LMS log of two courses delivered at Mbeya University of Science and Technology (MUST) were extracted using developed Learning Analytics tool and subjected into linear regression analysis with students’ final results. The study found that discussion posts, peer interaction, and exercises were determined to be significant factors for students’ academic achievement in blended learning at MUST. Nonetheless, time spend in the LMS, number of downloads, and login frequency were found to have no significant impact on students’ learning performance. The implications of these results on improving students’ learning are discussed.

At present, a large amount of software has been created to analyze social networks, such as libraries to access online social networking APIs, software to draw graphs and tools to use and analyze networks. In fact, and because of the use of Moodle as standard Learning Management System at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in 2009 was born the idea of creating a plugin for Moodle capable of analyzing forums in which students participate and of identifying the major players within the student network. This work is about the present state of such plugin, which provides useful information to teachers so that, through the use of social network analysis, allows them to make decisions to improve and promote participatory education. Here, we show the application of the plugin to three case studies, in two different universities, which allowed to evaluate its usefulness and to compare the information according to the variables that influenced each case study.

In order to disseminate and encourage the use of remote experiments, their creation and deployment need to be simplified. This work presents a method to easily develop remote experiments interfaces in Javascript and to quickly embed them in Moodle. This solution requires the use of Easy Java/Javascript Simulations for the development of the interfaces and the EJSApp Moodle plugin to deploy them in the web platform. The proven flexibility of such solution has fostered the integration of two new experiments and also the easy adaptation of an already existing one, opening new remote labs flexibility to educational and/or training activities.

Web-based labs are key tools for distance education that help to illustrate scientific phenomena, which require costly or difficult-to-assemble equipment. Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is an authoring tool that speeds up the creation of these kind of labs. An excellent proof of the EJS potential is the open source physics (OSP) repository, which hosts hundreds of free EJS labs. Learning management systems, such as Moodle, provide social contexts where students interact with each other. The work described in this paper looks for the synergy of both tools, EJS and Moodle, by supporting the deployment of EJS labs into Moodle and thus enriching them with social features (e.g., chat, forums, and videoconference). To test this approach, the authors have created the ball and beam lab, which helps students of automatic control engineering to train different advanced techniques (robust, fuzzy, and reset control), and compare their performance in relation to a conventional proportional-integral-derivative control.

The use of e-learning techniques in higher education is becoming ever more frequent. In some institutions, e-learning has completely replaced the traditional teaching methods, while in others it supplements classical courses. The paper presents a study conducted in a member institution of the University of Ljubljana that provides public administration programmes. We analysed the relationship between the proportion of the course implemented in the Moodle e-learning platform and students’ performance on one hand and their satisfaction on the other. The empirical findings reveal a positive correlation for both elements. The results can help decision-makers learn more about how to enhance students’ success and satisfaction using an e-learning platform.

Purpose – In higher education, blended learning is already strongly established. The e-courses vary in their structure, assignments, prompt examinations, interaction between students and teachers, etc. Such aspects may influence the students’ perception of usefulness of blended learning. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors which influence that feeling and to look for possible differences in perception by different subgroups of students. Design/methodology/approach – Students in the survey evaluated 13 aspects of e-courses in which they were enrolled. From enrolment documents, additional demographic data were collected (gender, high-school grade, study programme, etc.). A multiple linear regression was used with perceived usefulness as the response variable and the 12 other e-course aspects as predictors. Further, the same regression analysis was performed on different subgroups of students based on demographical data. Findings – The empirical results showed that the general impression regarding the e-courses, their consistency with the face-to-face teaching and the teachers’ responsiveness had a significant influence on the students’ perception of the usefulness of e-courses. Further analysis based on demographic data revealed several subgroups of students where the perception of usefulness was influenced by different aspects. The teachers’ feedback and supplementing the tutorial play an important role in higher years of study, while the general impression loses its influence. Originality/value – The paper is the first to explore the importance of demographic determinants of perceived usefulness of e-learning tools in EAPAA (European Association of Public Administration Accreditation)-accredited undergraduate public administration programmes. Keywords Higher education, Blended learning, Moodle LMS, Public administration education, Questionnaire analysis, Students’ perceived usefulness

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and therefore e-learning is becoming an ever more frequently used teaching and learning technique at all levels of education. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how introduction of Moodle e-learning platform as part of the teaching process is related with students’ performance, i.e., the average grade and the average number of admissions to the exams. We also examined the same relationship among different groups of students (based on selected individual socio-demographic factors). The study included a member of the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Public Administration) in the period from 2008 till 2014. The results of the analysis (using a t-test) show a significant improvement in performance at the different (faculty-, student- and course-) levels after introducing the Moodle. The data show that the greatest improvement is seen among students with lower high school grades.

This study considers the reasons for, and subsequent consequences of MOOC participants choosing to see content "All at once" or released weekly "Step by step". It aims to identify the types of MOOC participant most likely to choose selective release over seeing the materials all at once, and studies whether one path or another is more likely to lead to successful completion of the MOOC. The MOOC in question is the twice-yearly Learn Moodle Basics MOOC which regularly attracts over 3000 participants and which in recent years has offered participants when signing up the choice of how to access the course content. It is envisaged that the report will be useful to educators and researchers interested in MOOC motivation and completion rates in general and to instructional designers considering how best to present their materials. As the MOOC focuses on how to teach with Moodle, the report should also be of interest to researchers exploring how the Moodle platform can be suited to MOOC delivery. The study involved taking the completion data from three recent Learn Moodle Basics MOOCs and analysing the results to identify which cohort ("All at once" or "Step by step") had higher results in terms of completion, partial completion and non-completion - if indeed there was a significant difference. An earlier study along similar lines (Mullaney, T and Reich, J 2013) suggested there is no significant difference. We test the findings against the earlier study and, additionally, explore the reasons behind participants' choice of path through the course. The most recent MOOC also included a participant survey asking why one path was preferred over the other. The results of this survey also form part of the study. The findings reveal that there is no appreciable difference between the completion and non-completion rates of participants in both groups. An alternative certificate, a "Certificate of Achievement," is awarded for partipants who complete all but one specific activity, and while again, no significant difference was noted in how many from both cohorts, it was observed that far fewer participants in both cohorts obtained this. It could be implied that, realising they would not obtain a Certificate of completion, participants were far less motivated to continue with the remaining activities. The results from the participant survey again unsurprisingly reveal that experienced Moodlers and those having previously done the MOOC are more likely to select the All at Once path whereas those who wish to 'chunk' their learning into 'manageable' sections are more likely to select the Step by Step path. However, there is no appreciable difference in confidence or competence in English. The study recommends continuing to offer both options of content release in further MOOCs. It also recommends working together with the authors of a recent study of Learn Moodle MOOCs (Monllau Olivé D et al, 2019) to explore in greater depth indicators of success and failure in both groups by enabling the Learning Analytics feature on the Learn Moodle site.

Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA) focus on data analysis of learners in the context of educational settings like Moodle, a Learning Management System (LMS). Both EDM and LA aim to understand learners and optimise learning processes. Predictive modelling serve a key role in optimising learning processes. Learning Analytics in an LMS covers many different aspects: finding students at risk of abandoning a course, predicting students failing a quiz or students not reaching the end of a lesson in less than 15 minutes. Thus, there are multiple prediction models that can be explored. The prediction models can target at the course also. For instance, will this course engage learners? Will this forum be useful to the students of this course? To ease the evaluation and usage of Supervised Learning prediction models in LMS, we abstract the key elements of prediction models and we build an analytics framework for Moodle, one of the most popular Learning management Systems available in the market. Our software framework manages the complete cycle that predictive models follow until they are used in production, which includes calculations of features and labels from the LMS database raw data, normalization, feature engineering, model evaluation and a production-ready mode to generate insights for users from predictions. Apart from the software framework we also present a use case that serves as an example: A prediction model which is able to identify students at risk of abandoning a course with a 92\% in accuracy using past versions of the course as training data.

The effects of the combination of computer-based concept mapping with the Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle use for the construction the Concept Map (CM) in self- and collaborative-mode are explored here. This approach builds upon the hybrid interconnection of blended (b-) and collaborative (c-) learning perspectives to form an extended teaching/learning environment. The analysis axes are based on the structural characteristics of the constructed CMs, peers' interaction during the collaborative construction of CMs, and LMS Moodle use expressed via the user's Quality of Interaction (QoI). One hundred and twenty-eight participants were categorized in two groups, i.e., G1 and G2, of 64 students (32 pairs) each. Both groups constructed CMs in self- (1�3 weeks) and collaborative-mode (4�6 weeks), yet G2 only was instructed to additionally use LMS Moodle during the whole six-week period. The experimental results comply with the findings from previous studies regarding with the positive effect that shifting from self- to collaborative-mode has on the constructed CMs, but extends further the notion of the additional positive effect of the LMS Moodle use in the collaborative construction of the CMs, as expressed via more increased peers' turn-taking, balanced collaboration, and CM-enabled constructive, reflective and organizational interactions. It is also shown that collaboration increases LMS Moodle users' QoI. The hybrid b-/c-learning approach proposed here sets new directions towards the enhancement of LMS use and computer-based concept mapping, contributing to the enrichment of the Higher Educational Institutions services and re-examination of educational practices.

This paper reports the results obtained by taking advantage of the European Language Portfolio, Moodle, and peer evaluation activities in a listening course with an important presentation component. Previous work by the same writer had shown positive results from the use of these tools in two listening and speaking courses. However, those courses met twice a week, which is unusual in Japan, so the amount of time that could be dedicated to such activities was larger than most teachers have at their disposal. On the other hand, the present article details the steps taken to make it possible to integrate Portfolio, Moodle, and peer evaluation in a course that met only once a week. This was achieved by giving students clear directions for Portfolio use and by developing a simplified evaluation form for peer evaluation. The paper shows that the directions worked and that the simplified form was a viable option. An end-of-term survey demonstrated considerable satisfaction about the course among the students.

Purpose – In higher education, a combination of traditional face-to-face learning and e-learning is becoming very popular. During their studies, students are enroled in several e-courses. They perceive various aspects of e-courses and show different responses when using teaching materials and learning in an e-course. The purpose of this paper is to measure such aspects from the students’ perspective and explore the differences among various subgroups of students. Design/methodology/approach – In the survey, students expressed their opinions on 13 different aspects (a seven-level scale) of the e-courses in which they were enroled. In addition, the influence of some demographic characteristics was analysed. The authors used statistical tests (t-test and ANOVA) to compare the means among the analysed subgroups. Findings – The empirical results reveal some differences among the subgroups of students. Students’ attitudes to blended learning increase significantly by year of study and decrease according to the amount of other non-study activities. Simplicity of finding materials in an e-course is the factor where male and female students differ significantly. This finding serves as a guideline for faculty management concerned with how to adjust blended learning to fulfil the various expectations of different student subgroups. Originality/value – This paper’s insights will be of value to individuals and institutions engaged in the e-learning process in higher education. In particular, the results will be helpful to the faculty management and teachers with the main task to increase the engagement of particular groups of students regarding the work in e-courses.

Moodle Pty Ltd has made this open data set available for research purposes via research.moodle.net. The enclosed Readme file provides an overview of how to extract and view the open, anonymized data from the “Teaching with Moodle August 2016” course from learn.moodle.net for the purpose of conducting original research.

UCLA develops and uses a learning management system to provide an online environment for students to access and interact with course content. The data collected by the learning management system is a direct measure of student activity, and provides information that augments known information about the student, such as assignment grades and demographics. This paper assesses UCLA's learning management system data for its usefulness in creating an early warning system that will advise instructors and students of whether a student is likely to receive a failing grade. The data are used in two analyses: an exploratory analysis of how students use the learning management system, and a predictive model to forecast end-of-term grades based on partial-term information. Recommendations on how to generalize the results across the UCLA undergraduate population are drawn from the findings of the analyses.

The University of Namibia launched Moodle as a Learning Management System (LMS) to be adopted by the Institution in 2015. The Department of Information and Communications Studies at the University moved on to run two practical courses with the aid of Moodle using its basic functions. The students who enrolled for the course had to adapt to the System. This paper explores the level of acceptance of Moodle by the students with findings that show that overall the students were satisfied with using Moodle as part of eLearning.

How to promote engagement and achievement in flipped classroom has been a critical research issue. It has been recognized that a course design enticing students' behaviour, emotional and cognitive engagements could promote achievement. Among the different types of engagements, behaviour engagement is relatively easier to measure and collect, especially with the help of learning management systems (LMS). This study focuses on the exploration of how online behaviour engagement affects achievement in flipped classroom with a problem-centered learning flow consisting of activation, demonstration, application, and integration. Learning data collected from ten courses was analysed. All the courses were conducted on the Moodle platform, with a total of 488 undergraduate students enrolled from 2010 to 2015Â at a university in Taiwan. A model depicting how online behaviour engagement affects achievement was developed using the partial least squares SEM (PLS-SEM) method. Findings demonstrate that engagement in problem-solving activities has a significant effect on achievement. Furthermore, engagement in self-assessment and self-reflection activities have a significant direct effect on engagement in online studies and social interaction, which in turn have a significant direct effect on engagement in problem-solving activities. Most important of all, the effect of the engagement in self-assessment and self-reflection on achievement is mediated by the engagement in problem-solving activities. Based on these findings, it is argued that the design of attractive and progressive problem-solving activities is at the heart of an effective flipped classroom, and promoting a learning culture of self-reflection and self-assessment helps trigger active engagements in other online learning activities.

This work describes the application of subgroup discovery using evolutionary algorithms to the usage data of the Moodle course management system, a case study of the University of Cordoba, Spain. The objective is to obtain rules which describe relationships between the student’s usage of the different activities and modules provided by this e-learning system and the final marks obtained in the courses. We use an evolutionary algorithm for the induction of fuzzy rules in canonical form and disjunctive normal form. The results obtained by different algorithms for subgroup discovery are compared, showing the suitability of the evolutionary subgroup discovery to this problem.

Learning analytics is the analysis of electronic learning data which allows teachers, course designers and administrators of virtual learning environments to search for unobserved patterns and underlying infor- mation in learning processes. The main aim of learning analytics is to improve learning outcomes and the overall learning process in electronic learning virtual classrooms and computer-supported education. The most basic unit of learning data in virtual learning environments for learning analytics is the interaction, but there is no consensus yet on which interactions are relevant for effective learning. Drawing upon extant literature, this research defines three system-independent classifications of interactions and evaluates the relation of their components with academic performance across two different learning modalities: virtual learning environment (VLE) supported face-to-face (F2F) and online learning. In order to do so, we performed an empirical study with data from six online and two VLE-supported F2F courses. Data extraction and analysis required the development of an ad hoc tool based on the proposed interaction classification. The main finding from this research is that, for each classification, there is a relation between some type of interactions and academic performance in online courses, whereas this relation is non-significant in the case of VLE-supported F2F courses. Implications for theory and practice are discussed next.

Student engagement has become synonymous with the measurement of teaching and learning quality at universities. The almost global adoption of learning management systems as a technical solution to e-learning within universities and their ability to record and track user behaviour provides the academy with an unprecedented opportunity to harness captured data relating to student engagement. This is an exploratory study that aims to show how data from learning management systems can be used as an indicator of student engagement and how patterns in the data have changed with CQ University's recent adoption of Moodle as its single learning management system.

This poster presents a cross-platform learning analytics dashboard on Moodle and Open edX for monitoring outcome-based learning progress. The dashboard visualizes students’ interactions with the platforms in near real-time, aiming to help teachers and students monitor students’ learning progress. The dashboard has been used in four large-size general education courses in a comprehensive university in Hong Kong, undergoing evaluation and improvement.

Technology Integration has been a topic widely discussed in education. Ministries of Education around the World are investing huge amounts of money in order to equip classrooms with the necessary tools to effectively integrate technology in the classroom. However, the research shows that many technology integration plans do not succeed with the most common barrier or limitation, teachers' professional development. Professional development for teachers is usually provided through a one-time workshop. Communities of Practice (CoP) for teachers, else known as Professional Learning Communities (PLC), have proven to be an effective method of professional development for teachers, as it provides teachers with opportunities for reflection, collaboration, sharing and participation in authentic contexts. Moreover, online learning can allows PLC to expand out of classroom walls and collaborate with other teachers regardless of their location. With that in mind, an online Professional Learning Community has been created to foster continuous professional development of the Primary Years Programme (PYP) teachers in technology integration, that are members of the Central and Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA). This pilot project aims to improve collaboration among its members in regards to technology integration and the creation of best practices for effective technology integration, in the PYP curriculum. The online Community is created and hosted on Moodle and its core members are PYP teachers and Technology Integrators of the PYP curriculum.

The use of technology and ICTs in education is spreading fast worldwide and it is a massive way of spreading knowledge. It has been noted that “the internet is the world’s largest and most powerful computer network connecting personal computers, sophisticated mainstreams, and high speed supercomputers around the globe” Tilwani, A. (2013, p ). To keep abreast with the rest of the world, the Botswana College of Open and Distance Learning (BOCODOL) started infusing technology in running some of its educational programmes. It started this initiative by offering the Certificate for Distance Education Practitioners in 2012, as an online programme for students from Botswana and other countries of Southern Africa, to equip them with basic skills in Distance Education. The use of eLearning to deliver the CDEP programme was to bring the students from the Southern African Development countries (SADC to one eLearning platform, the MOODLE, for tutorials and to share learning experiences. This paper examines the effectiveness of using eLearning as a mode of programme delivery, by tapping from the experiences, problems and any other difficulties encountered in running an online programme. The methodology used to collect data for this presentation was through a questionnaire administered online for the students enrolled in this programme, as well as for their tutors. This was to get first-hand information from users showing how they managed to go through the programme, the problems they uncounted as well as their success. Looking at most of the problems which were brought forward, such as lack of internet connectivity, or students not being able to access the host institution website, the paper recommends some improvements on the College internet services so as to try and pave the way for the incoming eLearning programmes which are planned.

This paper focus on the potential contributes of Learning Analytics in the improvement students learning. The analysis of student’s data collected from Virtual Learning Environments is important to ascertain student’s engagement. This paper presents the analysis of data collected in the ambit of MatActiva project. Data was analysed with Google Analytics, Course Dedication and Moodle Reports. Promising results were obtained.

Practical learning analytics 'dashboards' that show students at risk are emerging and will likely become commonplace over the next few years. But how do we determine who is at risk? We advocate a focus on 'what the student does' echoing Biggs' seminal article on teacher understandings of learning. Teachers need access to tools that let them articulate what activities lead to learning in their own context. But making best use of these tools introduces a messy milieu of open/closed algorithms, the ethics/efficacy of intervening with at-risk students, and the challenge of articulating learning outcomes. This session builds on the development of the open-source Engagement Analytics dashboard for Moodle.

With the development of Internet, online learning management systems (LMSs) have been used widely for providing teaching platforms. The vast quantities of data that LMSs generate daily are difficult to manage manually. Thus, educational data mining (EDM) is applied to solve this problem. In this thesis, EDM is applied on Moodle log data of a medical course. This course was arranged by problem-based learning (PBL) method, which uses virtual patients (VPs) as a problem, to improve students' diagnostic skills.The aim of this thesis is to analyse Moodle learning behaviour related to the usage of VPs and implement a set of Python algorithms to handle such kind of data. There are two ways are utilised to analyse Moodle log data by EDM: applying data mining techniques and implementing Python scripts. The techniques applied on the first way are attribute weighting and generalized sequential patterns (GSP), while the second way provides Python algorithms about extracting frequencies, sessions, and relationship tables. This thesis shows learning behaviour records and patterns about the usage of each VP. In addition, it gives information about the overall usage of differen tkinds of activities and resources that Moodle offers. Moreover, Pytho nalgorithms implemented in this thesis provide tools to extract frequencies,sessions, and relationship tables of Moodle log data for further research.

This article presents GISMO, a novel, open source, graphic student-tracking tool integrated into Moodle. GISMO represents a further step in information visualization applied to education, and also a novelty in the field of learning management systems applications. The visualizations of the tool, its uses and the benefits it can bring are illustrated through adetailed case study of an online course. GISMO provides visualizations of behavioral, cognitive and social data from the course, allowing constant monitoring of students’ activities,engagement and learning outcomes.

One of the promises of big data in higher education (learning analytics)is being able to accurately identify and assist students who may not be engaging as expected. These expectations, distilled into parameters for learning analytics tools, can be determined by human teacher experts or by algorithms themselves. However, there has been little work done to compare the power of knowledge models acquired from teachers and from algorithms. In the context of an open source learning analytics tool, the Moodle Engagement Analytics Plugin, we examined the ability of teacher-derived models to accurately predict student engagement and performance, compared to models derived from algorithms,as well as hybrid models. Our preliminary findings, reported here,provided evidence for the fallibility and strength of teacher- and algorithm-derived models, respectively, and highlighted the benefits of a hybrid approach to model- and knowledge-generation for learning analytics. A human in the loop solution is therefore suggested as a possible optimal approach.

The Open University (OU) is Europe's largest higher education provider and one of a handful of mega-universities across the world. As a distance education university that is currently undergoing a process of increasing migration from paper to online, the OU requires exceptionally feature-rich, robust, and scalable e-learning systems. After extensive scoping and requirements-gathering activities, it was decided that adopting and enhancing an open source system to form the heart of the university's learning management system (LMS) would be the most successful strategy. While this made it possible to host the first course websites within months, building the full system required a large amount of development. During a three-year, $10 million program of work, almost all code developed has been given back to the open source community in order to further enhance and boost the sustainability of the product. Adoption of the new instructional platforms and media is being accompanied by changes to work practices for staff and faculty who are accustomed to developing learning materials and tutoring using traditional methods. This research bulletin examines the factors leading to the selection of the open source LMS at the OU, details the many aspects of development work that had to be undertaken, and describes the issues involved for institutions participating in an open source community. It also looks at some of the many business and cultural challenges the institution has faced and at how faculty are being encouraged to move toward a model of education incorporating increasing amounts of e-learning content and activity.

This paper examines the design and implementation of reflective journals as individual student blogs in a course with 276 students and 13 teaching staff. The academic aim was to encourage reflection, reduce plagiarism, increase student engagement and increase the visibility of students’ progress in the course. The technical aim was to experiment with an approach that uses a small and simple information system to integrate freely available blog services (e.g. Wordpress.com) with institutional systems and requirements. This paper reports on the learning design, technical implementation,...

The interest in developing Learning Analytics tools that can be integrated into the well-known Moodle course management systems is increasing nowadays. These tools generally provide some type of basic analytics and graphs about users' interaction in the course. However, they do not enable a varied set of Data Mining techniques to be applied, such as approaches for classification, clustering, or association. To address this issue, a new and freely available Moodle Data Mining tool, named MDM, has been proposed in this paper. The proposed tool eases the whole knowledge discovery process, including tasks such as selection, data pre-processing, and data mining from Moodle courses. The proposed MDM tool has been developed in PHP programming language, so it can be easily integrated into Moodle as a module for a specific course. Its main features and architecture are described in depth, and a tutorial is also provided as a practical way of using the MDM interface. Finally, some experimental results using a real-life sample dataset of mechanical engineering students are analyzed.

We report on an online course in research writing offered in a massive open online course (MOOC) format for developing country researchers. The concepts of cognitive presence, teacher presence, and social presence informed the design of the course, with a philosophy of strong social interaction supported by guest facilitators. The course was developed with low-bandwidth elements and hosted on a Moodle site. It was offered twice as a MOOC and 2830 learners from more than 90 countries, mainly in the developing world, took part. The average completion rate was 53%. Female learners and learners who were active in the forums were more likely to complete the course. Our MOOC approach may be a useful model for continuing professional development training in the developing world.

This work describes a new Moodle module developed to give support to the practical content of a basic computer organization course. This module goes beyond the mere hosting of resources and assignments. It makes use of an automatic checking and verification engine that works on the VHDL designs submitted by the students. The module automatically keeps up to date information about their state, and significantly reduces the overload that a continuous assessment demands to the teacher. Additionally, this new module is oriented to promote a collaborative teamwork allowing to define student teams in a more operative way than built-in Moodle groups. The module has been designed according to the Moodle philosophy and its application can be extended to other similar subjects.

In this study, we investigated the effect of using the social network site Facebook for discussions in an online course. Data were collected from concurrent offerings of an introductory educational psychology course, one using Facebook discussion boards and the other Moodle forums. We measured student perceptions of social presence and the frequency and length of their discussion interactions. Evaluation of this data indicated that there were no differences in our measures. We discuss why the potential benefits of Facebook for online teaching may not have emerged in this study and provide suggestions for further research in this area.

This paper presents an evaluation of open source e-learning platforms. The main focus is on adaptation issues. The result of the evaluation shows that the platform Moodle outperforms all other platforms and also obtained the best rating in the adaptation category.

The goal of this project was to provide a model of a virtual environment that allows graduate students in the program to develop and practice online teaching strategies geared towards the K12 classroom. The graduate students who are also practicing teachers developed teaching resources using Moodle, a free, open-source course management system. Teaching resources to be discussed and demonstrated in this presentation include lesson plans, wikis, synchronous and asynchronous discussion areas, FAQs, and assessment tools.

Based on the success of the NOF training in Northern Ireland, the Department of Education have launched a new strategy, emPowering Schools, to encourage teachers to continue embedding ICT and e-learning into their teaching pedagogies. This paper investigates the factors affecting the introduction of online learning into a one year PGCE course. Student teachers were required to complete a series of tasks, presented as an online course, which guided them towards the production of the content materials for their own online course. A face-to-face workshop provided the support and technical training needed to create a subject-specific Moodle course suitable for use with pupils in a secondary school. The evaluation revealed three factors which influenced student teachers' attitudes towards using an online course as e-learners and an additional three factors summarising their experiences of uploading resources to the Moodle. Significance tests by gender and subject area are reported and conclusions drawn for future work in this area.

Mapping the specification IMS Learning Design and the Course Management System Moodle is a logical step forward on interoperability between eLearning systems and specifications in order to increase the best acceptance of the specifications into the widespread world of the eLearning systems and to ensure the standardization of the outputs from the systems to be used in others. IMS Learning Design and Moodle look for a common understanding focused on the integration of information packages modelled by each part in the other. The final goal aims at Moodle playing an IMS LD package. A second step will map a Moodle course to be used in any IMS LD complaint tool. The Unit of Learning in IMS LD and the course in Moodle become the perfect couple where to find several elements that should match each other. This paper shows how to make this understanding, mapping related elements in both to get a list of pairs easy to translate from one to another, and to define also a list of requirements for this protocol.

With the rapidly increasing popularity of the Internet in recent years, the delivery of learning programs has gradually shifted from local desktop to online-based applications. While the XML programming environment has evolved as the new standard for the Internet, building customized learning programs requires the use of authoring systems such as Macromedia Director, Authorware, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Microsoft Frontpage (for a detailed review see Godwin-Jones, 2003), which places high demands on design, programming skills, and time. An alternative to using such applications is the deployment of course or learning management systems. One such system that has been gradually gaining worldwide popularity is known as Moodle (http://www.moodle.com).

Integrating the specifications and tools for IMS-Learning Design (IMS, 2003) into Moodle (Moodle, 2003), an open-source Learning Management System (LMS), is not just a technological question, but also relates to practical, pedagogical, and philosophical issues. This study documents the discussions and experiments of a team of teachers active in the Moodle community who are concerned with the development of international standards in future versions of Moodle. In the course (Moodle, 2005a) of studying the book, Learning Design (Koper and Tattersall, 2005), participants analysed the implications of integrating the LD specification into Moodle and the operation of various LD tools (CopperCore, Reload) and related tools (LAMS) within the Moodle environment. These differences were then summarized into general implications for future versions of both Moodle and Learning Design. This study concludes that continued, open dialogue between teachers and developers of both LD and Moodle is necessary to achieve transparent integration.

This paper focuses on the use of Moodle as a course management system in teaching General Academic Purposes English at an intermediate level of an intensive language program. After describing the Moodle course and providing examples of its content, advantages of integrating it in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) will be pinpointed. Also, problems and concerns about its use will be presented. Finally, recommendations for future developments of Moodle as an e-learning component in the program and in similar EFL programs will be outlined, as informed by the described practice of designing and implementing a Moodle course.

In the latter half of 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned a study via its Teaching and Learning committee to examine the issues surrounding sustainability of open source software. The resulting report drew together seven case studies of successful but very different open source projects and examined each project’s sustainability model. Each of these case studies has been told from the point of view of the lead developer or one of the key personnel and gives a fascinating insight into the factors that have determined the success of each project. These case studies are now presented by OSS Watch as stand alone documents in a series.

Education Queensland (EQ) schools are increasingly using Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for student learning and other school functions. EQ is also incorporating ICT applications to streamline school management practices. This research examines the implementation of a Learning Management System (LMS), MOODLE (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) at a large semi-rural high school. The use of MOODLE is in response to EQ key ICT objectives outlined under the State Government’s 2007 Smart State policy. The research used an exploratory case study methodology to examine the implementation of MOODLE at the school. Sustainability literature was used to examine the key measures to identify changes in ICT practices at the school by students, teachers and other school staff. Findings from the research revealed that students quickly incorporate LMS features for learning and other purposes. Students’ familiarity with technology influenced the use of new applications and wider application use across the system. Also it was found that teaching practices changed in response to implementing a localised LMS, MOODLE, which in turn resulted in an increased use of the site. The literature identified that a sustainable implementation of ICT practices requires five essential markers to be considered. Identified through this research were the technical considerations in provisioning LMS as well as staff considerations that facilitated enabling use of the LMS. It was concluded from the findings that localised control is a critical component to assure continued growth and sustainability of the LMS. Results from this research are being used to develop a framework for EQ schools to develop their own localised ICT practice within the school community.

Educational data mining is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from the educational context. This work is a survey of the specific application of data mining in learning management systems and a case study tutorial with the Moodle system. Our objective is to introduce it both theoretically and practically to all users interested in this new research area, and in particular to online instructors and e-learning administrators. We describe the full process for mining e-learning data step by step as well as how to apply the main data mining techniques used, such as statistics, visualization, classification, clustering and association rule mining of Moodle data. We have used free data mining tools so that any user can immediately begin to apply data mining without having to purchase a commercial tool or program a specific personalized tool.

Online teaching and learning has been in transition for its entire existence. The number of courses offered at a distance has grown rapidly. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Waits & Lewis, 2003), in 2000-2001 more than 56% of four-year colleges and universities in the United States offered distance education degree programs. In the academic year 2000-2001 alone, there were an estimated 3,077,000 enrollments in all distance education courses offered by 2-year and 4-year institutions, most of these offered online (Phipps, 2004). Many classroom based higher education programs, which meet in person regularly throughout a semester, use online technologies as well. Students and instructors use these “distance education” technologies to share files, present content, communicate with each other between class meetings and conduct other teaching and learning activities.

Moodle and other virtual teaching platforms have bolstered the ability and motivation of universities to support distance learning. The aim of our study is to improve understanding of the motivational factors behind student satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, with the Web-based learning platform, Moodle. Our study extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to include technical support and perceived self-efficacy, with the expectation that they influence usage of Moodle. We surveyed 226 students of the Business Administration and Management (LADE) and Infant and Primary School Teaching degree courses of the University of Huelva. The data showed that technical support has a direct effect on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Moodle usage was also directly influenced by perceived ease of use and attitude. The results reveal the importance of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness on attitude.

In this work we present an overview of the undergraduate online Physics course that we have implemented in the Moodle platform. This course has been developed as an enhancement of the face-to-face courses. The aim of this course is to create an online learning community which helps both teachers and students to have a virtual space where we can share knowledge through different kinds of supervised activities, chats and forums. As we will show in this paper, the students’ response to this initiative has been very good: the online Physics course helps them to reinforce their abilities and knowledge.

The utilization of the e-learning environments for teacher training programs is at the beginning in the Romanian system for teacher continuous formation. Also, the rules for approving this kind of formation program are not approved yet, due the ongoing modification to The Law of Romanian Education. There are a lot of e-learning environments in our academic institutions, but now the free resource Moodle for e-learning course management system gain new users every day. Some of the benefits which recommend Moodle for being implemented in the Romanian’s programs for teacher training are the subject of our paper: different types of assignments, chats, forums, databases, glossaries, lessons, multiple types of tests with one or more items, quizzes, wikis, surveys and the SCORM/AICC module.

Become also used in the training of multimedia software, is the most important innovation in the field of education provided by emerging technologies. Graphics, text, many factors such as digital images and sound are located in multiple environments. All of them gained importance in our daily lives and lead new structures in education is inevitable. To make meaningful abstract information is necessary to take advantage of the interactive multimedia applications. It is stated that a lot of research, teaching methods that increase the motivation of students and courses appeal to different senses can have a positive impact on student learning in arts education. One of the main areas of learning for training art students of the Art Criticism efficient way to gain knowledge to create effective learning situation is needed in the process of training materials. In this study, Moodle based educational material draft is aimed to create, which can be used in the field of art education courses given theoretical learning in higher education programs include effective teaching-learning experiences, and planned to offer. Mentioned art education courses is limited to a subject that’s "Principles and Elements of Art" at Fine Arts Departments Art Criticism course. In the study, an e-learning management system Moodlesupported training that can be used as the material of the design process, the design principles that have been referred to the eligibility for arts education learning and teaching experiences.

With the growth of online courses and programs in higher education, considerable concerns emerge about student feelings of isolation and disconnectedness in the online learning environment. A research study was conducted to develop and validate an instrument that can be used to measure perceptions of connectedness of students enrolled in online programs or certification programs in higher education. The instrument consists of 25 items and has four scales: (a) community, (b) comfort, (c) facilitation, and (d) interaction and collaboration. One hundred and forty-six online learners who were enrolled in courses at a Turkish university completed the online questionnaire. Results of a factor and reliability analysis confirmed that the instrument is a valid and reliable measure of students’ perceived connectedness in an online certificate program.

There is growing rhetoric about the potential of learning analytics in higher education. There is concern about what the growing hype around learning analytics will mean for the reality. Will learning analytics be a repeat of past mistakes where technology implementations fail to move beyond a transitory fad and provide meaningful and sustained contributions to learning and teaching? How can such a fate be avoided? This paper identifies three paths that learning analytics implementations might take, with particular consideration to their likely impact on learning and teaching. An ongoing learning analytics project – currently used by hundreds of teaching staff to support early interventions to improve student retention - at a regional Australian university is examined in relation to the three paths, and some implications, challenges and future directions are discussed.

This paper reports on a large longitudinal survey of students and their use of technologies in two Australian universities. The SEET survey is unique in Australia because it includes not just current use, but students’ expectations about their future use of technology. The survey was originally run in 2010 and then repeated, with slight modifications to reflect changes in technologies, in 2013. This paper compares the results from 2013 with the 2010 results. Whilst some changes reflect the wider access to freely available open resources and new technologies such as Smartphones and iPads, other results are remarkably consistent with the 2010 results. Overall students are increasingly satisfied with their use of technologies and despite the increase in uptake of freely available technologies, it is evident that the LMS and its inbuilt tools and functions remain a key platform for learning and teaching at universities.

Enthusiasm for the potential of learning analytics and big data technologies must be tempered with caution for fundamental learner rights to that data and concern for the ways in which these re-shape the learning environment and the learner-teacher-university relationship. This paper argues that there is a legitimate distrust of 'creepy' analytics that misuse surveillance technologies and that a Charter of Learner Data Rights would be a strong foundation on which to build analytic technologies that are open, personalised, portable, adaptive and engaging for learners.

This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning through the active creation of resources and learning places by both learners and course facilitators. This pedagogy is based on the building of connections, collaborations, and the exchange of resources between people, the building of a community of learners, and the harnessing of information flows on networks. This resonates with the notion of emergent learning as learning in which actors and system co-evolve within a MOOC and where the level of presence of actors on the MOOC influences learning outcomes.

With their ability to simulate real life and allow users to interact with the virtual environment, Multiuser Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are very useful platforms for education and training. A survey of the related literature shows that MUVEs in education are mainly used only as a supplement of the traditional lesson in the classroom, which is mainly the idea of blended learning. In this work, we go one step beyond and examine whether this blended learning model can be fully implemented online, with MUVEs replacing the face to face interaction. This is ideal for open learning communities, whose members are able to meet only online, and can hardly meet in the same classroom. For an open learning community, we investigate whether the existence of a MUVE can be combined smoothly and productively with the already established tools for online learning communities support and the first user experiences are positive: users prefer to use LMS because of its simplicity and are attracted from the 3D virtual environment and the interactivity it offers.

This concise paper reports on an analysis of access logs of a first year university course that was delivered in a blended format. This analysis is an initial step in a wider project aimed at investigating if learning analytics can provided useful insights on course level, targeting both student learning and the needs of teachers. Preliminary findings show potential in noting when students need targeted help, a lack of correlation between access logs and grades, and insights into the degree by which course completion rates are affected by the lack of student engagement.

Learning Analytics is an area of practice that impacts the legal and ethical obligations of educational institutions. New legislative regimes, growing concern about online privacy, and the affordances of the data being collected mean Learning Analytics could represent a risk to universities to the same extent that it represents an opportunity. These risks augur the need for institutions to develop formal practice and/or policy frameworks around Learning Analytics to define supported practice, actively manage risks and begin to build trust and ethical practice through transparency. There is a danger for Australian universities that the development of such “checks and balances” are not keeping pace with the technological advancements in this field. This paper outlines how one university is seeking to provide a frame for lawful and ethical practice of Learning Analytics through a Code of Practice.

This paper describes an online English language proficiency testing platform that uses Moodle-hosted selected and open response questions along with other useful features. These features include enhanced test security settings aided by the Safe Exam Browser; an embedded MP3 player for listening skills; and a split screen mode for reading tests. The paper highlights significant elements of this particular approach to testing as they apply to formal high-stakes e-exams (testing of learning) and for continuous assessment (testing for learning). Snapshots of sample online test materials illustrate these features. Issues of concern in the field of web-based, computer-assisted assessment will be discussed in light of experience gained from a recent pilot study in which this interface was used in a series of mock exams in 2015.

One of the great promises of learning analytics is the ability of digital systems to generate meaningful data about students’ learning interactions that can be returned to teachers. If provided in appropriate and timely ways, such data could be used by teachers to inform their current and future teaching practice. In this paper we showcase the learning analytics tool, Loop, which has been developed as part of an Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching project. The project aimed to develop ways to deliver learning analytics data to academics in a meaningful way to support the enhancement of teaching and learning practice. In this paper elements of the tool will be described. The paper concludes with an outline of the next steps for the project including the evaluation of the effectiveness of the tool.

This paper presents findings from a study of Australian and New Zealand academics (n = 276) that teach tertiary education students. The study aimed to explore participants’ early experiences of learning analytics in a higher education milieu in which data analytics is gaining increasing prominence. Broadly speaking participants were asked about: (1) Their teaching context, (2) Their current student retention activities, (3) Their involvement in, and aspirations for, learning analytics use, (4) Their relationship with their institution around learning analytics. The sampled teaching staff broadly indicated a high level of interest but limited level of substantive involvement in learning analytics projects and capacity building activities. Overall, the intention is to present a critical set of voices that assist in identifying and understanding key issues and draw connections to the broader work being done in the field.

Moodle, an open source Learning Management System (LMS), collects a large amount of data on student interactions within it, including content, assessments, and communication. Some of these data can be used as proxy indicators of student engagement, as well as predictors for performance. However, these data are difficult to interrogate and even more difficult to action from within Moodle. We therefore describe a design-based research narrative to develop an enhanced version of an open source Moodle Engagement Analytics Plugin (MEAP). Working with the needs of unit convenors and student support staff, we sought to improve the available information, the way it is represented, and create affordances for action based on this. The enhanced MEAP (MEAP+) allows analyses of gradebook data, assessment submissions, login metrics, and forum interactions, as well as direct action through personalised emails to students based on these analyses.

This study examined the factors that influence students’ perceived course outcomes in e-learning using the Learning Management System (LMS), and the extent to which the factors significantly predict course outcomes. A total of 255 polytechnic students completed an online questionnaire measuring their responses to 5 constructs (lecturer support, interaction with peers, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and course outcomes). Data analysis was conducted using structural equation modeling. Results showed that perceived usefulness and interaction with peers were significant predictors of course outcomes, whereas perceived ease of use and lecturer support did not. However, perceived ease of use had an indirect relationship with course outcomes through perceived usefulness. Lecturer support also had an indirect relationship with course outcome through interactions with peers. Overall, the four antecedent variables contributed to 77.0% of the total variance in course outcomes. Based on the study findings, implications for educators and researchers are discussed.

In most Australian correctional jurisdictions, prisoners are not allowed access to the internet precluding them from participating in higher education online. This paper reports on an Australian government-funded project, Making the Connection, which is taking digital technologies, that don’t require internet access, into correctional centres to enable prisoners to enroll in a suite of pre-tertiary and undergraduate programs. A version of the University of Southern Queensland’s learning management system has been installed onto the education server of participating correctional centres. The second stage of the project will see notebook computers preloaded with course materials, allocated to participating prisoners. At the time of writing, the project has been deployed at eight correctional centres in Queensland and Western Australia, with negotiations underway for further rollout to Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. It is expected that the technologies and processes developed for this project will enable the delivery of higher education to other cohorts without access to reliable internet access.

The rise of learning analytics in the last few years has seen fervent development from institutions, researchers, and vendors. However, it seems to have had a laggard reception in higher education. Peering behind some barriers to adoption, we question whether common approaches that address the economics of low hanging fruit distract us from asking and answering deeper questions about student learning. This may lead to destructive feedback loops where learning analytics, swept by the currents of institutional agendas and cultures, does not deliver upon its promises to those who need it most - students and educators.

At the CAA conference in 2006 we reported on the Open University's (OU) adoption of Moodle for the core of its Virtual Learning Environment (Sclater et al, 2006). This paper will describe the eAssessment developments undertaken by the OU during the past two years which have already provided new features in Moodle 1.6 - 1.9 and will provide further features in Moodle 2.0. As part of this process the OU has integrated its own OpenMark assessment system (Marshall, 2007) with Moodle and together these systems have now run in excess of 125,000 tests to March 2008. While there is still much to do the OU will be reducing its financial commitment to developing these systems after July 2008 and this is a suitable time to consider the OU's contribution to open source eAssessment systems.

Given the focus on boosting retention rates and the potential benefits of pro-active and early identification of students who may require support, higher education institutions are looking at the data already captured in university systems to determine if they can be used to identify such students. This paper uses historical student data to validate an existing learning analytics tool, the Moodle Engagement Analytics Plugin (MEAP). We present data on the utility of the MEAP to identify students ‘at risk’ based on proxy measurements of online activity for three courses/units in three different disciplines. Our results suggest that there are real differences in the predictive power of the MEAP between different courses due to differences in the extent and structure of the learning activities captured in the learning management system.

Ethical and legal objections to learning analytics are barriers to development of the field, thus potentially denying students the benefits of predictive analytics and adaptive learning. Jisc, a charitable organisation which champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research, has attempted to address this with the development of a Code of Practice for Learning Analytics. The Code covers the main issues institutions need to address in order to progress ethically and in compliance with the law. This paper outlines the extensive research and consultation activities which have been carried out to produce a document which covers the concerns of institutions and, critically, the students they serve. The resulting model for developing a code of practice includes a literature review, setting up appropriate governance structures, developing a taxonomy of the issues, drafting the code, consulting widely with stakeholders, publication, dissemination, and embedding it in institutions.

The Concordat on Open Research Data has been developed by a UK multi-stakeholder group. This concordat will help to ensure that the research data gathered and generated by members of the UK research community is made openly available for use by others wherever possible in a manner consistent with relevant legal, ethical, disciplinary and regulatory frameworks and norms, and with due regard to the costs involved.

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in learning analytics (LA) in technology-enhanced learning (TEL). LA approaches share a movement from data to analysis to action to learning. The TEL landscape is changing. Learning is increasingly happening in open and networked learning environments, characterized by increasing complexity and fast-paced change. This should be reflected in the conceptualization and development of innovative LA approaches in order to achieve more effective learning experiences. There is a need to provide understanding into how learners learn in these environments and how learners, educators, institutions, and researchers can best support this process. In this paper, we discuss open learning analytics as an emerging research field that has the potential to deal with the challenges in open and networked environments and present key conceptual and technical ideas toward an open learning analytics ecosystem.

This is going to be a wide-ranging post that goes a little lit crit at times and dives into an eclectic collection of topics from election polling to the history of medicine. But even the most pragmatic, b-school-minded entrepreneur or VC may find some value here. Because what I’m ultimately talking about is a fundamental limiter on the future growth of the ed tech industry. The value of learning analytics, and therefore the market for them, will be limited by the data and statistical literacy of those who adopt it. The companies that are focused on developing fancier algorithms are solving the wrong problem—at least for now. These tools will have limited adoption until they are put into the hands of educators who understand their uses and limitations. And we have a long way to go in that department.

Data-driven decision making, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, is evolving into a vastly more sophisticated concept known as big data that relies on software approaches generally referred to as analytics. Big data and analytics for instructional applications are in their infancy and will take a few years to mature, although their presence is already being felt and should not be ignored. While big data and analytics are not panaceas for addressing all of the issues and decisions faced by higher education administrators, they can become part of the solutions integrated into administrative and instructional functions. The purpose of this article is to examine the evolving world of big data and analytics in American higher education. Specifically, it will look at the nature of these concepts, provide basic definitions, consider possible applications, and last but not least, identify concerns about their implementation and growth. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Many approaches, models and frameworks exist when designing quality online learning environments. These approaches assist and guide instructional designers through the process of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation of instructional processes. Some of these frameworks are concerned with student participation, some with motivation and some with student success. All these variables affect active participation and engagement of the student to some degree but the main concern is how to design online instruction conducive to high level of engagement. Therefore, this paper presents an instructional design framework along with a set of strategies that could be used to foster learner engagement in online learning. This framework is result of an extensive literature review on student engagement and is aimed at summarizing the results in a cohesive way for online instructors. For e-learning design and development to be successful online designers and instructors need better approaches to increasing student engagement and its authors hope that proposed framework provides such an approach.

Early prediction of school dropout is a serious problem in education, but it is not an easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are many factors that can influence student retention. On the other hand, the traditional classification approach used to solve this problem normally has to be implemented at the end of the course to gather maximum information in order to achieve the highest accuracy. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a specific classification algorithm to discover comprehensible prediction models of student dropout as soon as possible. We used data gathered from 419 high schools students in Mexico. We carried out several experiments to predict dropout at different steps of the course, to select the best indicators of dropout and to compare our proposed algorithm versus some classical and imbalanced well-known classification algorithms. Results show that our algorithm was capable of predicting student dropout within the first 4�6 weeks of the course and trustworthy enough to be used in an early warning system.

The quality of the environment in which students learn, plays a paramount role. Researchers and education practioners should have means by which they can measure the learning environment before they can enact any changes in that environment that will lead to improving the effetiveness of education. Learning environments questionnaires have been utilized in multiple countries at multiple educational levels and many educational areas, however there are no records of such instruments being validated and used in Portugal. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze several questionnaires/instruments designed for the evaluation of learning environments, in order to make a critical appreciation about the assessed dimensions and finally establish an action plan for the adaptation and cross-cultural validation of one of these instruments for the Portuguese Language.

Teachers of science, mathematics and technology Australia wide are being required to transform their established epistemologies of practice in order to engage learners as active conceptualisers within socially interactive learning environments. Many teachers are enrolling in postgraduate distance education programs to assist them with this challenging task. Curtin University is responding by using computer mediated communication to speed up the exchange of distance study materials and to provide online interactive learning environments (via chat groups, bulletin boards and email). For the past three years, we have been using the Internet to teach online Masters degree students studying at a distance from Curtin. Our major pedagogical goal is to engage our students (professional teachers) in reflective and collaborative learning. Our web sites provide Activity Rooms in which we engage students in frequent and focused discourse with each other and with their online tutors. As reflective teachers, we are keen to evaluate our own innovative practices and constantly improve them. To this end, we have designed the Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), an electronic questionnaire that enables us to readily monitor each student's preferred online learning environment and compare it with her/his actual experiences. In this presentation, we outline the rationale of the questionnaire and present some preliminary analyses that illustrate its usefulness. The COLLES is the subject of ongoing research and development funded by a 2000 ARC Small Research Grants Scheme award.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) takes place as an interaction in the internet environment, with different methods for retrieving class content, materials, subject related information, resources and student teacher interactions. Since the interaction details of the LMS such as Moodle is stored in its database as log files, those logs can be used to analyze and understand the weak and good students. Discussions, Forums, Assignments, wikis and the course are the main categories of the logs which are resided in the logs. This research was done to develop a Business intelligence (BI) tool to identify the able students and less able students log patterns with Moodle which is immensely helpful to identify the less able students very early and find remedies to improve their educational standard. Moodle dataset of MSc Business Management students of University of Moratuwa was used for the research. Store procedures were written in java to extract the xml format data to store the log details to mysql server. BI capabilities such as organizational memory, information integration, insight creation and visualization were covered. Sql server 2012 was used as the main database to develop the data warehouse. Dimensions were created to generate the necessary cubes. Apart from that sql server integration services were used to enhance the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process. Data cubes were analyzed with Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) queries. finally dashboards were built using power BI too. Power Pivot graph and the power table were used to present interactive details to the end users. Number of patterns was realized to identify the less able students. Based on assignment submission, number of time a user used the system, number of times pages and resources were accessed, new patterns were identified and presented to the users to get the decision which is immensely helpful to the academics and the students.

Ubiquitous learning (U-Learning) environments collect context information relative to user's preferences and needs, but this information is typically very volatile. On this basis, the Quality of the Context aims at treating this information with the application of the quality parameters. This paper presents a ubiquitous virtual environment, in which three modules (U-SEA, SEDECA and QoC) were developed and integrated with Moodle, and describes the use of a Bootstrap theme to automatically adapt the interface on mobile devices. The results about the integrated modules showed that the UVLEQoC environment operated satisfactorily, based on the assessments made by the group of users who tested the modules and their operation.

This research study addresses differences in student perception of the significance of Moodle learning management system (LMS) quality characteristics and differences in student satisfaction in regard to such characteristics. Therein, it has been proven in this study that male and female students are equally satisfied with Moodle LMS quality characteristics and that there is a difference in the significance that students give to these characteristics. When students were observed in regard to their age and year of study, it was found that these groups assigned different significance levels to quality characteristics and were not equally satisfied with them. It was also found that there is a substantial statistical difference in the significance students gave to quality characteristics and in student satisfaction itself, according to how much time they spent using the Moodle application, which is also noted as one of the most important aspects of the research conducted. A further analysis of the variables demonstrated that the following components of quality characteristics were more important to female students: average waiting time for a response, feedback quality, material thoroughness, material clarity, website user-friendliness, cooperation diversity, and material quantity.

This study investigated how often students used mobile phone to access various activities on Moodle. A survey on self-reported usage was filled by 252 university students in courses offered by four different faculties at the University of Hong Kong. Follow-up interviews were conducted to solicit students’ perceptions on mobile access to Moodle and the underlying reasons. The results show significant differences in students’ usage of various Moodle activities via mobile phones. Students’ responses also suggest that mobile access to Moodle is a necessary complement to computer access but its limitation on usability and reliability may have restricted its potential in enhancing teaching and learning.

In the past decades, online learning has transformed the educational landscape with the emergence of new ways to learn. This fact, together with recent changes in educational policy in Europe aiming to facilitate the incorporation of graduate students to the labor market, has provoked a shift on the delivery of instruction and on the role played by teachers and students, stressing the need for development of both basic and cross-curricular competencies. In parallel, the last years have witnessed the emergence of new educational disciplines that can take advantage of the information retrieved by technology-based online education in order to improve instruction, such as learning analytics. This study explores the applicability of learning analytics for prediction of development of two cross-curricular competencies – teamwork and commitment – based on the analysis of Moodle interaction data logs in a Master’s Degree program at Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA) where the students were education professionals. The results from the study question the suitability of a general interaction-based approach and show no relation between online activity indicators and teamwork and commitment acquisition. The discussion of results includes multiple recommendations for further research on this topic.

This work presents a method to quickly develop remote labs interfaces and embed them in a learning management system like Moodle. The proposed solution requires the use of Easy Javascript Simulations for the development of the interfaces and the EJSApp Moodle plugin to upload them in the learning management system. At the end, an already existing remote experience, originally intended only for testing an electronic solution, was revitalized with a new interface and features.

This paper aims to answer one of the most common questions asked in Educational Technology is that if the media used can restrict/enhance the teaching approaches or if we can adopt a variety of approaches regardless of media we use. To do this, the question is discussed in the scope of a widely used media, Learning Management System because there are variety of Learning Management Systems which have different capabilities such as Sakai, Blackboard, Intact and Moodle. The author advocates that primarily method, the presentation way of instruction, influence the teaching/learning process not media. On the other hand, it does not mean that media, the way of delivery instruction, is not important; media also support teaching process but you can use alternative media to make the same effect. For that reason, media selection should be done by taking into account several factors such as faculty; learner readiness to use selected media; content; number of learners and instruction time.

This quantitative, nonexperimental study utilized Rogers’s diffusion of innovation theory as the theoretical base to determine instructors’ perceptions of the attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability) of the course management system used in order to predict adopter status. The study used a convenience sample of 137 full-time faculty members at five Historically Black Colleges and Universities in two southeastern states. Logistic regression was used to predict group membership (i.e., adopter status) and to provide information about the relationship and strengths among the variables. The findings of this study provided evidence that faculty in the different adopter categories have different perceptions related to adoption and use of the CMS which can be used to predict adopter status. Identifying faculty attitudes can be used to properly design changes in related programs that will lead to a broader base of users.

Past research has indicated that e-learning technology is not utilized to its full potential in education despite greater degree of access within higher education institutions. The issues of pedagogy in current e-learning technologies and the importance of interface design in future e-learning systems have also been raised in past research studies. The purpose of this study was to do close examinations of these issues and then investigate them through faculty’s perceptions and utilization of Blackboard a commonly used Learning Management System, at a large Midwestern university. Two specific research questions guided the investigation. The first research question investigated the relationship between faculty members’ perception of Blackboard and their perception of Blackboard’s design. The second research question was designed to find the relationship between faculty members’ capacity of use and their pedagogical perspective of e-learning, as well as the perceptions of Blackboard’s design. Open-ended questions were also designed to allow faculty to provide more in-depth description of their concerns with Blackboard. Twenty-six common features of Blackboard were selected and subdivided into three groups—instructional features, interactive features, and visual features. Five Likert-type scales and one check-all-that-apply scale were designed by the researcher to collect empirical data. A web survey was administered to 1208 faculty members. A total of 154 responses were received, which met the desired sample size of 117. Multiple regression analysis was used to answer the two research questions. The result of analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between the perception of Blackboard and the perceptions of the designs of the respective aspects of Blackboard features. A significant relationship was also found in the capacity of Blackboard use with pedagogical perspective of e-learning, as well as the perception of the design of visual features of Blackboard. However, no significant relationship was found in the capacity of use with the perceptions of the design of instructional and interactive features of Blackboard. Analysis of open-ended responses revealed a consistency with past research studies such that most faculty members used Blackboard primarily for administration of courses and very few faculty members considered pedagogical issues when using Blackboard in their teaching. Recommendations for future studies are provided.

Course management systems, like any other technology, have an inherent purpose implied in their design, and therefore a built–in pedagogy. Although these pedagogies are based on instructivist principles, today’s large CMSs have many features suitable for applying more constructivist pedagogies. Yet few faculty use these features, or even adapt their CMS very much, despite the several customization options. This is because most college instructors do not work or play much on the Web, and thus utilize Web–based systems primarily at their basic level. The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web–novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks. A solution to this underutilization of the CMS is to focus on pedagogy for Web–novice faculty and allow a choice of CMS.

The quick acceptance - indeed, the enthusiastic embrace - of course management systems (CSMs) by college and university faculty and students is leading to numerous questions: What is happening in he general slow-to-change environment of teaching and learning that is permitting this swift adoption? Why would an often clunky, nothing-new-in-the-software application become so swiftly de rigueur in disciplines across higher education? Why would pedagogy that changes at the pace of a snail on holiday suddenly adopt the CMS for an anytime, all-the-time classroom experience?

We developed a module for the Moodle open-source eLearning platform through which undergraduate students can Build, Answer and Evaluate by blind peer review questions related to a course subject. In the first learning phase the students can build and submit questions. Selected questions are candidates for inclusion in later tests. After the test a reference solution and evaluation criteria is made public. The student's answers are then randomly distributed so that each student has to evaluate at least three of his peer's tests using double blind peer review. After all tests are cross-evaluated by the community of students, the system grades them by majority vote in each question. The need to: i) build meaningful questions; ii) present a correct answer; iii) state the evaluation criteria; iv) answer to subject-related questions; and finally v) evaluate; and vi) justify a grade attributed to a classmate, is a powerful community-aware context in which students develop competences on the subject's topic while simultaneously have to reason about their learning process.

Athabasca University—Canada’s Open University evaluated learning management systems (LMS) for use by the university. Evaluative criteria were developed in order to ensure that different platforms were tested against weighted criteria representing the needs of the university. Three LMSs (WebCt, LotusNotes, and Moodle) were selected for the evaluation. Moodle was chosen with 11 first place ratings and with only one third place rating. Lotus Notes was second with five first place ratings. Moodle garnered 40% of the total weighted score with Lotus Notes getting 32%, and WebCT 29%. The first place preferences within individual criteria show the following: WebCT 6; LotusNotes 7; and Moodle 58.

Sorting of Korean English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) university students by Second Language (L2) aptitude allocates students to classes of compatible ability level, and was here used to screen candidates for interview. Paper-and-pen versions of the Oxford Quick Placement Test were adapted to computer-based testing via online hosting using FSCreations ExamView. Problems with their online hosting site led to conversion to the popular computer-based learning management system Moodle, hosted on www.ninehub.com. 317 sophomores were tested online to encourage L2 digital literacy. Strategies for effective hybrid implementation of Learning Management Systems in L2 tertiary education include computer-based Internet-hosted L2 aptitude tests. These potentially provide a convenient measure of student progress in developing L2 fluency, and offer a more objective and relevant means of teacher- and course-assessment than student evaluations, which tend to confuse entertainment value and teacher popularity with academic credibility and pedagogical effectiveness.

This work describes the application of subgroup discovery using evolutionary algorithms to the usage data of the Moodle course management system, a case study of the University of Cordoba, Spain. The objective is to obtain rules which describe relationships between the student’s usage of the different activities and modules provided by this e-learning system and the final marks obtained in the courses. We use an evolutionary algorithm for the induction of fuzzy rules in canonical form and disjunctive normal form. The results obtained by different algorithms for subgroup discovery are compared, showing the suitability of the evolutionary subgroup discovery to this problem.

There has been a recent explosion of interest from academics across a wide range of disciplines in the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments for education, driven by the success of platforms such as Second Life. As these platforms are used more often as environments for teaching and learning, there is an increased need to integrate them with other institutional systems, Web-based Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. In this paper we outline the open source Sloodle project, which is working on integrating learning and teaching across Second Life and Moodle, a popular open source VLE. We review the history and current status of Sloodle and present results from user surveys, highlighting the benefits educators hope to reap from this integration.

Abstract: This paper discusses integrating Moodle, an Open Source course management system (similar to Blackboard), into a course designed to expose teachers into ways to use and integrate computers into their instruction. One problem in preparing teachers to use software in schools is the likelihood that the software taught in the course will not be available in the school where the students end up working. Using Open Source software can mitigate that problem. Toward that end, Moodle, rather than the university-supplied Blackboard, was used as the course management system, providing students with resources, assignments, and discussion boards. As a final project for the course, students used Moodle to build their own course, using the assignments they had done in class as content in their course, making Moodle a means of developing a portfolio of their work.

Moodle is open source and users use it in many different ways in places all over the world, without any central control. As such, there is no clear picture of which plugins, both those distributed with the standard Moodle distribution and those distributed separately via the Moodle Plugins Directory, are actually used. This survey is part of our research to help discover what plugins Moodle users use, in order to focus development efforts and to determine how Moodle is used in different educational sectors. Results from this survey will also complement download and update information from the Plugins Directory.

The main goal of this dissertation is the investigation of learners' eye movements recorded during interaction with an e-learning environment. From the recorded gaze data essential insights are gained to support eye-efficient design of learning environments as well as learning materials. Preliminary work and the authors' practical experience for many years as an e-learning professional show, that e-learning is a melting pot of different fields of expertise. Only an interdisciplinary evaluation can enable valid insights and benefit efficient utilization of the results in real-world e-learning systems. Therefore it is essential for e-learning studies to consider multiple factors during evaluation. Within this dissertation recorded eye movements are investigated based on a framework consisting of three pillars. The three pillars of the research methodology are selected aspects of user interface, user attributes and didactical as well as educational aspects and have the following contextual focuses. The investigation of the user interface will be conducted by emphasizing usability testing and user interface design. First the eye tracking method's efficiency in the context of iterative software development is elaborated and second gaze data is used to investigate learners' visual patterns as well as visual preferences on pages and items of e-learning systems. The perspective of didactics is studied based on the application of different educational task types and the effect of training. The latter influence is investigated as to whether participants had different visual behavior depending on whether learning materials were provided prior to the online e-learning test or not. Criteria for evaluation of users' attributes are cultural affiliation, gender as well as different performance levels. All these aspects will be elaborated holistically and are used to deduce practice-relevant recommendations for e-learning operators, teaching staff, designers and after all for the users as well.

This narrative seeks to identify practices that have enabled staff in eLearning roles to support their peers to increase the use of eLearning within a New Zealand tertiary education context. Specifically, it examines those factors that have contributed to the development of institutional capability in eLearning over a two-year funded period. Unitec New Zealand has recently implemented a transformative eLearning Development Strategy with the aim of developing the capability and capacity of Unitec academic staff in integrating learning technologies. The eLearning Strategy has seen the funding of a number of temporary roles to support and foster increased staff capability and capacity in eLearning. These roles have had the responsibility of engaging in an institute wide Community of Practice, and encouraging a local community of practice within Faculty departments. In completing this narrative we ask ourselves what factors can contribute to the development of a sustainable learning culture at Unitec with specific regard to eLearning. The authors identify how a community approach has enabled greater confidence and capability across not only an eLearning community but the wider Unitec Academic staff. In this narrative, we will explore and reflect upon the enablers and barriers experienced in the eLearning roles, the insights, and the implications arising from this model and its efficacy in meeting institutional goals. The merits of a funded time release as a prerequisite for change of teaching practice are examined, so as to inform recommendations for future initiatives that foster growth in eLearning integration without dedicated funding. Options are envisioned for the future direction of eLearning capacity development, informed by community participants, literature and the authors’ own reflections. These discussions anticipate which measures are sustainable solutions for the future, and consider other measures which could be employed to improve the status quo and ensure a continuing culture of learning and development amongst Unitec teaching staff.

Learning Management System (LMS) environments can be powerful tools in education, especially when they are combined with core learning principles, and principles of interactivity and adaptivity. In the case of Greek language learning, e-learning environments need substantial improvements in order to provide effective solutions to the end user. This paper aims to describe an e-learning environment that is being developed for the learning of the Greek language. This environment is an interdisciplinary effort and is designed to provide an effective solution to the end user. By following the latest research directions, the working teams have been developing high quality digital content (animations, multimedia content, HTML pages enriched with graphics, etc.) that is being categorized with respect to the users’ expectations, characteristics, and knowledge. The environment uses the Moodle LMS in order to exploit the features of courses, quizzes, user tracking, and tools of collaboration and communication. Moreover, new Moodle features are created, or extended in order to fulfill the Greek language learners’ educational needs. For the same purpose, the Moodle embedded representation of content as lists of resources is being encapsulated through a graphically enriched navigation system. The material is thus presented to the user in a flow that is educationally documented.

This paper presents CADMOS, a graphical learning design tool that allows a practitioner to easily create lesson plans. One of the main innovative features of CADMOS is that a lesson plan can be exported so that it can be deployed and enacted in a Moodle platform.

The recently developed Australian Curriculum recognises the global changes that impact on the learning programs for all education institutions. We are now a globalised society, where the challenge of an economic crisis in one part of the world has widespread implications. Civil wars and famines lead to humanitarian crises and refugee migration that have an international impact. The Centre for Integrated Human Studies at the University of Western Australia recognises that the 21st Century provides humankind with significant global challenges on a number of fronts – social, economic and ecological. Providing students with the knowledge and skills to connect with members of the global community will ensure our future citizens are well equipped to contribute to meeting these tests. Learning management systems such as Moodle are seen as key strategies to enable education which prepares students for a challenging future. Since 2009, The Centre for Integrated Human Studies has developed post-graduate programs using Moodle as their learning management system. During this period a unique senior secondary program in regional Western Australia that incorporates the use of high definition IP video conferencing also has been developed with Moodle. This combination of Moodle and regular video conferencing enables a high degree of class engagement and collaboration from students across up to five schools. The post- graduate program currently has 40 off-campus national and international enrolments and the secondary program about 80 students over seven courses. In reporting on these two case studies, this paper will describe how these programs have developed and the school-based research undertaken. The next phase of the development will be using Moodle to support collaboration between the university and secondary schools.

In the academic year 2011/2012, Alfaisal University started admitting female students, becoming the only educational institution in Riyadh city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to teach both male and female undergraduates in the same (split-level) classrooms, with men sitting on the ground floor and women in the balcony. This trial integration carried with it some cultural and religious restrictions designed to limit the amount of interaction between the sexes, and this impacted the structure of our learning management system. Male and female students were allowed to communicate and collaborate directly with one another while the instructor was in the room, but on Moodle communication between them was prohibited as were all collaborative activities, since the interaction could not be adequately monitored. However, both male and female students needed access to the same course content and were allowed to collaborate with members of their own sex. Male and female faculty members, on the other hand, were allowed to communicate and needed to do so, as many of them teach identical courses. In this case study, we will focus on our experience of using Moodle with shared content and gender restrictions and how this arrangement affected the quality of instruction received by the students.

A considerable amount of e-learning content is being delivered via virtual or managed learning environments. These platforms keep track of learners’ activities including content viewed, time spent and quiz results. This monitoring trawl provides appropriate data to enable personalised e-learning experiences through the application of existing data mining and knowledge discovery techniques. This paper proposes a categorization of learning design developed within the framework of virtual educational environments. It is aimed at the identification of categories and the construction of learning design patterns for courses listed in the Moodle platform of the Universidad de la República de Uruguay.

The Moodle learning management system (LMS) is becoming increasingly widespread due to its adoption by education providers at all levels. The system however does not provide educators with the ability to create connections between online course material and domain concepts easily and visibly. We chose concept tagging as the method for allowing teachers to provide these links in a new concept tags plug-in for Moodle. Our concept tagging plug-in allows the creation, management and application of concept tags to course content. Students and teachers will mutually benefit from the use of such a mechanism, as it would aid information location in and retrieval from course content. An initial evaluation of the plug-in showed that teachers find the concept tagging of course modules to be a desirable and usable functionality that Moodle lacks. The work in this paper describes the first prototype of the plug-in, the aim of which is provide the first step in contributing to the addition of basic student modelling functionality to Moodle as part of a wider project. By continually keeping track of a student’s progress on each concept tag, Moodle will be able to suggest appropriate course modules for further study based on this progress.

The project’s main aim is to investigate feedback for teaching and learning using analytics via Moodle. Moodle analytics allows institutions to accumulate information which can be used for analyzing students’ behaviour within a virtual learning environment (Romero, Ventura, &; García, 2008). This information can include records of computer operations in the form of logged data of students’ activities. However, students’ activities and their e-learning interactions may vary across an institution because of the different ways course spaces are designed between schools/departments. Through Moodle analytics, it would be possible to evaluate students’ online behaviour and possibly to explore what this behaviour can tell us about how students learn online and to identify various departmental pedagogical disciplinary practices (Martín-Blas &; Serrano-Fernández, 2009). The project focuses on the study of students’ activities and its relationship with the design of course spaces in the areas of feedback and assessment and will build on the work of San Diego and McAndrew (2008). Through this project, we will explore the potential of Moodle analytics to provide feedback to tutors about learner activities in relation to the design, structure and content of a module, and also to provide feedback to students on how they use these resources. In order to achieve this, records of learning activities through Moodle analytics need to be translated into a display that teachers can interpret easily and that students can appreciate. Studies around learning activities with Moodle will be conducted across six departments on selected modules with large student numbers.

Moodle as a learning management system does a superior job managing individual courses, their content and the users within them. Enterprise users frequently have needs beyond the course, especially with managing its users in organizational structures into learning programs. This paper looks at ELIS, an application add-on for Moodle that provides a way to manage Moodle users and courses into targeted learning programs and report on progress in those programs. It will describe the use cases that led to ELIS, the work done to define and build it, the feedback mechanisms to help define the feature roadmap and the process used to build and manage it.

The deployment of non-trivial collaborative learning situations in VLEs is a burdensome and error-prone process for teachers, especially as the number of participants, groups, tools and activities grows. Besides, this deployment frequently suffers from the limited set of VLE built-in tools teachers can select to support learning activities. GLUE! and GLUE!-PS are two alternative routes for the deployment of collaborative learning situations that respectively tackle the integration of multiple external tools in multiple VLEs, and the deployment of abstract learning designs generated within multiple authoring tools in multiple VLEs. This paper discusses how the GLUE! - GLUE!-PS partnership represents a deployment route that overcomes both the two aforementioned limitations, when deploying in VLEs non-trivial collaborative learning situations that require the integration of external tools. An authentic, though somewhat complex collaborative situation deployed in Moodle illustrates the benefits of the GLUE! - GLUE!-PS approach. Higher education teachers that deployed this situation in Moodle as part of a professional development workshop highlighted that this approach allows an efficient deployment, and emphasized the benefit of reusing learning designs in other courses and VLEs.

In recent years, a decreasing mathematical knowledge is observable among first year university students. At the same time, the number of students starting their studies at universities is currently increasing. One of the most important factors of success at least for technical studies is the mathematical competence. Therefore we see the improvement of these skills as an important task for today’s university education. This paper describes a Moodle based approach that allows the measurement of individual mathematical competence at the beginning of a coaching process to continuously increase the mathematical skills of university students. Here, we combine the use of presence learning, individual feedback of the current math skills of each student and adapted learning advices together with up to date e-learning material. Technically, the system is integrated in Moodle through database extension, filter programming and use of graphic libraries, together with a recommender system for adapted e-learning material. This paper describes details of the technical implementation and provides results of a first evaluation.

This document has been prepared to report on and showcase a variety of e-learning pilot projects and initiatives launched by the IB Online Professional Development department (hereinafter ‘IB Online PD’) of the International Baccalaureate (hereinafter ‘IB’) in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1968, the International Baccalaureate is an international organization that aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment. These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right. The IB Online PD department, as an integral global service e provider, offers a wide range of online workshops for new and experienced coordinators, teachers and administrators in all of our educational programmes. Online workshops are available through the open source learning management system, Moodle platform, and tailored for all subject groups in both the Diploma programme and Middle Years Programme, as well as workshops for the Primary Years Programme. The workshops are available in English, French and Spanish. Notably, IB Online PD is now in the process of reengineering current processes, methodologies, and systems to ensure high quality, pedagogically sound, innovative and user-centred e-learning experiences. As such, IB Online PD has introduced two multi-faceted projects aimed at [a] innovating the look &; feel and instructional design of the current Moodle version (1.9) and [b] strengthening the direct application of online collaborative learning in all IB online workshops so as to ensure a measurable and positive impact. This document includes a brief description of two projects: [1] Project 1: Innovating content design and development for effective collaborative learning: migration from Moodle 1.9 to 2.2, [2] Project 2: Strengthening online collaborative learning through just-in-time and flexible learning, and highlights key e-learning initiatives that have strengthened the online collaborative learning experience for all key stakeholders involved.

Designing learning scenarios and exploiting them for setting up a learning situation on Moodle is still a complex task. Visual Instructional Design Languages and their dedicated graphical editors have been identified as important conceptual tools for achieving more creative design solutions within a design process. However, binding and operationalizing such learning models is not tackled for now. In this article we propose the specification and development of visual languages and editors 1/ dedicated to Learning Management Systems like Moodle, and 2/ taking into account specific instructional expressiveness from communities of practices. This original approach requires the identification and formalization of the LMSs implicit and internal instructional design language. It also requires the development and addition to the LMS of a dedicated API in order to expose this proprietary format for communicating inside and outside LMSs. Then, we propose to use this LMS semantics as a base for the specification of external instructional languages. We follow a theoretical, methodological and technological research framework based on the Domain-Specific Modelling domain. Such software engineering domain provides some relevant tooling and techniques for assisting and guiding the elaboration of domain-specific languages. All our experimentations and development prototypes have been focused on the Moodle platform. These first propositions and results are presented. Also, a dedicated funded research project has just started in order to deeper address the highlighted issues and objectives.

Video and audio recording in Moodle is not an easy task. There are some third party plug-ins that allow teachers to prepare assignments that students have to complete recording themselves either using audio or video devices, in a non-interactive way. This paper reviews current three open source Moodle plug-ins for speaking practice: NanoGong, PoodLL and Moodle Language Laboratory, analysing each one's advantages, limitations and some shortcomings that need to be addressed. In hopes of addressing the lack of those requirements' implementation, we present Babelium, a new plug-in that allows to record and share interactive video exercises that students can leverage to record their own answers, either using their microphone or their webcam. Simultaneously to the answer being recorded, students can get some help and tips, for their oral production, watching a parallel, exercise-synchronized video, that shows images, texts and words that could be useful for the oral communication effort. These video-exercises can be used not only for monologues but also for conversation, dialogue or dubbing simulations, which opens interesting new ways of practising speaking, especially for second language exam preparation. Finally, this paper shows our experience applying this plug-in for Basque speaking teaching and practice, a minority language from the Basque Country (Spain) and presents some examples of video-exercise types that can be reused in any other language learning environment using a Moodle instance.

Different actors like teachers, course designers and content providers need to gain more information about the way the resources provided with Moodle are used by the students so they can adjust and adapt their offer better. In this contribution we show that Excel Pivot Tables can be used to conduct a flexible analytical processing of usage data and gain valuable information. An advantage of Excel Pivot Tables is that they can be mastered by persons with good IT-skills but not necessarily computer scientists.

E-Learning environments may contribute to the teaching and learning process if the integration is done within the framework of proper pedagogy. Building customized E-learning programs places high demands on design, programming skills, and time. An alternative to this can be deployment of courses within learning management systems. One such system that has been gradually gaining worldwide popularity is Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment), a course management system for online learning. Moodle is “open source”, allowing developers to tailor the system to individual needs. It also communicates extremely well with many web -based resources (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, JClik, Hot Potatoes, etc.), allowing developers creativity and versatility. The design of Moodle is based on socio-constructivist pedagogy. This means its goal is to provide a set of tools that support an inquiry- and discovery-based approach to online learning. Furthermore, it purports to create an environment that allows for collaborative interaction among students as a standalone, or in addition to, conventional classroom instruction. In this paper we present an overview of E-learning environments that we have implemented using the Moodle platform. These environments include interactive activities combining simulations, short videos, virtual experiments, games and more, in order to enhance interactive learning based on constructivism theory, and allow for students and teachers to learn skills for intelligent use of information and technological communication. The environments have been developed in partnership with teachers, as an enhancement to face-to-face teaching, for both curricular and extra-curricular learning. One main advantage of these environments is the freedom of teachers to add, change or use them as is, according to their needs; hence, the teachers are equal partners in the development. We will also show how these environments supply teachers with many interesting tools that can be used to improve the teaching– learning process, and the students to reinforce their abilities and knowledge, in a user friendly and stimulating manner engaging them in a fun, familiar and modern environment where much of their daily non-school activities take place.

The purpose of the MOCLog project is to develop a tool for the analysis and presentation of log data on a Moodle server. The new idea of MOCLog is to combine in a useful tool a didactical theory with users’ data and to serve the needs of four groups of stakeholders: students, teachers, study program managers and administrators. The approach that we followed with MOCLog is the analysis of learning activities in online-courses from a didactical point of view (learning process and outcomes), thus going beyond than simply counting and visualizing the numbers of posts and clicks. For this purpose, a model of the log file analysis was proposed, derived from didactical principles, and an analysis of user requirements. These requirements have been collected through interviews with stakeholders, theoretical studies from the literature, and from the experience of our team members as researchers in eLearning. Based on this, a model composed by a concept map, a solution map and use cases was developed. Implementation started from these use cases and specified a design that allows realizing them within the context of Moodle, either by reusing components available from the GISMO system, or by implementing new ones. After a series of different tests and the implementation of related improvements, the MOCLog system is now available for deployment and exploitation in academic institutions.

The e-learning courses are supported by technological tools that compensate for some limitations, as the distance itself, temporality and emotional issues, among others. It is important that a distance learning course has a proper Learning Management System (LMS) that really supports the teaching / learning process. The work is justified given the need that monitoring teams have to process the information on the courses that are stored in Moodle, which, despite being in a single database, are difficult to recover, but are of great importance to help the monitoring process of the students and tutors. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate MonSys - Monitoring System of tutors and students - from the implementation of a Monitoring Coordination at UNASUS / UFMA - Open University of SUS of Federal University of Maranhão, in two virtual post-graduation courses using Moodle. To evaluate the MonSys, we measured the time spent by monitoring technical staff of UNASUS / UFMA to process information from Moodle, compared with the time taken to retrieve this information via the MonSys. Using the MonSys, it becomes possible to monitor the students and tutors of the Moodle Learning Management System courses through the online mode, and in a faster way, requiring less effort from the monitoring team for the generation of useful information and allowing greater control and better development of the course. According to the results, the reduction of working time of the monitoring team and the increase in the ability to monitor the access and performance of students and tutors in postgraduate courses were significant, given the demands of UNASUS / UFMA.

The Moodle 2.0 Web Services architecture has been designed to optimize bulk operations or administrative tasks. Therefore, it does not support external applications accessing activity modules. For this reason, the Moodbile project aims to provide an extension of the Moodle 2.0 Web Services architecture in order to provide access to external applications such as m-learning applications, from within Moodle.. To validate this extension, three m-learning applications have been developed: an HTML5 client that may be used from most mobile browsers, an android-native app and an iOS-native app.

This paper introduces three Moodle plugins, Online Judge Assignment, Moss Plagiarism and Github Assignment, which are designed for courses involving programming, such as CS1, Data Structure, Algorisms, Compilers and Operating Systems. Online Judge extends the advanced uploading of files assignment to instantly compile and run submissions against predefined test cases. According to the number and weights of passing test cases, it can grade submissions automatically. Students who do not reach the maximum grade can improve and upload their programs again and again for higher grades. It supports more than 40 kinds of programming languages. Moss is a plagiarism plugin. It compares all submissions in the same/related assignments, lists the most similar pairs and let teachers to confirm who are cheating. Its underlying engine is designed to parse source code but this plugin extends this ability to support pdf, doc, docx and odt documents. Github, as an assignment type plugin, can synchronize commits from git repositories in github.com and store them as submissions. Therefore, teachers can track student projects in details and grade them directly in Moodle. Moreover, for team-based projects, each group uses one shared repo and the plugin can statistic workload percentages of every group member. It has been proved that these plugins can significantly reduce teachers’ labour and improve students’ enthusiasm, make programming courses more efficient. All of them are open source and free. You are welcome to download them from http://git.io/hmdl .

Providing learners with a list of disparate search results is not always conducive to learning. In particular, this approach lacks learning structure, and learners have to sift through lists of resources in order to make sense of them and to find the level of detail they require. In this paper we outline the Moodle Help Block, a Moodle block plug-in that provides learners with Just-In-Time context relevant learning material using a defined pedagogical strategy. The Moodle Help Block uses a combination of Semantic Web, Social Web and learning composition technology to generate learning episodes as needed by learners. The Moodle help block conducts a dialogue with the learner to extrapolate where a given learner’s knowledge gaps lie and generate learning episodes with learning material to help the learner overcome their knowledge deficit. It is thought that the Moodle Help Block can assist learners with targeted help when a teacher is not available.

The Inter-Orthodox Centre of the Church of Greece (DKEE) under the auspices of the Pedagogical Institute took the initiative for a teacher training program of primary and secondary education teachers focused on new technologies and the latest educational theories. The training program follows the basic principles and methodological applications of elearning, has 3 stages of development and it is estimated than more than 3,000 teachers will be trained. The design of the training was based on previous surveys and studies on the Greek educators’ needs and the experience gained during the implementation of online courses in Greece and abroad. In these online courses the Moodle platform along with other technologies compatible with moodle were used so the environment could offer a number of different stimuli. The instructors acted as facilitators, in the context of learning theories related to adult education. This training program which supplemented other educational training programs of the Greek Ministry of Education has the following benefits: access to learning regardless of time and place limitations, individualized learning, updating the learning object, flexibility in shaping the work environment and the educators’ work. The evaluation showed that Greek teachers can work effectively in an online training environment.

This presentation is a progress report on a study being carried out to explore the possibilities of telecollaboration in education. The two teachers from China and Japan have launched an intercultural exchange project between Chinese students learning Japanese as their third language and Japanese students learning cross-cultural communication. The telecollaboration has been implemented in a non-traditional way, which does not involve language exchange as its essential part, in order for both the groups with different learning needs to benefit from these activities. A pilot project conducted from October 2011 to January 2012 revealed some of the promises and challenges. Selecting and setting up the platform was the biggest challenge, which led to other challenges and issues. Based on the lessons learned from the pilot project, the project has been redesigned. A Moodle course has been set up for this project, and several functionalities and the arrangement of the activities have been planned and tested for use, including using Forums for in-group discussions, using NanoGong in forum posting, and using Choices for a warm-up. The Moodle course, the arrangement of the activities, and what the authors are trying to achieve with them will be discussed.

In this paper we show how Moodle can be used to improve the quality of education in developing countries and, even more important, how can be used to turn the educational system more sustainable and effective in the long-term. We describe our experience in implementing a programming course in Moodle for the Higher School of Informatics at the Université Polytechnique de Bobo-Dioulasso, in Burkina Faso (West Africa), joining efforts with local professors in designing and implementing the learning system. We finally discuss how the teaching effort is reduced, the students’ knowledge and capacity improves, and the institutional academic model can be guaranteed with the proposal. For this reason, we claim that information technologies in developing countries are a cost-effective way to guarantee the objectives originally defined in the academic curricula and, therefore, deal with the problem of the education.

Moodle Course Creator Certificate is the official Moodle Certificate provided exclusively from Moodle Partners. Human Resource Development New Zealand Moodle Partner is the Certification Central Administration. This Certification is running since 2006. It started as Moodle Teacher Certificate and renamed to Course Creator's when Moodle development forced it. While Moodle is growing and becomes more and more complex the need for organized trainings and a reliable and effective certification scheme becomes imperative. In this paper we will present the history of MCCC and its evolvement during the years.

Recent advances in mobile multimedia technology have brought about fundamental changes to both education and entertainment. Institutions are now grappling with ways to bridge existing course management systems (CMS) with mobile technologies using native mobile apps as well as web apps (Daniels, 2012). This poster demonstration will introduce a suite of mobile apps that interact with specific Moodle CMS modules to reinforce oral production activities for language learning purposes. The suite includes a VideoBoard app, a VoiceShadowing app and a SlideShow app. The VoiceBoard app allows learners to record video or audio on a mobile device and to submit the media directly to a ‘VideoBoard’ module within a Moodle course. Using the VoiceShadowing app, learners can simultaneously listen to sample target language audio files, record their ‘shadowed’ speech and upload their recording to the Moodle ‘VoiceShadow’ module. Finally the SlideShow app provides a simple mobile interface for learners to capture images and recorded captions, which are then automatically converted to an online slideshow in Moodle. These mobile apps are currently available on the Apple App Store for free and require the installation of accompanying Moodle modules. Development of an Android-based version of each app is underway.

This poster illustrates the enhancement of the ‘OU Mobile VLE’, originally delivered through highly-customised Moodle v1.9, through to release of a more standardised approach for Moodle 2.x. This case study builds on student feedback, both unsolicited and in student surveys. Combining with usage analysis, key features were refined and optimised for delivery and contribution via the mobile web. Support for distance education requires more narrative, signposting and scaffolding of the learning design to be available. A package of discrete resources and activities structured through a ‘study planner’ approach, coupled with ‘alternative formats’ covers the on/offline blend. Formative self-assessment was extended – from reflection in course texts through to simple quiz question types.

We have developed a Moodle plugin called pdf2submission for utilizing Moodle also for teaching at ordinary classrooms. The plugin is based on opensource libraries and tools. With the plugin, handwritten paper documents can be easily accepted in Moodle as if they were submitted online. Though the original version of the plugin is available only for Moodle 1.9, a new version for Moodle 2.2 has been developed.

In this presentation the term Virtual Course-Room (VCR) is used to describe a structured Moodle-room offered as an additional service for students attending Goethe-Institut language classes. It consists of 3 levels: Level 1 is mainly course documentation, level 2 offers students a choice of online resources for independent language learning, and level 3 makes full use of the interactive tools of the VCR, integrating online activities into face-to-face tuition. Together with interactive whiteboards becoming standard equipment of the classrooms, the aim of this concept is the hybridization of classroom learning. Students benefit from the possibility to keep up with their course in case they miss a lesson as well as from additional training opportunities and detailed information on the Goethe-Institut’s examinations. The electronic course book makes course targets and progress transparent. Students can, and many do, subscribe to the course-book, thus getting new entries as soon as they are posted. Moreover the virtual course-room can help to achieve a genuine pedagogical objective, which is a more learner-centred approach and personalized learning, often difficult to be realized in face-to-face classes. An important advantage of working with the VCR is the improvement of the teachers’ ICT knowledge and abilities. Being familiar with some major developments in the field of learning and teaching allows them to keep a high degree of professionalism and they more readily accept that their role as teachers is changing. New ways of learning and communicating are not envisaged as threats but as a chance to make the lesson more attractive and to feel part of the modern teachers’ community.

Over the past few years we have seen the emergence of numerous free education sites. Initiatives such as Khan Academy, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, and Wiki Educator all demonstrate that the face of technology enhanced learning is changing. The Libre knowledge movement (free knowledge) and OER (Open Educational Resources) are examples of the paradigm shift in perceptions and practices around knowledge and education. What has been missing from the landscape is a similar service that is totally free, learner focussed, and based on Moodle – the best Learning Management System in the world today. FreeMoodle.org was started in mid-2011 by an official Moodle Partner, and intends to address this by providing completely free Moodle hosting for individuals and organisations, provided that the courses are open and free to others. FreeMoodle.org is unique in being Moodle based (bringing with it the pedagogically sound principles) and supported and managed by an official Moodle Partner (HRDNZ). FreeMoodle.org fundamentally provides a single Moodle-based learning destination for learners – whoever and wherever they are.

We address key aspects of the future of Moodle in the context of types of change in technology environments, in particular Christensen's distinction between sustaining and disruptive innovations. Our focus is higher education worldwide, and our primarily interest is in Moodle or its successors in 2020.This paper reviews the competition Moodle currently faces, and goes on to outline four potentially competing forms of learning environment architectures. Particular attention is paid to the implications of the semantic web. We conclude with a recommendation that the Moodle community needs explicitly to set up processes which in parallel to continuing evolution of Moodle 2.X and 3.X, systematically seek to design a next-generation learning environment This will be based on semantic web-based technologies and pedagogies of the mid-21st century, rather than non-semantic technologies derived from the end of the 20th century, and pedagogic mindsets derived from the 19th century.

At its core Moodle is a user management system, with course areas to which users are given roles and permissions, to access content, and activities and receive grades. These are the core aspects of learning management. However it would not be possible for the Moodle platform to include every possible feature inside the product – there are simply too many tools being created by specialists around the Globe. With the external tool in Moodle 2.2, it aims to bridge that gap – being able to reach out to those tools which others create and connect seamlessly to provide access to the users inside Moodle to an external tool or content.

The objective of almost all research is its dissemination and, ideally, commercial exploitation. In this paper we describe key channels of dissemination and exploitation of Moodle research.

Remote-Learner.net Inc., manages, maintains and supports thousands of Moodle sites with hundreds of different Moodle plug-ins. The data produced across all of these sites, combined with CRM data, provides a wealth of information used to plan for the needs of that userbase. This paper discusses how we mine the large amount of data we have, to learn about the plug-ins our users want, need and use. And how we use that data to plan for the add-ons we will provide, support and manage for our users.

This study examines how social engagement in an online learning environment (OLE) can transform teachers’ perceptions of their own pedagogical practices. Data was collected over a ten-month period, as a group of five teachers at an international school in Hong Kong were learning to use Moodle to create blended learning environments. Participants ranged from new teachers in their first year of work, to experienced teachers with over ten years on the job. The data examined in this paper came from an online semi-structured interview. The findings indicate that teachers with more teaching experience may have more confidence to use OLEs in a constructivist way. In this study, OLEs, especially with the use of Web 2.0 tools, were expected to provide a process for negotiation of student control and expression in a way that motivates students and supports learning.

Background: Researchers in developing countries often do not have access to training on research writing. The purpose of this study was to test whether researchers in Rwanda might complete and benefit from a pilot online course in research writing. Methods: The pilot course was set up on Moodle, an open source online learning environment, and facilitated by the author. The lessons and assignment were spread over six weeks, followed by a two-week extension period. Twenty eight faculty members of the National University of Rwanda enrolled themselves in the course. Results: Twenty-five of the 28 learners completed the course. After the course, these learners expressed high satisfaction, eg, 24 of them felt that they were ready to write a research paper for publication. Conclusion: The high completion rate (89%) is noteworthy for two reasons: e-learning courses tend to have lower completion rates than classroom courses, and 76% of the learners in the pilot course had not taken an e-learning course before. This result and the positive feedback indicate that online courses can benefit researchers in developing countries who may not have access to classroom courses on research writing.

Student time-management practices are a significant contributing factor to success in tertiary education, particularly in online and blended learning. In courses where many tasks are set to involve students continuously, a learning management system can be used to structure and assist time-management. This paper reports on the successful development and testing of a simple time-management tool that can assist students within an LMS.

This paper summarizes a PhD research project that has contributed towards the development of Moodle - a popular open-source course management system (moodle.org). In this project we applied theoretical perspectives such as "social constructionism" and "connected knowing" to the analysis of our own online classes as well as the growing learning community of other Moodle users. We used the mode of participatory action research, including techniques such as case studies, ethnography, learning environment surveys and design methodologies. This ongoing analysis is being used to guide the development of Moodle as a tool for improving processes within communities of reflective inquiry. At the time of writing (April 2003), Moodle has been translated into twenty-seven languages and is being used by many hundreds of educators around the world, including universities, schools and independent teachers.

The 2012 telecollaborative exchange project delivered multiple activities for nine weeks based primarily on Moodle, with the educational goals of motivating students to interact inter-culturally, and developing their cultural awareness. 40 students from a language class in China and from a seminar class in Japan participated. This project, conducted mainly in Japanese, was intended also to meet different learning needs of both Chinese learners of Japanese and Japanese students studying cross-cultural communication. Using Moodle gives us opportunities and the participants were engaged in weekly tasks using Forum, Choice, NanoGong, PowerPoint slides and Skype video calls, which were arranged to offer both inter-class interactions and small-group discussions within a mixed group of students from both classes. This project yielded some positive results in terms of the educational/learning goals, though more active participation should be encouraged. Some of the Moodle functionalities, used in combination with other tools, worked fine and helped raise students’ motivation in this exchange project, while others did not work as planned or expected by the authors, which will lead to a modified approach to the following project. This presentation evaluates this 2012 attempt based on the participants’ feedback and output, and their behaviors observed on Moodle and in class, and explores ways to maximize future intercultural telecollaboration via Moodle.

Since 2012, new large-scale open educational courses have been offered in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like Udacity, Coursera and edX. Our Tezukayama Internet Educational Service (TIES) offers learning support systems platform combined with e-books, Moodle and Academic Access Management Federation by Open Source License via Large Scale Online Courses (LSOC) like MOOCs under an open source developed community. This paper introduces the learning support systems platform utilizing Moodle modules and the community called Creative Higher Education Learning Object (CHiLO).

This poster will present our experience of the past 9 years in supporting Moodle LMS on a large heterogeneous humanities and social sciences – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Following the successful selection, testing and implementation process came the years of actual use and growth of our LMS, both in user base and the complexity of support. While in the fall of 2004 the LMS had few hundred users and no more than 20 online courses, in 2013 it has over 7000 users and more than 1300 online courses. During the production phase of our LMS support, we have experienced 4 out of 5 stages of development regarding institutional e-learning practice according to Bates, but not in the particular order: Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, and finally, Stage 4 (instead it was 1, 3, 2, 4). After years of successful LMS part-time support have we established a dedicated E-learning Support Center (ESC) that should enable future growth of our institutional LMS and quality control and assurance when it comes to e-learning materials and activities (and respective online courses they reside in). The fifth stage, sustainable and high quality use of e-learning is our final goal in the years to come.

Moodle understands about 42 mathematical functions ranging from “+” to “tanh” and at one point we managed to get a 1171 characters long formula with nine variables working. Iimagine building your questions in a spreadsheet which has a much richer variety of functions available. With that power, vast and rich question banks could be built quickly. This paper describes the construction of a spreadsheet to generate Calculated questions, using all mathematical functions, and the impact this power tool had on the organization of a course. It catered for large groups by enabling the creation of lots of quizzes to snack from, unlimited rehearsing and immediate feedback of students, allowing lecturers to tutor on demand and students to peer teach. The tool was developed and piloted on a course, “Introduction to Statistics”, that was redesigned in order to engage students, improve success rates and minimize redundant lectures. Lectures were reassigned as workshops in which students were challenged with quizzes to activate their learning. Students were invited to collaborate and peer teach. The tool empowered the lecturers to quickly design large question banks. Students approved the self-paced workshops. Confronted with tons of questions in various quizzes students became involved and began to question each other and the lecturers for a way to solve the presented problems.

Moodle has been chosen by thousands of higher education (HE) institutions to facilitate quality e-learning for millions of learners. This paper introduces the full end-to-end life-cycle of Moodle development and operation in a typical HE institution. This paper also discusses the strategies to overcome the key technical challenges related to the development and operation of Moodle in HE institutions. The important challenge addressed here is how to cope with the continuous upgrade process of Moodle to new major and minor releases. With the help of a few bespoke agile processes, this paper presents two case studies of upgrading Moodle to newer versions, from 2.2.7 to 2.2.9 (minor version upgrade) and 2.2.9 to 2.4.3 (major version upgrade combined with the annual Moodle archive site setup).

Learning analytics enables tutors to gain useful insights on the behaviour of students in an online learning environment. This information can then be utilised to customize the educational space, optimize the learning resources and activities, and personalize the student experience. This paper presents our approach to analysing the data of users’ behaviours that are recorded in the Moodle logs. Currently, the Moodle logs manager suffers from functional limitations and uninspiring visualizations. Our method utilises the possibility of downloading the logs in Microsoft Excel format and provides a simple and effective offline solution. The method we have developed is based on Excel macros and visual basic. Tutors can experiment with different combinations of metrics such as total page views, unique users, unique actions, IP addresses, unique pages, average session length and bounce rate. Furthermore, the software allows the definition of date ranges and the selection of individual or groups of students. The complicated processes of analysing and combining data are carried out in the background, enabling tutors to focus on the pedagogic implications and invest in practical, realistic scenarios through informed decision-making. Future work includes transferring the offline functionality to an online Moodle plugin and increasing system intelligence to allow the production of meaningful and actionable suggestions with regards to set target goals.

This paper reports on the creation of an e-learning champions’ network at a research-led university and reports on interim successes and challenges. The importance of senior management buy-in at multiple points within the initiative is highlighted, as is the localised approach to this strategy. A structured approach to working with the departmental e-learning champions has resulted in a successful start to the institution’s vision of improving e-learning uptake. This approach has involved analysing the usage data generated within Moodle and other e-learning systems and combining this with information gained from interviews with champions to produce e-learning position statements for each department. These were combined to produce a faculty e-learning report to be communicated to the faculty’s teaching committee. An action plan is in the process of being implemented at faculty level. Multiple communication channels have been established to support the E-Learning Champions’ Network; however, staff engagement with online communication tools has been minimal. The paper discusses the importance of face to face events in order to establish trust with and between champions and the e-learning support team. It also provides a description of engagement activities at one university which may serve as a useful model for other institutions.

The aim of this report is to address current issues that university students experience with the online learning portal Moodle, and recommend changes that will increase the use of the site. The focus of the research is the perspective of the student, and this has been investigated through an online survey taken by 83 final year students. This cohort was targeted since it is the first peer group that has used Moodle throughout their three years at Cass Business School, after the university moved from the previous online portal. The authors of this report are students at Cass Business School, which makes it the first piece of research of its kind, entirely focused on the student perspective. The report is structured around the overall themes functionality and design, assessment and feedback, communication, and collaboration, which the survey was based on. The findings of the survey were generally positive. Students seem to be generally satisfied with their experience of Moodle, however there is room for improvement both in terms of functionality and how well Moodle integrates with other tools, as well as how it is used and promoted by teaching staff. The recommendations made are therefore around integrating other university online tools to make Moodle a ‘one-stop-shop’, making minor adjustments and additions of Moodle functions to make it more user friendly, and encouraging staff and students to use Moodle to a larger extent in order to reach a critical mass of usage.

Initial research in this project looked at opportunities for personalisation in specific degrees within the authors’ immediate remit. This led to the elaboration of initial ‘colours’ of personalisation and an awareness of the logistic and economic solutions, and challenges, that these approaches could bring to teaching. From this, a 'palette' was elaborated to offer the basis of a set of design principles that could be adopted more widely to produce new personalised material. However, some of the new or enhanced features in Moodle 2.4 began to change our thinking about what we could achieve, moving beyond Moodle as merely technical support for what we currently do. Instead, we are focussing on how Moodle 2 allows us to develop and refine our educational practice so that we start doing things that were just not possible before, to support excellent student learning. The current next stage of this research now aims to look beyond single courses to build references and models for staff to approach personalisation, to provide a more tailored, more responsive, and more independent learning experience for students. Further work is underway to trial new methods of student input, independent learning, and staff feedback, with analysis of performance for any good practice emerging. The outcomes from these activities will then be structured, formalised, and simplified to bring personalisation to more courses, raising the bar for student education throughout the Business school.

This paper aims to inform and persuade stakeholders in Africa so they support instructors by meeting their online basic needs because online instruction cannot be carried out in isolation. The report is based on a piece of research which was carried out from 2010 to 2013 in Rwanda. It will focus on a teacher training institute in Rwanda, Central Africa, where instructors have been trained on how to create, develop, and manage online courses in Moodle. Firstly, the study will lay down background information which, in addition to literature review, highlights a needs analysis that was carried out by the institution and which found out that there was a great need to raise the effectiveness of instruction through Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Also, the institution wanted to meet the professional development needs of a growing teaching and student population by developing and using online educational materials beyond the classroom. Afterwards, the paper will evaluate the training, based on the project’s expected outcomes i.e. development of training materials and introduction and use of online learning materials. It will draw on instructors’ own Moodle experience, including online courses they have created on the platform and challenges they have faced during the implementation process. It will then recommend Moodle because it’s an open source and is free to customise to any context. Furthermore, though there may be low hosting cost, it has a lot of potential to reach out and educate more people, develop learning and teaching beyond the classroom. Finally, it will make suggestions to stakeholders as to what needs to be done to support instructors and learners with a view to adopt Moodle, a growing online learning environment across the world.

The fast pace with which new technologies, like smartphones and tablet computers, have been adopted in the last years since their appearance, has created a didactical gap on the side of the educational institutions. This gap is also created by the fact that design and development of mobile applications in educational institutions has been mostly technology driven and not merely enough didactically driven. Schools need scenarios that allow them to integrate the increasing informal and non-intentional learning activities that are taking place with the help of these technologies into their curricula. The mobile learning devices have become one of the most prominent interfaces with which learners interact with their learning tasks. This interaction with information is mediated trough technology and as such, the design and development of applications that aim to support these scenarios need a framework that takes into account the main three aspects of mobile learning: the device, the learner, the social aspect. As mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are used as satellites for the main learning device and are not meant to replace it, we speculate that a Moodle App should implement only some of the activities that are possible in Moodle. The App that we designed and developed sets out to be one implementation that fits to all frontends and implements a limited set of activities. As an outlook we propose further research and development on the mobile aspects of Moodle with the focus on personalisation aspects and extending the service by implementing functions that support the main activity in the learning context of the users on mobile devices, which is reading.

The assessment of students’ performance in online learning environments is a challenging and demanding task for the teachers. Moodle offers several assessment tools. This paper presents a new assessment tool, called Learning Analytics Enriched Rubric (LAe-R). LAe-R is based on the concept of assessment rubrics which is a very popular assessment technique in education. LAe-R contains “enriched” criteria and grading levels that are associated to data extracted from the analysis of learners’ interaction and learning behavior in an e-learning environment. LAe-R has been developed as a plug-in for the Moodle learning management system. The findings of a case study showed that LAe-R is a very usable tool that is highly appreciated by teachers and students.

This paper focuses on an “in the trenches” perspective of a pre-service teacher and his use of Moodle to teach three subjects to year nine students at Heathfield High School, a public school in South Australia. This case study looks specifically at how Moodle can be used to support, enhance and extend student learning. The “in the trenches” perspective will show Moodle can be an effective tool in the classroom. Students enjoy this approach and are motivated to learn when the course is designed well, tailored and populated with activities and resources that create engagement and enrich the learning experience. The pre-service teacher’s observations, conversations with teachers and students and feedback responses from 3 teachers (100% response) and 69 students (83% response) are drawn upon and form the basis of this paper.

In a company that spans the globe with over 10,000 employees, 300+ offices with operations in 70 countries, Moodle has provided the opportunity for employees from all over the world to participate in courses that build their own learning and growth as well as contributing to an overall increase in productivity for the company. In this document we will present a research made in this corporate learning environment. As Moodle and GAC Corporate Academy evolve, the time has come to investigate a different learning approach: gamification. While there are several researches on the value and risks of gamified learning (Burke, 2012), this research is going to examine a gamified approach in this specific business environment.

This review of e-assessment takes a broad definition, including any use of a computer in assessment, whilst focusing on computer-marked assessment. Drivers include increased variety of assessed tasks and the provision of instantaneous feedback, as well as increased objectivity and resource saving. From the early use of multiple-choice questions and machine-readable forms, computer-marked assessment has developed to encompass sophisticated online systems, which may incorporate interoperability and be used in students’ own homes. Systems have been developed by universities, companies and as part of virtual learning environments. Some of the disadvantages of selected-response question types can be alleviated by techniques such as confidence-based marking. The use of electronic response systems (‘clickers’) in classrooms can be effective, especially when coupled with peer discussion. Student authoring of questions can also encourage dialogue around learning. More sophisticated computer-marked assessment systems have enabled mathematical questions to be broken down into steps and have provided targeted and increasing feedback. Systems that use computer algebra and provide answer matching for short-answer questions are discussed. Computer-adaptive tests use a student’s response to previous questions to alter the subsequent form of the test. More generally, e-assessment includes the use of peer-assessment and assessed e-portfolios, blogs, wikis and forums. Predictions for the future include the use of e-assessment in MOOCs (massive open online courses); the use of learning analytics; a blurring of the boundaries between teaching, assessment and learning; and the use of e-assessment to free human markers to assess what they can assess more authentically.

Computer-marked short-answer questions, with tailored feedback, have been in regular use in the Open University Science Faculty for 5 years. High marking accuracy has been retained following a move to algorithmically-based answer matching. However, short-answer free-text e-assessment remains an underused technology. This paper suggests some reasons for this, in particular the need for a substantial number of marked student responses for use in developing the answer matching.

A considerable amount of e-learning content is being delivered via virtual or managed learning environments. These platforms keep track of learners’ activities including content viewed, time spent and quiz results. This monitoring trawl provides appropriate data to enable personalised e-learning experiences through the application of existing data mining and knowledge discovery techniques. The reasons for not providing this type of bespoke teaching is, in addition to technical and financial constraints, largely due to the plethora of educational and pedagogical issues which have to be overcome. This paper presents these obstacles and suggests solutions thus challenging the community to focus on a new research area which concentrates on facilitating the specification and application of pedagogical domain knowledge for incorporation into existing data mining and knowledge discovery frameworks. This includes educational thresholds, constraints, taxonomies and previously discovered knowledge as well as pedagogical interestingness and metrics.

The virtual learning environment (VLE) has grown to become a piece of complex infrastructure that is now deemed critical to higher educational provision. This paper looks at Moodle and its adoption in higher education. Moodle’s origins, as an open source VLE, are investigated and its growth examined in the context of how higher educational institutions adopt VLEs.

This paper analyzes some current trends in Learning Management System's analytics. It points out that while the analysis of access log patterns - clickometry - is by far the most common form of analysis available in LMS systems its value is limited at best. Being a measure of behavior in its most basic sense clickometry is best suited for assessment of interactions in courses built around behaviorist pedagogy. More constructivist pedagogies require deeper analyses of the data, which is certainly available in most LMS systems but are usually left unanalyzed and unreported due to the complexity of the required methodologies. This paper shows that 85% of available data is not typically analyzed and presents a case study with proposed analyses.

The Moodle bug tracker is a boundary object that faces software developers who write and maintain Moodle's code whilst simultaneously exposing an interface to a much wider public world of ordinary Moodle users. Bugs can be fixed and new features requested by recording them in this boundary object which then tracks their progress. Such tracking has proven a powerful lure for researchers and despite much study of the phenomenon of open source bug fixing and software building, much remains to be answered. Specifically this research sought to analyse the implications of this massively distributed collaborative development process for education and educational technology (which to give it due importance, is referred to here as educational infrastructure). It examined the ways educators - who are defined inclusively as all those involved in supporting the educational enterprise - interface and contribute to the development of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle at this granular level of bug fixing. Two things happen in a successful bug resolution: it is reported and then it is fixed. Only one population is skilled and empowered to engage in the latter but, in theory, anyone can be a reporter. Here data was collected and analysed about these two types of participant. Firstly archival and statistical analysis of thousands of issues contained in the tracker database itself was undertaken. These canonical accounts of bug-fixing contributed to the design and conduct of interviews of both core participants of this community and more casual or peripheral members. A broad spectrum of community participants were interviewed from fringe and casual members to some of the key actors including Tim Hunt of the Open University, Moodle HQ members Helen Foster and Michael de Raadt and Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas. Ethnographically inspired methods were utilised in the interview analysis to uncover rich stories of actual practice that were absent from the accounts of the database itself. This led to several contributions to research being made by this thesis: a depiction of the dynamics and characteristics of an open source software community of practice dedicated to the enterprise of education; an enumeration of three complexes of factors leading to bug tracker issue resolution elicited from participants themselves; an account of particular unknown or under-reported non-canonical issue resolution factors; a model of the role of bug tracker issue mediators including the novel brokerage act of proxy issue submission and improvement; and a theory of how bug trackers are resistant to predictive models of issue resolution. These findings have implications for educational institutions reliant on VLEs and for developers of open source educational software