4 System Demonstrations
4.3 Usage Pattern
Educators can develop different approaches to pedagogism via the OpenMoodle module.
We provide two usage patterns: teach collaboratively pattern and one-way supply pattern.
Collaborative teaching pattern
As name implied, teachers can cooperate with another one to share teaching materials.
For example, there are two teachers, Alice and Bob. They teach on the same subject but they are coming from different schools. They want to give a course together. It means that they are in charge of separate scope and separately hold course data at their separate platform.
Figure 4-6 shows the flow chart of collaborative teaching pattern. They can use the following steps:
1. At first, they negotiate the common consensus of teaching scope.
2. Respectively send the login account and Moodle address to each other.
3. Respectively enter the login account and specify the external server address.
4. Respectively designate specific materials for receiving party and publish them.
5. Respectively choose the published materials and import from another person.
6. Respectively set up the “auto-sync” option. Data will be synced automatically if there is any resource updated.
7. System will filter out the redundant resources. Each of them can hold own teaching materials and get the benefit from another one.
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Bob Alice
Data is imported from each other Send server address
Designate the materials and publish them
Designate the materials and publish them
Figure 4-6 the flow chart of collaborative teaching pattern
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One-way supply pattern
Teachers can delegate other external teachers to supply their local course content as well. For instance, an inexperienced teacher, Chris has to teach a unfamiliar course and is looking for help. He encounters an experienced guy Douglas had taught on the same subject for a while. Douglas can assist Chris via the following steps. Figure 4-7 shows the flow of collaborative teaching pattern.
1. Douglas designates the materials and publishes them.
2. Douglas sends his Moodle SERVER address and login info to Chris.
3. Chris enters the login info so he can view the resources published by Douglas.
4. Chris can choose the materials that he want and import them from Douglas’s site.
5. Chris can start teaching with Douglas’s help.
There are also two scenarios depended on setting up different sync option. If Chris chooses the “Non” option, it means that he consider the external content is just a kind of the course template. He can design teaching materials with his style. In the other hand, if he chooses the
“auto-sync” or “only-inform” option, it means that he delegate Douglas to supply course materials entirely.
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Designate the materials and publish them
Send the server address and login account Enter Douglas’s
server address and account
Choose the materials and press import button
Chris Douglas
Set up the sync option.
Data is imported from Douglas
Start teaching
Figure 4-7 the flow chart of one-way supply pattern
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5 Evaluations and Comparison
5.1 Comparison
In this section, we compare OpenMoodle and other course content sharing system and results as shown in Table 5-1. Educators can create course template through our OpenMoodle module and Community Hub. But collaborative teaching with other like-minded teachers is only
Table 5-1 Comparison with OpenCourseWare and Community Hub
OpenMoodle OpenCoureWare
Any educator Institute’s faculty Any educator
Keyword Search No Yes Yes
User Feedback Text comment &
resources statistic
No Text comment
Integrated with each other
Yes No Yes
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allowed in OpenMoodle. Besides, users can keep following the latest content contiguously depend on different usage scenarios. In OCW, users have to do it manually and they do not provide such facility for users in Community Hub.
In here, we take the MIT OCW as sample. Although MIT is one of top universities, OpenCoureWare’s course content is provided unilaterally by MIT’s faculty. They have good quality of course content in OCW’s courses but lack of diversity. Although there is an OpenCourseWare Consortium consisted of several institutes, users need to filter these sites and find proper content by themselves. And these OCW sites are not easily integrated together because of adopting myriads of content management system. In OpenMoodle, any educator, teacher, or lecturer can work together and provide learning content for students. Because of OpenMoodle integrate with Moodle LMS, they can provide not only teaching materials but also teaching activities than OCW. Different with Community Hub just provide text comment feedback, we provide that and individual resource statistic as well. The drawback of OpenMoodle is keyword-search. Educators have to use other way to search other people.
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5.2 Experiment and result
An experiment to evaluate the OpenMoodle module has been undertaken among two universities. They are Tunghai University in Taichung, and Tahwa Institute of Technology in Hsinchu. We separately built Moodle server embedded with OpenMoodle module and made use of 15 courses within Department of Computer Science, Tunghai, and 12 courses within Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tahwa. These courses are currently running in this semester. And we create a testing site for assembling purpose in National Chiao Tung University. All the integrated 27 courses were imported into testing site. As time goes on, it will follow faculty’s footstep to update the latest content. The teachers at Tunghai and Tahwa may communicate with each other, measure the quality of external materials, and choose the suitable resources for students.
A questionnaire survey in the view of OpenMoodle to IT personnel has been done. We adopt the System Usability Scale (SUS) [24] developed by John Brooke to evaluate the users’
view of system’s usability by providing a single reference score. The SUS is composed of five positive statements and five negative statements. Each of them has five-point scale that range from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. We modified the original instrument in SUS and the questionnaire showed in Appendix C. Twelve IT personnel answered this questionnaire. We can get the score for each statement, however, individual scores for each statement is not meaningful and should not be analyzed or used for other purposes. So we only calculate the sum of scores for ten statements. The mean result was 83/100 with the lowest and highest values being 67.5/100 and 90/100 respectively.
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6 Conclusion and Future works
6.1 Conclusion
Collaborative teaching is critical pedagogy that is good for both teachers and students. This inspires teachers to discover, share, and experiment with new thought when designing the teaching activities and creating assignments. Besides, it helps students to improve their social and communication abilities, relationship between teacher and students, and increase their learning effect. Although there are numerous learning management systems developed and are wildly adpoted by educators, there was very few LMS integrated with collaborative teaching pedagogy.
OpenMoodle module is hence proposed in this paper to cope with this critical issue.
OpenMoodle provides a chance to establish an environment for teachers who are not at the same place to make the interactions and teach collaboratively. Experienced teachers can make a short cut for novice teachers by supplying painstaking efforts. Teacher can collaborate with another one to teach in the same course but hold data separately to control the autonomy. They measure the data of course and choose the most appropriate materials for students. Students gets diversity of knowledge, view, and teaching style as well. Course publishers can benefit from user’s feedback and usage statistics. Furthermore, the OpenMoodle is implemented based on the CCM. Other LMSs can easily integrated with the OpenMoodle.
Moodle is such a successful open-source LMS and is widely adopted around the world. Our CCM based on web services architecture can provide the unified approach to Moodle’s resources and activities. Educators can develop custom-made services and integrate with othe heterogeneous systms more easily.
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6.2 Future work
There are some improvements for OpenMoodle module. Community-hub is a very important feature in Moodle 2.0 plan. It provides a way to make Moodle servers can be connected together. Because of OpenMoodle does no support search functionality; users have to use email or other way of communication to find other people who are willing to share their knowledge. We can improve the search functionality by integrating community-hub with our OpenMoodle module or developing an index server which allows sites to register on it. The course information may be obtained publicly.
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Reference
[1] S.J. Jang, “Innovations in science teacher education: Effects of integrating technology and team-teaching strategies”, Computers & Education vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 646–659, September 2008
[2] Betty Robinson and Robert M. Schaible ,”Collaborative Teaching: Reaping the Benefits” College Teaching, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 57-59, Spring, 1995.
[3] Official Site of Moodle, Retrieved on May 16, 2010 http://Moodle.org
[4] Al-Ajlan, A. and Zedan, H. “Why Moodle”, 12th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems, FTDCS 2008, pp. 58-64.
[5] Official Course Management Site of Tunghai University, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from https://elearning2.thu.edu.tw/
[6] Official Course Management Site of Ming Chuan University, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://Moodle.mcu.edu.tw/
[7] Official Course Management Site of National Chi Nan University, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://Moodle.ncnu.edu.tw/
[8] Official Course Management Site National Cheng Kung University, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://Moodle.ncku.edu.tw/
[9] Stefan Baldi , Hauke Heier , Anett Mehler-Bicher,” Open courseware and open source software”, Communications of the ACM, vol. 46, mo. 9, September 2003
[10] Abelson, H .,”The creation of Open-CourseWare at MIT”. Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp 164-174, May 2007.
[11] Official Course Management Site of Department of Computer Science and
Information Engineering, Tahwa Institute of Technology, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://ltl.csie.thit.edu.tw/Moodle/
[12] Sabine Graf, Beate List. “An evaluation of open source e-learning platforms stressing adaptation issues”, Advanced Learning Technologies, 5th IEEE International
Conference on, pp.163–165, July 2005, Kaohsiung, Taiwan [13] MIT OpenCourseWare's home page, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
[14] Yue, K.-B., Yang, T. A., Ding, W., & Chen, P. (2004). Open courseware and computer science education. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 20(1), 178–186.
[15] Moodle component: Community Hub, Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://docs.Moodle.org/en/Community_hub ,
[16] Małgorzata Suchańska, Justyna Kęczkowska. “Some Aspects of Employing the
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Moodle Platform as a Tool for Enhancing the Teaching and Learning Process”, Computer as a Tool, The International Conference on, pp.2465–2467, Sept. 2007 [17] J. Gortmaker, M. Janssen, and R. Wagenaar, "The advantages of web
serviceorchestration in perspective," in ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 506{515,ACM Press, 2004.
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[20] U. Srivastava, K. Munagala, J. Widom, and R. Motwani, \Query optimization over web services," in in Proc. of the 32nd international conference on Very large data bases, pp. 355{366, VLDB Endowment, 2006
[21] T. Andrews and C. Daly. “Using Moodle, an open source learning management system, to support a national teaching and learning collaboration”, 19th Annual Conference for the Australasian Association for Engineering Education: To Industry and Beyond, pp.1-6, Dec.2008
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[23] Miguel Á ngel Conde González, Francisco José García Peñalvo, María José Casany Guerrero, Marc Alier Forment, "Adapting LMS Architecture to the SOA: An
Architectural Approach," iciw, pp.322-327, 2009 Fourth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, 2009
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Thomas, B. A. Weerdmeester, & A. L. McClelland. Usability Evaluation in Industry.
London: Taylor and Francis.
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Appendix A: Essential capabilities for OpenMoodle
Capability Description
Moodle/category:manage Manage categories
Moodle/course:create Create courses
Moodle/course:activityvisibility Hide/show activities Moodle/course:manageactivities Manage activities Moodle/course:managefiles Manage files
Moodle/course:view View courses
Moodle/course:viewhiddenactivities View hidden activities Moodle/course:viewhiddencourses View hidden courses Moodle/course:viewhiddensections View hidden sections Moodle/restore:uploadfile Upload files to backup areas
webservice/rest:use Use REST protocol
webservice/soap:use Use SOAP protocol
webservice/xmlrpc:use Use XML-RPC protocol
webservice/amf:use Use AMF protocol
Forum Related capability for forum activity.
Choice capabilities group Related capability for choice activity.
Glossary capabilities group Related capability for glossary activity.
Lesson capabilities group Related capability for lesson activity.
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Appendix B: Course communication services for
Moodle
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Component Function name
moodle_mod_forum_delete_posts
moodle_mod_forum_get_firstpost_from_diss Lesson moodle_mod_lesson_create_lessons
moodle_mod_lesson_get_lessons moodle_mod_lesson_update_lessons moodle_mod_lesson_delete_lessons moodle_mod_lesson_get_pages moodle_mod_lesson_delete_pages
Glossary moodle_mod_glossary_create_glossaries moodle_mod_glossary_get_glossaries moodle_mod_glossary_update_glossaries moodle_mod_glossary_delete_glossaries moodle_mod_glossary_create_entries moodle_mod_glossary_get_entryids moodle_mod_glossary_update_entries moodle_mod_glossary_delete_entries
Assignment moodle_mod_assignment_create_assignments moodle_mod_assignment_delete_assignments
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Appendix C: System Usability Scale for OpenMoodle
1. I think that I would like to use OpenMoodle frequently.
2. I found OpenMoodle unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought OpenMoodle was easy to use.
4. I think that I would need assistance to be able to use OpenMoodle.
5. I found the various functions in OpenMoodle were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in OpenMoodle.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use OpenMoodle very quickly.
8. I found OpenMoodle very cumbersome/awkward to use.
9. I felt very confident using OpenMoodle.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with OpenMoodle.
Instructions: For each of the following statements, mark one box that best describes your reactions to the website todn14series
ay.
Please provide any comments about OpenMoodle
Strongly Disagree
Strongly Agree
This questionnaire is based on the System Usability Scale (SUS), which was developed by John Brooke while working at Digital Equipment Corporation. © Digital Equipment Corporation, 1986.