Mahara 2013 at the Custard Factory – my perspective

Mahara UK 2013 Conference site

Following the Mahara conference, I took a fortnight's leave (in England, no rain during the entire time), so this report is delayed.

Here are a few observations taken from my little notebook (one with real paper).

Badges seem to be the upcoming theme, as Mozilla have their Open Badges project and badges are available in Moodle 2.5.

Leading the Development of Academic Practice - Flying Visitor from Canada

The weather this July reminded me of the weather that I experienced during my time as a Visiting Fellow in Ontario, Canada in 2011. This year I had the opportunity to be host as Dr Alan Wright who is the Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning at the University of Windsor in Ontario came on a flying visit to the UK. In addition, Alan came to Coventry University to present a seminar on Leading the Development of Academic Practice. The seminar was well received by those who attended, who came from many different parts of the University.

Six years ago, Windsor was the first university in Canada to appoint a Vice-Provost with a specific teaching and learning leadership mandate, and ten other universities have since followed suit. Their job is to lead the development of academic practice by influencing policy with the aim of promoting change and improving the student experience. In the seminar, Alan discussed the way that this needed to be achieved by addressing the notion of getting lecturers' support and commitment to changes and the need to integrate the plans within academic practice.

The presentation is now available in Curve - Coventry University's Open Collection

Best of Moodle2 - basic tutor guide

This handout will show tutors some basic features of Moodle2 and how to do them. It includes the following:

• How to enter Moodle at Coventry University
• Moodle 2 home page
• Add an item to the news forum
• Editing a module/course
• Change the topic title and add a summary
• Changing the number of topics
• Adding a link to a web site (URL resource)
• Using blocks
• Adding a file using drag and drop
• Adding a file - using upload

Technology for Teaching at the Learning and Development Conference

July 2013 Schedule

Demonstrations and workshops about Moodle and Mahara in July.

July 2013 Schedule

Holiday Reading

• Want to learn more about technologies for teaching?
• Can’t get to the July workshops?
• Then Holiday Reading may be the answer for you.
• It’s about the basics of Moodle 2 plus hints and tips about using Moodle and Mahara in your teaching.
• It’s online so you can use it anywhere in the world!
•  Access the course here (Coventry University Staff only; email Anne for the enrolment key). 

Communicating with your students using Moodle

This is aimed for tutors or TAs who may have not used Moodle 2 before.

This demonstration and discussion session will show how you can use Moodle’s realtime quiz, forums for different purposes and how you can give feedback to your students
The demonstration includes:
Realtime quiz
A comparison between the Standard forum, QA forum and the News forum
Offline assignment
Mahara assignment
The discussion will be about best practice and use of a communications strategy with students

Best of Moodle 2

First presented today to the Engineers.  Decided to present as a Mahara page, plus a Moodle bit for the Realtime quiz and for the demo parts. The PowerPoint was a set of images.  The images' text didn't come out as expected (they were exported as GIF, I exported them again, this time to JPG and they're fine now).


Getting into putting a TinyURL for the page and a QR code for reference too. Paper-free resources!

The presentation plus resources. 

Mahara at London Campus with the new LT

I showed examples and gave an introduction to Mahara and we did the following:

• Looked at examples, including embedding audio and image gallery
• Added Content
• Added items to a Journal
• Created a Page and Shared it with a URL
• As a Moodle tutor, set up a Mahara assignment and marked a submission
• As a student, created a Mahara page and submitted it to a Mahara assignment within Moodle
• Created a template page for people to copy (and be aware of the option to retain view of the copy).
• Created and invited colleagues to a Mahara group.
• Used embed.ly to embed external media.

(As a Moodle Admin person, created a Moodle sandpit Course and  a student ID and added his own ID to the Course)

 Lunchtime... took in the local culture... brightening up a cold late spring time at Spitalfields Market.