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Month: February 2021

Moodle Munch: Feb. 2021

Published 16th February 2021


The February Moodle Munch recording. How do they get these up so fast!?

This month’s Moodle Munch had sessions on Universal Design for Learning and use of Office 365 within Moodle.

First up, Suzanne Stone and Ann Marie Farrell from DCU discussed how they went about creating a toolkit for creating Moodle course sites that were built with UDL considerations in mind. They were joined by an academic colleague who shared their reflections on using the toolkit. They had gone from using Moodle as a file store designed to meet their needs as a teacher, to one which put students’ needs first. This included, for example, redesigning content that previously would have been a PowerPoint upload, to an online interactive learning activity using the ‘Book’ tool in Moodle. That ‘using Moodle as a file store’ comment is a very familiar problem!

As an aside, and I’m not quite sure where this came from, someone posted a link in the chat to LibreTexts, an online resource for open source textbooks. It’s very American, but that’s understandable when the US has a huge problem with massively expensive textbooks students are expected to purchase on top of their already huge university fees. I’ve had a wee quick nose through their philosophy section and it seems pretty good. Bookmarked and shared.

Back on topic, the second session today was from Edel Gavan of MSLETB who talked about their Office 365 Moodle integration. Their Teams integration looks better than ours, as it can create a Team for each Moodle course which means that students get Teams meetings added to their Outlook calendars automatically, and they can easily create recurring appointments for, for example, weekly classes. To be fair, I think our systems could do that, but there are features we don’t have enabled by our IT. Edel also showed a ‘Block’ of Microsoft tools in Moodle which has been made available via a plugin to add those. One technical point of note regarding those was that each Microsoft service needs to be configured separately.

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Teaching, Learning and Assessment in a Digital World

Published 3rd February 2021

100 years of learning theories showing the learner as the active agent
The learner must be the active agent in the learning process

This was Bob Harrison’s inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton. Bob has been in education for over 50 years, and I have known his name in Ed Tech circles for a long time.

His talk was on the dangers of over-emphasising the power of technology as a solution to the problem of online and distance education, and the need to continually relearn the lessons that successful learning, no matter whatever physical distances may be involved, needs to be driven by the learner as the active agent in the learning process, supported by well-designed content delivered by caring and competent teachers. And if I’ve mangled Bob’s thesis in this summary, you can read it more eloquently in his own words in this article, Why there is nothing remote about online learning, published last year. And for an example of how you can’t magically improve online learning just by throwing money and technology at the issue, Wired’s article on the ‘LA iPad debacle’ is a good read.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s lecture, and his dismantling of technological solutionism, neoliberalism in education, and his barely checked scorn for the Department for Education and their fixation on remote teaching.

The screenshot which I grabbed to illustrate this post shows a continuation of the theme of learners as the active agents of learning in the most influential learning theories spanning the past century.

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CELT Team Away Day and Insights

Published 2nd February 2021

Insights into CELT
Insights Into CELT: Shocker, we’re all introverts

Has there ever been such a phrase as to warm and inspire the hearts of man* as ‘virtual team away day’? Thanks Covid, the gift that keeps on giving.

In the morning we planned our plans for world domination, which all went according to plan. After lunch we had a presentation on Insights Discovery which we had all been asked to complete the week before. Last time around it was a Belbin exercise, because the boss didn’t like Insights, but we have a new boss now who doesn’t like Belbin, and who swears by Insights. So we did Insights. I find them all much of a muchness, and don’t put a lot of stock into them. But then I’m a reflective person with a strong internal locus of identity, so I feel like I know myself very well, and there was nothing in my Insights profile that was shocking, or indeed which had changed much since the last time I did one. Other people in the team did get a lot from it though, they found it interesting at least. I guess it was nice to see all the team profiles together, and though I’ve said ‘we’re all introverts’, we do have a new member of the team who came out all fiery red.

* And women. And enbies. I see you, in all your valid glory.

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