UNews - online environment

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in transition to Moodle

trevor.kenney — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:07:19 +0000

You've seen the teaser advertisements around campus for months now – Moodle is most definitely coming. But what is Moodle, why is it on the way and how can we make the most of it?

The Moodle transition is the final stage of a Learning Management System (LMS) migration being undertaken by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ's Curriculum Re-Development Centre (CRDC). It's a massive project that will see the U of L replace the Blackboard/WebCT environment it has been operating in since 1999.

"We're very excited about the move to Moodle," says David Hinger, director of the CRDC. "Moodle is a very powerful tool designed to do many of the things you'd want to do in a face-to-face classroom in an online environment. It really takes advantage of the blended learning theory of education as it allows instructors to put delivery of their content within Moodle, so that they can really take advantage of face-to-face time in class."

The move to Moodle was precipitated by changes within the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ's previous LMS. The U of L had been using WebCT since 1999, but in 2005, Blackboard Inc. took over the company and has since ceased providing updates to the WebCT product. The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ therefore was forced to look at moving to a new LMS, whether it was to a Blackboard Learn LMS or some other product. A faculty steering committee was struck and Moodle emerged as a clear winner.

Hinger describes an LMS as, "an extension of your face-to-face course. It's a simple way to provide resources and activities, and to have an online presence for your teaching and learning needs."

The reasons the U of L decided to move to Moodle are many, including its design as a constructivist pedagogical model as opposed to Blackboard's content management system approach.

"Moodle is very much built the way educators sit down and design their courses," says Hinger. "It's very simple and intuitive, with a lot less clicking then what you'd do in Blackboard."

The steering committee also found that Moodle was the choice of incoming students, as more than 80 per cent of students had been exposed to a Moodle learning environment in high school. Add in the fact that it is an open source program that lends itself to customizable features, and Moodle seems like the perfect fit for the institution's teaching and learning needs.

"Being an open source program, if there are features that aren't there, we can build them," says Hinger. "If we identify unique needs for our faculty, we can build things within the Moodle environment to do what they need it to do."

The move to Moodle has already begun, with two courses used in the Fall 2010 Semester as part of a pilot program. Currently, 50 courses have been constructed in Moodle, utilizing the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ's testing centre and including every manner of course, from art history to management. Feedback from instructors has been positive.

"Those who have had a chance to work with it so far have found it very user-friendly," says Hinger. "But we aren't going to throw instructors to the wolves, we're very committed to providing whatever support they need to use this product. A lot of instructors have looked at this as an opportunity to redesign what they are doing in an online environment and finding it a very valuable exercise. We'll assist them any way we can."

The CRDC will continue to support Blackboard/WebCT through the 2010-2011 academic year, with full implementation of Moodle scheduled for Fall 2011 and the 2011-2012 academic year.

To learn more about Moodle and the LMS migration process, go to the CRDC website at www.uleth.ca/crdc

GET THE FACTS

• The CRDC will be offering workshops to assist instructors with Moodle. As well, an online pool of resources is currently being created.

• The U of L is one of the first in Canada to move to this newest version of Moodle 2.0, which was just fully released in November 2010.

• The U of L previously had 640 courses (70 per cent) operating in Blackboard/WebCT, with over 6,000 students utilizing the program.

• Other features of Moodle include the ability to embed videos, moderate virtual chats and forums and conduct online exams.

Building a real-time digital reliquary

trevor.kenney — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:00:58 +0000

Written in Old English by an anonymous poet, The Dream of the Rood is recognized as one of the oldest poems in the English language and among the most beautiful religious works. What many don't know is that much of the poem is carved in runes (ancient symbols) on a 17-ft high stone cross in a Scottish church.

The 8th century Ruthwell Cross is historically linked to two other crosses: the 11th century Brussels Cross, made of oak and thought in the Middle Ages to contain a relic of the "True Cross" from Christ's crucifixion, and the 8th century Bewcastle Cross in England, which is carved of stone. All three bear elements that are thematically related to The Dream of the Rood poem.

In the past, Anglo-Saxon historians were required to travel to Belgium and Great Britain to study these artifacts in all three dimensions. Despite the gains of modern digital photography, the crosses are difficult to capture photographically because of their condition and inconvenient locations. Additionally, even a very high-resolution image cannot capture subtle details, like the techniques used to carve the cross.

"It's not 100 per cent clear whether or not the poem was carved when the Ruthwell Cross was carved," explains U of L English professor Dr. Daniel O'Donnell. Being able to examine the crosses in all three dimensions is the only way for researchers to assess this and many other questions.

To improve access to the objects, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge team is co-ordinating an international effort to create a high-tech alternative. O'Donnell, a medieval literature specialist, is collaborating with U of L professors James Graham (New Media) and Dr. Wendy Osborn (Mathematics and Computing Sciences), computer programmer and U of L graduate Joel Rigby, and researchers from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Leeds and the Università degli studi di Torino, to create an online environment that will allow researchers to view and interact with the crosses virtually, in real-time and in three dimensions.

"After examining the multitude of available new media technologies used by humanities researchers and wanting to create an innovative online system that would significantly improve the standard of interactivity, visual accuracy and authenticity-of-experience, we settled on developing a proprietary digital information retrieval system that would work in combination with a collection of next-generation video game technologies," Graham explains. "We felt that the third dimension was the next logical direction for hypermedia-based research to go, as it allows users to see and intuitively interact with virtual representations of objects they wish to know more about."

To render the crosses in 3-D, high-tech laser scanners will be used to capture every detail of the historic artifacts. The digital scan files will then be converted from the 3-D x,y,z data into a highly efficient texture files – called normal maps – that will then be applied to the surface of the 3-D cross models.

The Visionary Cross research group is also completing an innovative system that will allow researchers to interface directly with external online databases while navigating within the 3-D game environment. Students and researchers examining the relics within the virtual game environment will be able to directly access specific online database information – and even add to that database – simply by clicking on the relevant location on the 3-D virtual object.

Not surprisingly, the project will need heavy-duty technological infrastructure. That's why Osborn, who is the director of the Southern Alberta Digital Library and an expert in data management, is examining the best ways to store the data involved to make its retrieval efficient.

"We're still working on proof-of-concept, so we don't have huge amounts of data yet, but when we go online and people start to add their own data, it could be terabytes of data that come into this," she explains.

To put this in perspective: 1 terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes (GB), and your personal computer probably has about between 1-5 GB of memory. In addition to the massive volume of information, the project will also involve many different kinds of data, which also presents a tremendous challenge, Osborn says.

The Visionary Cross Project is being funded by a two-year, $23,000 grant that Graham, O'Donnell and Osborn received from the U of L Community of Research Excellence Development Opportunities (CREDO) program. The researchers have also applied to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for funding for the next stages of the project.

While the Visionary Cross Project may seem like a radical diversion from most humanities research, O'Donnell explains that humanities researchers have relied on computers since the middle of the 20th century for things like statistical analysis and library cataloguing. But humanities researchers haven't just been the benefactors of technology – they've also created it.

"For example, an awful lot of what allows XML to work essentially comes out of work done in humanities computing," O'Donnell says.

UNews - online environment

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ in transition to Moodle

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Building a real-time digital reliquary

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��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in transition to Moodle