Wednesday 26 June 2013

XCRI-CAP Demonstrators – Moodle Block My Final Blog Post


Context

As part of the JISC Making the Most of Course Information – Stage 2 project Plymouth College of Art has also been undertaking an additional project to develop an XCRI-CAP Moodle block demonstrator. The College took the opportunity provided by the ITT in order to build upon, and make use of, the existing work the College is undertaking within the Making the Most of Course Information – Stage 2 Project.

As the XCRI-CAP demonstrator project is now complete, this blog post provides an outline of the project and our thoughts about how this project worked, how it will assist the sector and the value that it has brought to the overall JISC programme.

The context of the JISC programme was to enable students to be better informed through the provision of easy to see and comparable information relating to future study opportunities. This is therefore the perspective from which the Moodle block project was proposed.

  Why the Moodle block    


We decided to seek to develop the Moodle block as an XCRI-CAP demonstrator because we felt this would clearly demonstrate to stakeholders within both our own institution and across the sector the manner in which the XCRI-CAP feed can have value and can be utilized by institutions in order to display course data in new ways.

The Moodle block therefore sought to determine relevant learning opportunities available for students who are on current undergraduate provision at the institution and who would be seeking to progress to a new course. The Moodle block would utilise the information contained within the XCRI-CAP feed to enable personalized suggested “next steps” to be shown to students on their Moodle home page.

As this demonstrator was utilising Moodle this resulted in it being a usable development for a wide range of institutions as any HEI or College utilising Moodle and developing the XCRI-CAP feed would be able to use the code, uploaded to Github https://github.com/ULCC/moodle-block_xcrisearch/ as both its development and the nature of Moodle encourage community development and open source work.

 Project Outline

This project was due to be a short and rapid development project. Throughout the project time delays have caused issues which resulted in the project overrunning. The development was however able to be shown at the JSC Show and Tell Event which was held in January 2013 at Aston University Birmingham.

The objectives of the project were as follows:
·       The creation of a Moodle block which highlights progression opportunities available within the home institution
·       To ensure students are able to access additional and relevant information from the block if they wish to find out more information.
·       Disseminate the development of the Moodle block
To determine which fields from the XCRI-CAP feed should be used

We were also able to disseminate this development at the UK and Ireland Moodlemoot 2013 which was held in Dublin in February 2013. Through the peer review process this development was described as:

“something new and cutting-edge….. something innovative and potentially important for the future.”


        Use Cases

In order to provide a bit more information about how the Moodle block works the following case studies are provided. The first use case describes a “sunny use case” in which everything is available within the block for a perfect result to be seen. The second case presents a “rainy day case” in which there are no specific courses for the Moodle block to suggest and how this is handled within the Moodle block is shown.







   Technical Details
                                       

The Moodle block is relatively simple to install and use for developers who are familiar with Moodle already. The Moodle block requires a unique ID to be present and the same in both the XCRI-CAP feed and Moodle in order to combine the results from both. The Moodle block then uses the following fields to make recommendations of the next suitable learning opportunity.

<Subject>
<Creditlevel>

Both of these fields are mandatory within the XCRI-CAP 1.2 schema and should contain data in all XCRI-CAP feeds.

If relevant suggestions can not be found the user will be given the option to use the “course finder” to search the full course database for opportunities.

In all cases a web URL will be required for students who wish to access additional information.

        Conclusions and next steps

This development is now ready to be used by other institutions who may be using Moodle and the XCRI-CAP feed and interested institutions are invited to download the code from Github https://github.com/ULCC/moodle-block_xcrisearch/ and try the block for themselves.

It is hoped as new institutions begin to create XCRI-CAP feeds that the Moodle block will be more widely used and will enable students to see relevant learning opportunities that they may have not been aware of and may wish to find out more about before deciding to study at the next level.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

And so we face the final curtain…



Yes it’s the end of the project!  It has been a thoroughly fulfilling ride for the Plymouth College of Art.  During events and discussions with other projects it has become evident how lucky we have been with the data gathering side of the feed production.  

 
At the beginning of the project the College was undergoing brand and marketing changes as well as a new College website which had already enabled the College to review how data was being stored and disseminated.  

We had fantastic support from SMT and both marketing and Human Resources were interested in our proposals to extend the feed to include staff profiles.  

This has enabled us to devote the time and energy to develop the software for staff profiles as well as an aggregator demonstrator for the creative institutions involved in the JISC programme.

The project has enabled us to travel and meet other institutions, network, present at and attend conferences…and meet Jonny Ball!




Extension to the feed: 

Our bespoke version of Mahara has been received well at the college by staff.  With strong project champions and a clear message about why we are using it, we are looking forward to its roll out through the college.

We also now have a shiny new brochure  which has been designed to specifically suit the college’s requirements for Mahara and has been produced as e-publication for easy use on an iPad. 

The development of Mahara will be something the college takes beyond the project to build on certain elements such as research and collaborations.  We see this as an iterative process that can only improve over time. 

Creators Assemble!

The original superhero collaboration that inspired another













The Arts Assembly has been a fantastic collaborative journey.  Our aggregator website is now near completion and can be found at www.arts-university.co.uk

The value in this website is three fold:

  •  With it being fed and regularly updated by the XCRI-CAP feed it is sustainable and has a life after the project’s completion
  • Running our feeds through the aggregator has allowed us to identify any issues that we may have with the information being provided and fix them.  We have had to ensure that we are being consistent as a group with the information in the fields, such as course levels for example.
  • We hope that this will broaden the network of specialist Art institutions involved with the XCRI-CAP feed and the aggregator website.  Making new connections and networks is extremely beneficial as well as the added impact of providing specialist information to students interested in art and design courses.
Last but not least…

You can hear about our project on JISC on air 

We would like to thank all those that have given their time and energy to this project to make it the success that it is, from internal colleagues, to external stakeholders to our students.  This project has certainly given us food for thought and connections for future opportunities. 


It has been a real pleasure meeting all the other projects involved in this programme at the various JISC conferences and hope to see you all soon in the not too distant future.

 

For now let us not say goodbye but auf wiedersehen.

 

 




Tuesday 22 January 2013

Moodle Moot - where Moodle minds mix for Moodle matters

Moodlemoot Dublin 2013

Plymouth College of Art are presenting at the Dublin Moodle Moot in February.  The concept has been welcomed as something new and cutting edge which the Moodle community will find interesting to discuss further.  

Looking forward to what experts in the field have to say on this and will keep you all posted!  


Wednesday 19 December 2012

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Plymouth College Art from 
Elaine and Kerry

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

 

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!"

Thursday 29 November 2012

Vogue

 
Yes it was time to strike a pose and what fun we all had.  We booked out two days of studio time and have started with course tutors individual portraits and their teams.  









The general feeling was one of reluctance with some staff, but when it actually came to it the atmosphere was fantastic, staff were relaxed, happy and took some great photos.  






In many ways it was a good team bonding exercise and the word has now spread, so those who evaded the shoots have emailed to ask if we have any extra sessions planned. 





We were sent the finished shots by Joanne and what a very good looking bunch they all are too!

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Elaine and myself trundled over to London for the JISC Programme meeting last week.

It was my first one so it was a nice chance to get to meet the other institutions in the programme, which was nice.

Before
After
We started the day off with an exercise centred around reflection on the various aspects of our projects; these categories were 'things that made me think', 'heartfelt issues', 'things I see with new eyes', 'things I was to shout about', 'thing I find hard to stomach' and then a look at next steps.



Next we assessed some cookies!
After lunch it was time work in groups to discuss issues and topics that were relevant to the institution and their project.  As once of project outputs is aggregator website demonstrator for the 'Creative Assembly', this was an excellent opportunity to catch up with the other creative institutions to discuss our progress and obtain feedback


After discussing at length the web specification the creative assembly decided to offer to present at the JISC show and tell in January, where we will have the demonstrator to show...and tell.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles, but no personality."


The title of this post is a quote from Albert Einstein.  I actually felt that is summed up what we are hoping to achieve by the extension the feed of a 'Deliverer' field.

Students in the Art and Design community are inspired and driven by their tutors as we discovered in Stage 1, not just their qualifications.  So now it was time to address the lecturers in our college and sell them on this concept.

We were extremely lucky as when our Principal heard of what we were doing, he was enthusiastic and volunteered to be project champion; so we were already on the right path!  This meant that when we arranged our staff workshop we had a mock up of what the staff Mahara profile would like with the principal as a guideline.  Within this we were able to call up examples of best practice using http://workflow.arts.ac.uk/ as an example of best practice.  Some of the University of the Arts students had a real grasp on how to make Mahara work for them and will be a good foundation for inspiration with our staff.

It was good to use this workshop as an opportunity to feedback on the extremely positive comments made by the students, whilst evidencing that this is a concept that has sprung from student feedback, and educational institutions should be about the student - our customer.

To engage our staff further and ensure that images on tutor profiles were both creative and professional, we recruited a photography student (Joanne Cookney) to take staff portraits.  Also, in response to the Stage 1 findings, where students talked about the intangible elements of the college such as atmosphere being so much more than they expected, Jo would also be capturing teaching sessions, examples of work and college life.  We have a set format in terms of lighting and style, but we have said for tutors to be as creative as possible in their photos to capture their personality.  Staff are incredibly excited about this aspect of the project.

On reflection the session went very well and although we hoped to have a working version of our bespoke Mahara system, the staff got a feel of what we hope to achieve and why.

A few concerns were raised about having information about them in a public place, due to identity fraud and security.  This issue will be addressed as it is a fine balance between keeping staff information secure and publicising what makes out tutors so unique.

We also discussed our Moodle Block project with staff, and they are looking forward to seeing how this will work in practice.  

Next steps....

1.  Take all academic portrait photos
2.  Arrange a workshop for staff once PCA Mahara system is developed
3.  Have a good sample of staff profiles and any feedback on the system


Our Staff Mahara Workshop slides can be seen here, although some of the slides have not translated very well to slideshare.