re:Learnings

It’s only a few marks.  P’s gets degrees.  No one has ever looked at my academic transcript. It’ll only matter for those around 49%. Have you ever heard statements like these by staff at universities? Have you been surprised who has said it? Marks are the most common, basic quantitative measure of student learning performance. They are crucial for maintaining standards in professions. Students have to consistently work hard over a long time to achieve the marks they want. However the reasons why they chase those precious marks and to what standard is as diverse as students are themselves. Every mark really matters to students when they are: On the cusp of just passing a subject – even more so if it’s their last possible attempt at the subject Worried about the mounting time and financial cost: every fail requires more time, more tuition fees (or HELP-Fees) to graduate. Chasing a GPA to: qualify for further honours or post-grad study be competitive in...

Students of the world can blame Benjamin Wood for the Multiple choice test. You don’t have to search hard on the Twitterverse to see how impactful question design can be: [twitter_collection id=”992643547122745345″ height=”400″ dnt=”TRUE” chrome=”nofooter, noborders”] A well written multiple question will test knowledge and understanding. The question is – what is good design practice for creating a multiple choice question? The Basic Form Stem, distractors and key The classical form of a multiple choice is (1) question stem and (2) the options. The options are divided into distractors (incorrect answers) and key (the correct answer). The structure applies to various forms of multiple choice: Traditional Alternate Choice True/False Complex Multiple Choice (Not recommended as good practice) What is Good Question Design Practice? So what does the research (Brame, C., 2013, Costigan et al, 2004 and Haladyna et al, 2002) sa...

It’s a classic education professional buzz word that gets thrown about – but what does it really mean?  Can “ Constructive Alignment ” better help you answer that question from students “Is this going to be assessed?” When designing a course, if you are the subject matter expert, an Educational Developer will ask you to: Create about the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) Align both the “Teaching and Learning Activities” (TLA) and assessments each reflect the scope of ILOs. But why do they ask you to do that? It’s based on an approach developed by John Biggs in 1996 at Sydney University. The ‘Constructive’ part of the buzzword often gets overlooked. A Constructivist model of learning at its most basic theorises that people learn when they reflect on their experiences. The ‘Alignment’ is conceptual: the TLA (experience) and the Assessment (reflection) both reflect intended learning outcomes at the required depth of understanding (Biggs 1996). Required Depth...

My goodness! It actually worked.  Here’s a grab bag of thoughts about converting Canvas subjects to Moodle. 3 Phases of build: Admin – Base – Content When there are only a few of us on the project, or people change, or work only part time, dividing a subject’s development into three distinct phases really enable us to be flexible. Lots of Developers Having more than 4 people on the project allowed specialisation to emerge. It allowed both a content and a quiz point person to onboard new developers and to provide support. It also freed me to refine and develop processes and continue work on transitioning subject. MS Teams Universal acceptance of MS Teams as a method of organising the project for developers: files, comms and platforms. Development Server Having Moodle on a development server provide to be a great resource for: Trialling Moodle Plugins quickly and safely. Flexibility in process, e.g. export questions or make back-ups Spee...

Getting images into questions remains the last stumbling block. Solving the question import process was awesome but automatically importing images into those questions still remains the last unmet challenge. Images are either simply broken or have unwanted hard coded links back to the Canvas instance. Solution dead-ends For example, one Chemistry exam had 60 questions with 127 images. It’s pedagogically critical that not one is missed or incorrect. At least the Canvas export files provide the original image files – and even generates the images for LaTeX. Any solution had to be kept to existing tool base – scripting new tools was out of scope. So a limited amount of time was spent investigating tech-type tricks: Following tips like this: https://www.slideshare.net/tjuly/adding-images-to-moodle-quiz-and-import-via-xml Like Moodle Books, compress both the quiz xml and images together Uploading images to the course and trying to create links Creating image in on...

 The fact that Canvas questions can be imported at all is awesome. However it’s rarely totally straight forward. This is a deeper dive into the problems and the workarounds of just getting the file imported (not question content issues like broken images). Same error but different causes Canvas exports quizzes as QTI files (it’s in XML format). Sometime importing a QTI file into Moodle, the importer says there’s no questions in the file: Error: There are no questions in the import file. This one obtuse error message can have three possible causes. Issue 1 : Canvas Question Banks When you look at the QTI file in a text editor, indeed, there certainly is no questions: Cause The issue is in Canvas. The quiz is drawing questions from a question bank which simply don’t export the question items. Workaround Recreate the quiz in Canvas, but import the questions directly – don’t reference the question bank. Export to a new QTI file Import int...

The single biggest risk to Project Bob was converting quiz questions. Possible Question Conversion Strategies When you have subjects like Chemistry with 480 quiz questions of a variety of types, copying and pasting is just not an option. What are the conversion options and how good are they? Respondus Windows only tool; training/learning required for implementation. Limited question types supported (Multiple choice/True-False). As an incomplete solution it was prone to human error, time consuming and variable quality. IMSCC/QTI Fails to import: solution not available. GIFT (question format) Training/learning required for implementation, Images embedded in questions not supported.  An Incomplete solution, subject to uman error and time-consuming. Moodle plug-in (Canvas QTI) Further development required for implementation. Not supported (developer hasn’t updated since 2015). No official Moodle release. Installation approvals on Prod...

Just because you can use a shiny tech trick doesn’t mean that you should. Presenting Learning Content Moodle Labels, Lessons, Pages and Books are the primary elements to carry content. Which to use? Labels are the fast track to scroll of death Importing Canvas content automatically generates Moodle Pages. Lots. Lessons are cool but too limited and have gradebook & UX problems. Moodle Books have strong navigation but you can’t add activities inside them. The best compromise was to use Moodle Books. A topic introduced by using a Moodle Label. The Moodle Book provided a deep dive into that topic. In the above image, you can see the structure of content: an introduction, a list of Moodle resources and activities. Note how a Moodle book was split with activities between the two. Then simple, light indenting was used to ‘group’ the learn...

Canvas content imports into Moodle as pages. Lots of pages. This makes for excessive navigation for students and academics – not a good experience. Moodle Books are a surprise workhorse of Project Bob. They were selected for the better experience in navigating content. Similarly it’s quick to edit individual book chapters/sub-chapters. The small effort to convert Canvas Pages to Moodle Book Chapters was acceptable. The challenge The challenge is to automate getting content in along with images and linked files. Solution Moodle Books has a Import chapter feature. It can ingest a zip file containing html files (each one becomes a ‘chapters’), images and documents: Moodle Book feature: Import chapter The trick is to prepare the html files first: Beautify Code The plainer and cleaner the HTML source code, the more success you will have. Both Adobe Dreamweaver and Atom Editor are useful tools for making large changes across multiple fil...

27 subjects.  4 FTE Developers (Learning Designers).  6 months. Progress must be tracked and reported. What to do : “Lift & shift” ~ recreate each Canvas subject in Moodle as though they are just about to be rolled over for the new teaching period. What not to do : Learning Design ~ this is not the time to re-imagine, embellish, restructure subjects or change the content.  The Analysis When these subjects were initially created in Canvas they had very strong Learning and Design and Development support. Analysing the subjects to be transitioned showed a diverse range of topics: Chemistry Physiology Health Food Biology Business Law They also use a variety of learning models: Direct Instruction (Intensive and 12 week) Inquiry Learning Problem Based Learning Information/Learning Resource A common structure emerged for each unit: Introduction Module Non-learning modules Standard modules (Subject information, Assessment, Non-standar...