JISC RSC-Eastern - VLE Forum - Letchworth Garden City

David Mullett

After a relaxing 2 hour day dream fest on the train to the VLE Forum's destination, Letchworth Garden City, I arrived to a pleasant short walk to The Goldsmith Centre where todays event was taking place.

Glancing down the agenda, I have to say I wasn't particularly sanguine about taking too much away from the event, not because I was dis-interested, far from it, mainly because I've sat through one of the updates four times now and I've never really taken anything from larger companies coming in to sell solutions that no-one needs rather than discuss and identify source of problems. 

I wont detail all of the days events but I'd like to say that my assumptions were to take quite a swift one-eighty.

Coffee and catching up with known faces was nice, right before being ushered into one of the conference rooms to settle in to Bedford College's update on their Moodle Grade Tracker.
As soon as Roy Currie began introducing the project I'll hold my hands up and say I contemplated thinking about the train ride home, I'd seen this project update before and our institution doesn't even use Moodle, you can understand right? Well after Roy sucked everyone in with his intro I decided to stick with it. Mark Chaney, a Learning Technologies Adviser and VLE Developer started to demonstrate the updated software, I have to say I'm glad I stuck with the concentration levels as it was certainly an eye opener to how far the project has moved on since the last time I saw it in action.

Although a not a polished product, it sported a clean-cut and easily navigable interface, this in itself is a remarkable achievement considering the grade tracker has to display multiple levels and sub-levels of data and metadata such as units, criteria, courses and students. For those who were using Moodle in the room there was certainly some excitement, Mark was bombarded by many questions about various versions, features and compatibility issues. I'm pleased to announce that most of the replies were positive and included a lot of yes'. 

Check out the project here -> http://moodlegrades.bedford.ac.uk/

Just before lunch we had a nice little chit chat around the beast that is social media, Chris Boon from Norfolk Educational Services who was chairing the event, posed three questions to the attendees split into two groups, these questions were:

1. Should institutions give their students access to social network and social media tools? (e.g. Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr etc)
2. Should institutions encourage and facilitate the use of social networks and social media tools? (e.g. use the tools in teaching and learning etc)
3. Should institutions provide dedicated or integrated social networks and social media tools for their students? (i.e. tools linked to college accounts, integrated social tools in the VLE)

I wont go into the individual answers, because whether your group came to the conclusion of yes or no for many reasons, there were strong streams of agreement weaved throughout regardless of the answer. Safeguarding was one of these streams, we had a mix of FE and HE reps there, and the way social media is portrayed to students is very different, there was a heavy emphasis on safeguarding young teenagers in FE, including limiting use within the institution, seeing social media as one of the 'distraction technologies'. Whereas HE was more about not limiting it's use, but embracing the technology and making sure if it's being used, making sure it's used effectively, such as what we do introducing social media to students as a way on building up their Personal/Professional Learning Network (PLN).

Another one of these streams and probably the more pertinent one was the fact social media shouldn't be seen as something we need to think about for just students of all ages, academic development staff and lecturers also have access to these technologies, we should safeguard/advise those as well.

Max Holden presented to us a 'College in the Cloud' project between Blackpool and The Fylde College. From what I gathered, a slightly more in-depth version of something that's been around for quite some years now, a portal page bringing in all the relevant information tailored to whom ever is logged in, now with Microsoft being a partner we were hit by a tsunami of Windows 8'esque  tiles at every turn coupled with hooks to every other Microsoft product imaginable. 

New version of SkyDrive surprised me though by rearing it's head from earth and actually joining true cloud computing by introducing synchronous collaboration on documents, not on local office software, yes, that's right all in the browser, SkyDrive.. welcome to the party, bit late but better than not at all. As long as an institution is already subscribed to these Microsoft products then for quite a reasonable cost Collabco's 'MyDay' might well be worth a look.

Last but by no means least, Chris Boon showed us how City College Norwich has been using their e-Stream software to facilitate the uploading of video content, streaming and recording of live TV using an interactive EPG and allowing lecturers to upload self narrative videos and embedding them into their vle (Blackboard) using a mashup building block which looked incredibly easy. We have e-stream here which is currently owned by the Library, though it is mainly being used to archive the library's mammoth DVD collection and to record EPG programming. We don't have the plugin to allow us to upload using a web browser. By the looks of Chris' demonstration, this element is key to owning a process fluid enough for academic staff to participate in using this service more widely. With the addition of an e-Stream app for iOS and forgive me if wrong a GP one, the ramifications for student generated content for e-portfolio use videoing evidence in the field are off the scale.

Re-visiting and re-connecting with the library and of anything, purchasing an extra plugin for our existing e-Stream service to massively extend it's range of use across the institution (especially one like ours which has network sites geographically far a field) will be the one thing I talk to the team about, and the use of apps for e-portfolios of course!

Overall an enjoyable day and glad to see some meat for lunch :D