Moodle Adobe Connect This Moodle LMS integration provides seamless use of Adobe Connect Pro directly in Moodle.This is done by adding an activity instance and providing the meeting name, url (optional), start time, end time, meeting template and a public or private meeting setting. With single-sign-on technology, users who have logged into Moodle will not have to enter Adobe Connect Credentials to access the Moodle webinar or meeting. When provided access through the meeting link, it's a simple click of a button and away you go!

This is a new integration between Moodle and Google, allowing you to benefit from the two platforms working seamlessly together. You will need to centralize the authentication process. You can choose whether you want to login using Google Apps credentials, Moodle credentials, or an existing identity provider (if your institution has a centralized directory).

  When developing a Competency Based Training Program with the Moodle Outcomes Module, training managers are equipped with a process for defining competencies that are linked to a series of numbers or letters to determine the learner’s level of understanding of said competency. Unlike grades—which may be composed of test scores, participation points, attendance and projects—outcomes, like competencies, assess a series of statements which can be provided at the end of a course along with the overall grade. For more information on Moodle's advanced features, download our guide here.

Customer Relationship Management System Integrations Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems provide deep value for sales teams and organizations at large due to the capacity to track, automate and organize interactions with customers. Organizations who use Moodle for partner, client, channel or sales training began to see the benefit of having learning information synced with Salesforce. As such a number of integrations have been developed

Time and effort put into the development of eLearning programs is significant. This has moved many organizations to put pressure on eLearning departments to become either cost-neutral or profit centers; meaning courses developed need to be sold. To help facilitate this, there are many Moodle Plugins to help you do so. PayPal was the first Ecommerce plugin that enabled transactions directly from Moodle but there are now additional integrations that provide modern online payment options.

The recent report, 2013-2014 Results—Personalized Learning Drives Student Achievement, summarizes some pretty extraordinary results highlighting the success of blended learning classrooms compared to non-blended classrooms. For those of you who do not know what blended learning is, here’s a brief overview.

Hundreds of custom third-party plugins are offered for free by Moodle plugin contributors. Much like WordPress Plugins, Moodle plugins, once installed, change the look, feel and functionality of your LMS site to suit your requirements. Moodle’s category of available plugins is long and growing daily. To make things easier we’ve decided to share with you some must-have Moodle Modules to help you present, manage and administer pure online and blended learning sessions. Our Plugins webinar on January 23, will demonstrate how some of them work, including Face-to-Face, Real-Time Quiz, Drag and Drop Marking, and Attendance. We have also compiled a list of our all-time favorite plugins for various activities that you can review in the mean time.

On October 29th, Lambda is hosting a webinar on the Top Moodle Plugins for Blended Learning Strategies. We will give you a quick glimpse into some of what will be covered in the webinar. Blended learning is an emerging approach to education that "blends" traditional teaching methods with technology and virtual learning environments. It can also involve using a learning management system (like Moodle or Totara) to deliver a diverse range of teaching methods and resources to offer more effective learning.

A lot has been going on over at Totara Learning this summer so we decided to interview their Chief Technology Officer, Simon Coggins, to get the low-down on some of the developments that might affect customers at Lambda Solutions.

We’ve written before about the pervasive issue that is stagnating economic growth in the US—employee disengagement. According to research from Gallup, only 30% of American workers are engaged. What do we mean by engaged? As Gallup defines, engaged employees "work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company [and therefore] drive innovation and move the organization forward". The remaining 70% of US employees are either not-engaged or actively disengaged meaning that they are ‘checked-out, sleep walking through the day’ or plainly ‘unhappy at work undermining what their engaged counterparts accomplish’.  

We announced a few months ago that Lambda Analytika™ for Moodle was on its way, Well, it's finally here, and it comes with a plethora of new features and functions.  To celebrate the launch of this highly anticipated Analytika release, we are providing a special offer. If you purchase Lambda Analytika before December 21st 2015, your first 6 months is on us! Take advantage of this offer by clicking the button below.

So this week I am no longer the newbie in our department as a new administrator joined us on Monday.  I’m starting to feel more like I am part of the institution and am actually starting to make a contribution to things.  I’ve submitted a bid for the HEA Challenges of Web Residency project, and it’s been great work with Evelyn McElhinney on that. Regardless of the outcome writing instead of reading bids has marked quite a sea change for me.  Marion Kelt in our library is making great progress developing our institutional policy on OER and it was catch up on progress with the working group this week. I’ve also been involved in discussions around some other internal projects exploring potential new initiatives - hopefully more on that in the weeks to come. As I’ve been thinking about some possible future directions, they serendipity of twitter brought me to this post from Christina Costa. Outlining a lecture she had given about teaching in the 21st century, Christina clearly outlines some of the key challenges and affordances of using technology effectively for learning and raises some key questions, but ends with this "Can digital technologies, and the philosophies of practice associated with it, finally deliver on the promise of critical pedagogies?"  Just now I think the answer is sometimes, maybe . . . I also spotted the website for the EU funded Learning Analytics Exchange Project (LACE). I’m hoping to be as track/be involved as much as I can with this. We’re really at the early days of learning analytics here at GCU so this could be a really useful place for us to get advice from others and start sharing and developing the key questions we want data and analytical approaches to help us answer. Over the years I’ve really enjoyed blogging, and it certainly has paid off for me in terms of my career progression and other recognition. I start blogging from a non tradition academic post, and so my motivations weren’t academically driven.  This post from Deborah Lupton gives a really balanced view of the pros and cons of academic blogging and the need for continued research into its impact and development of practice.  As I become more and more engaged with institutional projects, and hopefully more "academically focused" (aka I need to write more papers)  I can see my approach to blogging will also have to change. The upside is that should have more focus for my writing, but the downside is that I will have to be far more considered. Actually that’s not really a bad thing is it? But having the motivation to keep blogging is an issue. It’s one of the reasons I started the (almost) weekly posts.  My old Cetis buddy David Sherlock sums up some of the practical "challenges" of blogging here  including the importance of fun - which sadly is sometimes lacking in educational contexts. Sometimes you can’t beat old technology, and this pen my colleague brought back from the Blackboard Conference last week in Durham has been useful for various notes this week too.

This week I’ve been thinking about the past and the future a bit more than normal. I’ve just finished reading Life after Life by Kate Aitkinson which has the premise "What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?" The  novel follows the many lives of Ursula Todd as she relives key episodes in her life.  At times I think we all have the "if only I had done that" feeling. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. But what if we did know what the future was going to bring, would we change things? A tweet from David Kernohan early in the week reminded me of an email exchange we had with BCCampus in Canada about a year ago. Me and @sheilmcn predicting 2013 just under 1 year ago, for @dendroglyph at BCCampus. http://t.co/kQ5J6DR8zV I think we did pretty well… — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) January 20, 2014 Looking back at it now, I agree with David that we did actually do pretty well. I had no idea this time last year I would have a "proper job" within an institution; and it has come to pass that, this week in particular, issues around which "areas of technology should be seen as commodities and those which should be considered as strategic investments." Like many others we are having lots of discussions about our strategic developments in online learning, MOOCs, technology provision etc.  In that respect the timing of the Cetis paper "Beyond MOOCs, Sustainable Online Learning in Institutions" couldn’t really have come at a better time to give a balanced overview of strategic considerations for online learning provision. I don’t think I would change anything from the overview we gave last year. I’m now working somewhere where we are developing an OER policy, we have 3-D printers, we are thinking about how to expand our online provison. But I do think that most people in the sector as still experiencing a bit of a groundhog day scenario with technology.  We’re all too often still buying "stuff" without really thinking through the implications, and the integrations need.  We have a solution without actually knowing what the problem(s) is/are. Although things are changing there are still too many assumptions that technology alone will solve all the problems we are facing. So I was heartened to see myself last year saying this: "one last thing- everything is underpinned by the growing recognition of the need to develop digital literacy not just in the sector but beyond.  For us to make any sense  of "all this stuff" we need to ensure our staff and students are continually developing both the technical and meta-cognitive capabilities needed" That’s an ethos I’d want to keep in any life. And finally, because every blog post needs a picture, I’ve looked back to my blipfoto archive and this was my entry on Jan 24th last year.  Sadly no sunshine here today . . . Tagged: future, oer, online learning, technology

After a bit of a respite and a small flirtation with FutureLearn, I’m getting back into the MOOC saddle again with #byod4L. Although not explicitly promoting itself as a MOOC, is kind of is and I’m hoping it will be the kind of MOOC experience I’ve found to enjoy the most - chaotic, crazy, connected, collaborative and fun. As this "open magical box" is being facilitated for a week, it does remind me of my first serious attempt at participating in a massive, open course - #moocmooc in  August 2012. When I started that MOOC (btw, it does keep surprising me how comfortable I feel using the term as a verb), I knew I had to be very pragmatic about what I could and more importably couldn’t do. There was just so much going on during that week online, and as the majority of the participants with in North America, a lot happened whilst I was sleeping.  I decided to take a very pragmatic approach to try and do one thing everyday (which the design of the course facilitated) and to use my blog and twitter as my primary communication channels.  This worked well for me and is how I have approached other MOOCs that I seriously wanted to engage with. It will be my strategy for this week too. I know I will miss out of some stuff, but a key part not just successful MOOCing  is becoming self directed, taking control, and realising that you can’t be everywhere, all the time and participate in everything. Remember no-one expects you to, and the facilitation team are dividing their time too as this really useful post from David Hopkins highlights. I like the five topics for the week: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating, creating. I think I’ll be most active in the connecting, collaborating and communicating spaces, but not sure if I’ll do enough to get a badge, tho that would be a nice momento of the experience. I’m also trying to encourage others in my department and institution to engage with the course over the week. We’re having a MOOC meet-up on Friday afternoon to discuss our experiences. Like other places it’s the first week of teaching for our new semester so getting some kind of group work is a bit of a non starter, but I’m hoping that just having an hour or so to talk about experiences/reasons of participation or non participation will be useful itself. A reminder of byod4l here is a little video I made for #moocmooc about places where I learn. Click on the image below or  this link to go the animoto page where it is hosted. Places where I learn Tagged: #moocmooc, #onlinelearning, byod4l, MOOCs

Just a very short post for day one.  I’m thinking about scenario 2 - the teacher, though this does apply to students too. One issue I have been discussing with my colleague Jim Emery is about connectivity within our teaching spaces. A small thought, if we are encouraging staff to bring their own devices or indeed if institutions/departments  are providing ipads/tablets etc the wouldn’t it be great if staff could wirelessly connect to the projectors in our teaching rooms? No more faffing around with adapters, or forgetting to bring them, you could just switch on and go. That might go some way to  help answer the questions of why/how would I use a phone/tablet/whatever for some and allow and encourage a bit more experimentation. (image fc-ipads.wikispaces.com) Tagged: byod4l

One of the things I really excited about in my new institutional based role is being able to be part of projects, instead of just watching and commenting on what other people do.  When I spied the HEA’s  Developing New forms of online practice in the disciplines: the challenges of web residency call I thought it might be the perfect opportunity for me to start working with colleagues here at GCU on a small externally funded project. From a personal point of view I was attracted to the call firstly because it was an area that I am interested in, secondly it was a 500 word proposal and didn’t involve a huge time commitment and thirdly and more importantly I saw this as a way for me to start some engagement with our students about digital identity and start to get a better understand of their perceptions of this aspect of digital literacy. I knew Evelyn McElhinney and her work in virtual worlds, and developing professional practice online via twitter before I started working here and so felt that there could be potential us to do "a wee project" .  I’ve followed Dave White’s development of the digital visitors and residents metaphor with interest and felt that the visitors and residents mapping methodology would (and this is probably the key part of our proposal) provide a relatively simple way for our students to: "to begin to articulate and understand their online engagement in the context of their continuing personal and professional development. Effective online engagement is particularly relevant to health care professionals, who are bound by professional codes of ethics. The increasing use of social media for professional and public engagement requires them to develop understanding of the interactions between professional and personal spaces.Insight gained from the mapping exercise will also feed into the development of our curriculum designs, technology provision and support." I’m also hoping that once we finished this pilot project, we can then run similar workshops within the other two schools here, and develop the process to help us support our students and also get greater insight to where, why, how and when they interact online. I’ll keep you posted here as the project develops. Just now we are looking forward to meeting the other successful projects on 12th February and finding out more about the mapping activity.  This video from David explains it in more detail. Tagged: #VandR, digitaliteracy, HEA, Jisc, online identity

I’m dipping back into #byod4l today. I didn’t manage to do anything really yesterday in the communication day. Kind of ironic as I thought it might be an area where I would be active. However, other non #byod4l communication such as email, twitter, blogging and that "work thang" kind of took priority. I’ve just watched the two video scenarios and I relate to both of them.  Like the student I do worry about where and how to save and share "stuff".  Over the years I’ve tried many different services and some listed in the curation resources area. Even now I’m still smarting from the delicious debacle, I flirted with diigo but it didn’t quite do it for me, I’ve tried pearltrees which I like, but my pearls are getting too big now so favourited tweets and a kind of weekly blog post also have their place in my chaotic curating methods. I also empathise with the teacher who was bemoaning the fact that students don’t engage with the additional online resources she provides as they see them as add-ons. Whilst better course/activity design may go some way to address this, I can fully understand why this is the case. Students have to be pragmatic about what they do. Pragmatism is the key thing that will get me through #byod4l (and has done for other MOOCs I’ve managed to complete). It is a key, often forgotten about, aspect of self directed learning.  When there is so much "stuff" around you just can’t engage with everything. But having the metacognative skills to make the most informed decisions about engagement is now more than ever a key part of any educational experience.  It’s great having so many curating tools, but knowing how to use and manage them effectively is an ongoing challenge and one I struggle with. One other related #byod4l activity today, here’s a screen shot of  Brian Kelly, me and Jim Emery trying a bit of collaboration this morning using a new to us free web conferencing tool appear.in Trying out appear.in Tagged: byod4l, curating, information literacy, self directed learning

The #BYOD4L event took place this week. One of the aims of the five-day long online course was to encourage collaboration. Brian Kelly and I have agreed to collaborate by writing gust posts on each others blog. My post is available on the UK Web Focus blog and Brian’s post is given below. What Was The BYOD4L Event About? The BYOD4L (Bring Your Own Device for Learning) is described as "a truly open course, or an ‘open magical box’ for those who don’t like the term ‘course’ very much, for students and teachers (nothing is locked away or private and you won’t even need to register) who would like to develop their understanding, knowledge and skills linked to using smart devices for learning and teaching and use these more effectively, inclusively and creatively". The learning outcomes are that on successful completion of this course, participants will be able to: Reflect on how smart devices can be used within their learning and/or teaching context. Discuss opportunities and challenges which influence more widely the use of smart devices in Higher Education for inclusive practice. Trial a specific BYOD intervention for learning/teaching in own context based on an informed rationale. This post summarises my reflection om the potential of smart devices in a learning context, the opportunities available and the challenges to be faced and details of a new BYOD tool I came across this week. I should also add that although BYOD4L does not describe itself as a MOOC the approach taken and the tools used had many similarities with the HyperLinked Library MOOC in participated in last year. Perhaps Mini-MOOC might be a good description of BYOD4L, if you’ll permit "Mini-Massive" in the abbreviation! What Did I Learn? The five day event sought to encourage participants to publish their thoughts and engage in discussions on five topics, which were accompanied by a blog post published each morning during the week. The topics were (1) Connecting, (2) Communicating, (3) Curating, (4) Collaborating and (5) Creating. It was difficult to engage fully in these activities on a daily basis, whilst still doing my day job! I therefore didn’t watch all of the videos which accompanied these themes. However I do feel that the event organisers provided a useful structure for helping to consider the role which using one’s own mobile devices may have in enriching learning. I have written two posts this week related to this topic: one on "Buying a New Tablet (Useful for #BYOD4L)" and the other on "Responding to "I Don’t Have Time!" Comments". In this post I will give my thoughts on the five issues. Connecting Whilst the Social Web is not new, mobile devices enabled connections to be made, in the words of the old Martini advert, "anytime, anyplace, anywhere". I have experienced the benefits of making new connections using mobile devices. The ability to be able to follow someone who has posted a link to an interesting article, shared useful resources or providing valuable insights into an area of interest to me whilst away from my desktop PC is useful to me. However people who worry about having too many people to follow do have a legitimate point, although this can be addressed by a periodic culling of one’s network, which might be particularly useful when one’s work activities change. Communicating Although mobile devices can be useful when one is on the move, they can also be useful in other situations as I described almost two years ago in a post on how  Twitterers Do It In Bed! Since publishing that post on a number of occasions when giving a talk about social networking I’ve asked for a show of hands of people who have used a mobile device for work-related purposes while in bed: it has been interesting to see the people who put their hands-up straight away, those who reluctantly admit to this, seemingly feeling guilty about it and the look of horror on the faces of others who have never considered this! Curating Having worked at UKOLN for over 16 years I am very aware of the importance of content curation. Although Twitter can be regarded as transient conversations I have been aware of the value of curation of tweets for some time. When I facilitated a workshop on Wikipedia editing for the first time I encouraged the participants to tweet during the workshop. Shortly afterwards I used Storify to create an archive of the tweets which I’ve used to evaluate the event, the structure and the timing. I was very pleased to see that the BYOD4L organisers provided Storify summaries  of the first and the second Tweetchats which they organised which was published shortly after the Tweetchats had concluded. Collaborating At 09.29 pm Wednesday 29 January Doug Belshaw tweeted: appear.in - one click video conversations tmblr.co/Z-yoOw15o6kPX Since I know Doug keeps up-to-date with new technological developments I tried out this simple video conversation tool.  After investigating the tool five minutes later I shared my interest with my network: The appear.in video conversation tools looks interest. HT to @dajbelshaw But to use a conversational tool you need to have someone to talk to! So Sheila MacNeill and I tried it as shown in the screen shot. By 09.58 Sheila had reported on our collaboration: me, @briankelly, @gcujime trying out appear.in #byod4l pic.twitter.com/lFEcUWXJiE In less than 30 minutes I had been alerted of a new video conversation tool, found someone to try it with and shared our experiences. Collaboration in action! In the video conversation we identified some possible uses for the appear.in tool: unlike Skype, no software needs to be installed and unlike Google Hangouts you do not need to sign up to the service. I also tried the service on my mobile phone, but found that the video wasn’t working (the black box in the screen shot was were the video from my phone should have been displayed). Creating I created the #byod4lchat Twubs archive, which complements the #byod4l archive. Since the #BYOD4L event is about mobile devices, I should confess that I created this archive on my desktop computer. However I did posts several tweets from my phone, so I feel that I have contributed to the five areas! Final Thoughts Last year I took part in the Hyperlinked Library MOOC. This provided a valuable opportunity for me to both learn more about MOOCs and learn about the HyperLinked Library model and the ways in which libraries can exploit networked technologies in order to enhance their effectiveness. I enjoyed the experience. I was conscious of the time it took to view the videos, read the recommended posts and articles and complete the assignments but, as I concluded in my Reflections on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC "if you were to ask me if I would recommend participation on the MOOC to others, my answer would be "Yes!"". The BYODL4L event had many similarities to the HyperLinked Library MOOC. For me the main difference was the focussed approach taken by BYODL4L which lasted for 5 days. Once again I would conclude that participation in the event gave me a wider appreciation of the approaches which can be taken to staff development. I do think we will see greater use of such collaborative approaches for supporting the development of staff within our institutions. I’ll conclude my thanks the organisers and volunteers who helped make the event so successful and asking the organisers some questions which would be of interest to others who may be considering organising a similar event: How many people were involved in planning and delivering the BYOD4L event? What was the business model for providing this free event? Would you do it again? If so, what would you do differently? What advice would you give to others who were considering organising a similar online event? This guest blog post was written by Brian Kelly, Innovation Advocate at Cetis as an assignment for BYOD4L. Brian normally publishes on the UK Web Focus blog. Tagged: byod4l

Another great night of speakers talking about using range of open data approaches was held at the CCA last night. Here are some of the tweets. Tweets by @sheilmcn Tagged: #okfn. #opendataGLA

This has been a bit of a meeting-tastic week for me, and so most of my time has been taken up with internal developments here at GCU. All quite exciting for me but not so much in terms of a blog post. However I still have had half an eye on the rest of the world, well parts of it at least. On Monday I went to the 3rd Open Data Glasgow Meet up.  As one of community organisers is was heartening to see a core of regulars building up, and of course welcome new faces.  The presentations were as diverse as ever from using wikipedia for developing research and scholarly skills at the Glasgow School of Art, where a number of secret wikipedians have been ‘outed’;  to using open source designs and 3-D printers to build boat houses in the Hebrides. Added to this mix was a touch of open science and another up date from the Glasgow Future Cities demonstrator Project.  I collated a twitter time line of the event which gives an overview of the presentations. The NMC HE Horizon report was released. I’m not even going to attempt to review it (David Hopkins has done a great round up of reviews), but I can easily match most of the key trends, significant challenges and important developments to activities  and/or areas in need of development within my own institution. I still have reservations the relevance of big data approaches in assessment in my context at this point in time. We are seeing a really big up take in e-assessment which is great. But it is going to take a while for the analytics side of things to become part and parcel of the emerging workflows/practices of our staff.  At this stage, we need to a lot of  work on developing (relatively) small and local approaches to data. We really are just taking baby steps in terms of actually getting the data in the first place never mind be in a position to make any sense of it. A more pressing priority just now is ensuring that e-assessment systems are reliable.  As many of you know many of us in the UK HE sector are more than a little bit cross with certain well known similarity checking system. Probably more interesting to me than the report were the video entries for the ELI video competition which show real examples of a number of the trends, challenges and developments from the report itself. The HEA also released their flexible pedagogies report, which is a bit a contrast to the NMC report, but has some useful overview information in it. Developing staff (and student) digital literacies were featured in the NMC and ALT ‘s Special Issue: Scholarship and Literacies in a Digital Age includes a fascinating range of papers around digital literacy issues - weekend reading for me I think. Elements of the Creative Classroom Research Model - NMC HE 2014 Tagged: #okfn. #opendataGLA, blended learning, NMCHE2014

How do you measure success on a MOOC? It’s a question that has been causing a lot of consternation as our traditional measures of success in education don’t seem to apply. Large drop out rates, challenges of assessment at scale, I don’t really need to go into all the details, it’s documented by others far more eloquently than me. However, despite my unsuccessful attempts in many MOOCs I have managed to complete a few (4 now!).  They all have been successful learning experiences for me. I got a certificate for one of them, but nice as they spacemen are on it, it isn’t really my biggest signal of success. As I blogged about before, it’s been after the MOOC  that the really collaboration and reflection on success has begun. This week at the EMOOCs 2014 Conference my colleagues Paige Cuff and Helen Crump are presenting our paper Signals of Success. Now having a paper accepted for a conference might not be your measure of success for a MOOC, but for me, Paige, Helen, Penny, Briar, Iwona and Yishay, actually pulling of this international collaboration has been a real triumph. You can see a pre-print of our paper and some more information here. And if you are wondering where the title of this post came from, this twitter conversation will give you a clue. @crumphelen @penpln @paigecuffe @mbjamieson @yvetteinmb @yishaym brilliant - next paper: "Cloudworks, purple dots, tea & biscuits"? — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) February 8, 2014 screenshot of twitter conversation Tagged: #emoocs2014, #oldsmooc, #oldsmoop

Despite the best intentions of the weather this week, a number of people from around the UK managed to make it to London on Wednesday for  workshop as of the HEA Digital Literacies in the Disciplines programme.   As I blogged about before, the main focus of our case study will be within nursing programmes in our school of Health and Life Sciences. The workshop was primarily an opportunity to bring the projects together and for us all to get a more in depth overview of the background to the mapping process.  For me the clarification of the ends of the V and R scale in terms of social traces was really useful. Visitor behaviour is where you don’t leave a social trace online and residency is where you interact with others and leave a social trace. The bit in the middle is where you are online to be with people, but within a known group e.g. Facebook. I liked David White’s use of the term "elegant lurking" e.g. a student who follows experts in a certain field on twitter but doesn’t interact with them, but does get a lot of useful information through the wider interaction of that group of people. As someone who isn’t keen at all on the term lurking this contextualization really appealed. As with most mapping exercises it is a not an exact science and the dialogue generated by undertaking the exercise is the most interesting part of the process. We were shown a range of different maps (again really useful to see) and as with most maps they all sparked a range of questions for me. One of the reasons we are keen on this methodology for nursing students is so we can provide a way for them to articulate and understand where and how they interact online in context of their professional, personal and student identities. Hopefully this will allow us to improve how we support them in developing relevant professional and personal practice. We are also interested in wider issues of where and how they use different social spaces for learning. Will they even think to add our VLE to their maps? This links to the use and support of learning spaces at an institutional level. Do we really need to be investing in developing social sharing spaces within our institutions (e.g. Yammer)  when most students use services such as Facebook anyway? And if we try to use these more personal spaces in a formal educational context, will that just make the students move somewhere else where they want to be? We may always be playing catch up. In turn, if these institutional social spaces are relatively closed will they be of any future value to students?  Should we be focusing attention on helping our students use recognised professional spaces such as Linked-In and leave them to use other online spaces in an informal way? I found the mapping exercise fascinating, and it’s really made me think about where and how I exist and leave social traces online.  I thought I had a good overview of my online interactions - particularly in a professional context.  But seeing other maps, and talking with people on Wednesday I remembered a whole lot of spaces where I do have a large social trace but I had actually forgotten about. Like many people I have "played" around with online bio services such as about.me, but I kind of forget about them as they are automagically updated from RSS feeds from my more active and engaged spaces such as my blog and twitter. However I’ve had over 3,500 visits to my about.me page in the past year which astonished me.  I also have a vizify page which again is populated from other services.  It has what I always thought was a good overview of ‘where I am" online Vizify online places But after doing the mapping exercise I think picture is more like this Sheila’s V&R map, Feb 2014 I confess I’ve had to re-do my paper map from Wednesday as I had forgotten quite a few things, and also I wanted to use circles not rectangles. Don’t think it makes any difference but there are a few Venn like overlaps. I was also impressed by fellow delegate who used powerpoint on Wednesday to create his map. We are running our workshop next month and I’m really looking forward to the maps and discussions it generates. Tagged: #HEAVandR

Firstly, thanks to @helencrump for the title of this post. The alternative title was ‘#oldsmooc - the MOOC that keeps giving". But I think Helen’s one sounds much more impressive :-) I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this post but there was a flurry of activity on my twitter stream last night/this morning and I just wanted to try and capture some of the ideas that have been floated. Regular readers of this blog will know that a group of #oldsmooc-ers recently presented a paper at the EMOOCs Conference, called "Signals of success and self directed learning" where we took a collaborative auto-ethnographical approach to create a range of narratives which described our different measures of success in participating in the mooc.  We felt that this personal reflection would help to address some of the gaps in understanding what actually motivates learners in MOOCs and probably more importantly for us as a group to explore the extent "connection, self-efficacy and self-directed strategies facilitate learning in a MOOC".   As a self selecting group we were very conscious that we could not ensure our narratives were typical of other leaners on the MOOC, but we did try and collect some more data from other participants.  I have tried to document the story of our collaboration, which has been a key  signal of success for us all. Getting the paper accepted was a great moment for us all, as was the conference presentation and tweets it generated.  We were still unsure if our approach and methodology really had any traction.  But last night Paige altered us all to this bit of activity on the current #rhizo14 MOOC.  Again through connections and network (aka some of our group taking part in another mooc) it seems our ideas and approach are being explored by other learners. I think this is really important.  We know that existing accepted educational metrics don’t really apply in the MOOC context, particularly for retention. Despite the promise of MOOCs and big data being able to give us insights into how people learn, I, like others, am still not so sure about some of the methods being used and in turn the patterns that are emerging. As well as the quantitative data, we need to get much more qualitative data exploring as many different narratives as possible from learners. It’s only by doing that that can we really start to help develop our understanding of how people define success in MOOCs. And in turn, we can ask more challenging questions of/from the quantitative data. Being a bear of very little brain, I like seeing the pretty patterns and swirly diagrams, but find it confusing when they don’t seem to relate to my own experiences.  Mind you,  if this article in the Sunday Observer is to be believed we won’t need to grapple with big data -v - little data -v- educational theory for much longer as soon the google robots will have worked it out all out for us and will have "fixed" education. My experience of learning on MOOCs has been very different from my traditional educational experiences. I know I didn’t (and still don’t really) enjoy formal education, and I am much happier (and hopefully more creative) in connected, loosely structured learning experiences than read a bit, do the test, read a bit more ones. Anyway below is a collation of the tweets from last night this morning, which range from us being all "check us out with starting an auto-ethnographic revolution" to more serious questions about the nature of open collaborative spaces, self disclosure and the importance of failure. On the last point, Pat Parslow referenced the "confessional" booth at the PELeCon Conference, which again got me thinking about the use of the language of guilt around what are perceived to be non traditional ways of doing things. But that’s probably a post for another day. Tweets by @sheilmcn Tagged: #oldsmooc, #oldsmoop, #rhizo14