Today three members of our ICT team travelled to Fareham College for Moodle Fest, which is an annual forum organized by the JISC RSC SE. This event is a good opportunity for ICT teams from FE colleges and HE institutes in the region to share and discuss their recent experiences of using Moodle. For this meeting the main focus was on the use of third parties, such as Moodle Partners like ‘Moodlerooms’ and ‘Webanywhere', to help with Moodle implementation. Third parties can offer a range of services including anything from simple installation and customization of Moodle all the way through to hosting, ongoing helpdesk support, training of staff and full management of a Moodle project.

Notably, with current FE strategies focusing on ‘streamlining practices’ and  ‘improving efficiencies’ many FE colleges, including us, use third parties to varying degrees to make the most of Moodle if the resources, skill set or time are not available in-house. There are obviously going to be many pros and cons with outsourcing certain Moodle services to third parties and therefore I was interested to hear the case study from the first speaker Nikki Gilbey, the learning technology manager at Fareham College, who was going to share her experience of selecting a VLE and third party host.

Interestingly Fareham College have recently moved from self-hosting Moodle to heavily using the Moodle Partner Moodlerooms who not only currently host their Moodle, now branded ‘Oracle’(?), but also designed, provided staff training and also continue to provide ongoing Moodle support. This particular package would have come at a high price for implementation and presumably a high annual fee for the continued support, the exact fee was not stated (but it was mentioned to be cheaper than a skilled member staff!). We were then informed that the move came about after the self-hosted Moodle product at Fareham College failed to function effectively once certain skill sets were lost from the College and subsequently Moodle was not being used by staff.

Nikki said that she was starting from scratch with this project and was open to choosing any VLE and third party that would meet the college’s strategic aims. However, I found the reasoning behind the choice of Moodle as a VLE and the use of Moodlerooms as a third party to be rather confusing. On the one hand it was stated that the primary reasons for the decisions being made were pedagogical and that their teaching and learning strategies were at the heart of every decision (which it certainly should be). However, their particular pedagogical approaches were not made clear and why this approach could not be achieved by using another VLE other than Moodle or another third party other Moodlerooms was also not established. On the contrary, it was made clear that they believe the use of Moodle was ideal as it is the most commonly used by FE colleges. In addition due to a high turnover of staff in the sector there would be a reduced training need as it was likely that new staff would have already used Moodle. It was also made clear that they though Moodlerooms were a good choice as they were the largest Moodle Partner having been relatively recently bought out by Blackboard.

Ultimately I am not sure what I can take away from this case study; other than it is a very interesting and different approach to the one that has been adopted here at Sparsholt and Andover College. Obviously there will never be one solution that will suit all colleges and I am sure that there are many positive and negative elements to all of the many strategies a FE college can take when deciding what VLE to use and whether to use a third party or as to how much support they receive from third parties during VLE implementation.

In other news from the Moodle Fest, I did see some great ‘in classroom’ use of Google docs embedded within Moodle at Fareham College; where students were shown a SOW and were allowed discuss it in groups and comment on it using interactive projectors (see image below).

In addition, Steve Catton shared his experience on the use of the Rubrics Plugin for marking which seemed like it could be very useful for staff and students in that it could make marking quicker and more objective for staff and could make it clear to students what they need to do to achieve their target grades (see pic below).

Finally, I also learnt that all language used in Moodle can be customized by an administrator to suit the language commonly used by an institution via the language customization options shared by Roger Emery. This customization feature could be useful to help remove barriers from less digitally literate or confident staff and students when interacting with Moodle. I enjoyed my first experience of Moodle Fest and I intend to research more into the three concepts I mentioned above to see if and where these ideas could fit in here at Sparsholt College and Andover College.

Thanks for reading the ILT team’s and my first ever blog post! If you have any queries or feedback about this post then I’d be happy to hear from you, just email ILT_support@sparsholt.ac.uk.

Kind regards,

Sarah.