Accessibility - Getting out of the way of Student Learning | Emily Southwell - ACOM | TLCANZ17
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Sometimes less is more. What are our students really after in their learning experience and how can we make Moodle 'get out of the way' so that the students can get there faster? Emily will share some of the strategies used at ACOM and the challenges faced in making their Moodle site accessible to all their users.
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Accessibility - Getting out of the way of Student Learning | Emily Southwell - ACOM | TLCANZ17
- 1. Get out of the way of student learning! How the Australian College of Ministries aims to simplify online learning
- 3. 33 Who are we? OUR STUDENTS ARE: • Adults • Practitioners • Nation-wide and international, often decentralized though sometimes brought together through hybrid learning • Not always tech savvy! So, what can we do in Moodle to help? OUR AIM IS: To make the student experience as simple and accessible as possible so we can get out of the way of their learning.
- 4. 4 How do we use Moodle?
- 5. 55 How it looks • SNAP Theme. Clean, responsive design. • Consistency across units and content
- 6. 66
- 7. 77
- 8. 88 How it functions • SSO for library • Site-wide Glossary entries for common resources • Internet accessibility • PLDs pop-ups and emails
- 9. 99
- 10. 1010 How it functions • PLDs: • Automated reminders about yearlong forums • Popups giving information around resubmissions • Tracking students who have not submitted • Remind users about required activities, and where they are • Remind users about feedback forms
- 11. 1111 How we support our users • Student Lounges • Announcement Forum • Community Lounge
- 12. 1212 How we equip our users • Student Homepage • FAQs and Tutorials • Staff Homepage • Orientation document with login email • Study Skills and Student Support
- 13. 13 What’s next?
- 14. 1414 The Dreams • Discipline Lounges • User Tours • “Need Help?” button
- 15. 15 Questions?
- 16. 1616 • Clean, logical, consistent • Information on hand (Glossary entries, PLDs) • Student connections via student lounges • Online resources for self help • Continuous development Once more for the people in the back…
Editor's Notes
- Context for who I am. 25 years old, started in this role as an admin assistant. All I knew about education and online learning was what I had experienced as a student myself. I learned all of what I know now via conferences like these, the help of our Moodlerooms tech support, and many swift and panicked Google searches.
- Who are we? My context, as a Learning Systems Manager, is ACOM. The Australian College of Ministries, a Theological, Higher Education Provider. We have no brick and mortar campus, which is a huge factor in driving our online strategy, as Moodle is the central place for all of our students. OUR STUDENTS ARE: Adults, varying in age from 17/18 through to 50s and 60s. As a result we have an andragogy, which aims to focus on student-led learning. Practitioners, even if they are not paid what they learn is relevant to their life and faith Nation-wide and international, often decentralized though sometimes brought together through hybrid learning. Some of our students participate in a cohort, but many are studying directly as an individual student. We have staff in each region of Australia to help support these individuals but they can only do so much. Direct students do not meet regularly with staff or with their peers. Who do they ask their questions of? How do they get unstuck? These are the questions we have aimed to resolve in our online strategy. Not always tech savvy! So, what can we do in Moodle to help? OUR AIM IS: To make the student experience as simple and accessible as possible so we can get out of the way of their learning. In perusing some of the feedback given by students earlier this year, I found that the majority of comments were in relation to unit content or assessments. Any time the platform was mentioned, it was in regards to the frustration of glitches, high anxiety in students who did not yet have a grasp on how Moodle worked, and a high number of notifications making the notification system bulky and unusable. Mind you, there were only 9 comments out of hundreds made in regards to our Moodle platform. What does this tell me? It tells me that students don’t want to notice the platform. When they do, it’s because it is getting in the way of their learning.
- SNAP Theme. Clean, responsive design. Pleasant, unobtrusive, platform for learning. It’s intuitive, more like a website than just a data-dump of files. Honour SNAP’s cleanliness through Consistency across units and content. All of our units are set out in the same fashion, from the same template. So when they take a new unit they don’t have to re-learn how this faculty member likes to set out their content compared to the last unit they took. Students know how to find what they need when they need it. At ACOM we have two staff members who look after the loading of content into Moodle. It’s a big job to update 100+ units each Trimester but it means that our quality control is much more efficient than if each faculty member took care of their own space. We’re the “experts”, so we make Moodle function the best it can. SSO for library. We have an online database, which is accessible via Moodle. Go to the Library “door” on Moodle, and voila, the library is opened. The library is actually one of our clunkier tools, as it requires several kinds of login in order to save to folders, download e-books, read e-books on your computer... By using SSO via Moodle we’ve removed one of those steps. Unfortunately the rest of the library is out of our hands but we give our feedback to our provider and pray for the best!
- Site-wide Glossary entries for common resources. This is a very helpful tool, which I continue to relish in as I find new ways to use it. By setting up a site-wide glossary, we’ve been able to provide automated links to documents throughout the site. We’ve used it to link to our Higher Education Handbook, our Referencing Guide, various guides to academic writing, which can be referenced in the assessment description in a unit. This means that when the student goes to do their assessment, the file is there on hand. It also means that from an administrative point of view, we only need to update this file in one place. I absolutely froth when I send a Moodle message to a user and the link to the document that I’m referring to automatically appears in the message. It’s information at your fingertips, how online learning should be! Internet accessibility. We try to keep our file sizes down. If we have a 5-10 minute video in a unit we’ll compress the file size down to around 50MB. Fun fact – Australian internet speed is ranked 50th in the world, with average speeds of 9.6Mbps. This means that a 50Mb file will take about 5 seconds to load, which in internet speeds is a decent amount of time. We also ensure that all of our PDF readings have text-recognition on them for those students who use text-to-speech technology, or simply for copying and pasting! PLDs pop-ups and emails. This is one of the most utilized functions on our site. With these PLDs we can set up automated reminders about yearlong forums, give information regarding resubmissions, track students who have not submitted, remind users about required activities in the unit and where they are, and remind users at the end of the Trimester to fill out the feedback forms. PLDs allow for personalized interaction with Moodle. The PLDs will automatically address the user by name, and responds to their behavior in Moodle. For instance, when a student fails an assessment, they may have the option to resubmit. Moodle automatically reopens the assessment for a second submission and displays a pop-up explaining what’s going on and what steps they need to take next. We also find that the PLDs are really helpful reminders, especially for end of Trimester feedback. We use the “nagging” technique for this, as every time a student accesses that unit in the last week of Trimester the pop-up will appear until they fill out the form. So while they’re busy trying to finish off their assessments last minute, we’re constantly reminding them to give us their feedback! Point out PLD on image. NEXT SLIDE = Assessment resource glossary entries
- Site-wide Glossary entries for common resources. This is a very helpful tool, which I continue to relish in as I find new ways to use it. By setting up a site-wide glossary, we’ve been able to provide automated links to documents throughout the site. We’ve used it to link to our Higher Education Handbook, our Referencing Guide, various guides to academic writing, which can be referenced in the assessment description in a unit. This means that when the student goes to do their assessment, the file is there on hand. It also means that from an administrative point of view, we only need to update this file in one place. I absolutely froth when I send a Moodle message to a user and the link to the document that I’m referring to automatically appears in the message. It’s information at your fingertips, how online learning should be! Internet accessibility. We try to keep our file sizes down. If we have a 5-10 minute video in a unit we’ll compress the file size down to around 50MB. Fun fact – Australian internet speed is ranked 50th in the world, with average speeds of 9.6Mbps. This means that a 50Mb file will take about 5 seconds to load, which in internet speeds is a decent amount of time. We also ensure that all of our PDF readings have text-recognition on them for those students who use text-to-speech technology, or simply for copying and pasting! PLDs pop-ups and emails. This is one of the most utilized functions on our site. With these PLDs we can set up automated reminders about yearlong forums, give information regarding resubmissions, track students who have not submitted, remind users about required activities in the unit and where they are, and remind users at the end of the Trimester to fill out the feedback forms. PLDs allow for personalized interaction with Moodle. The PLDs will automatically address the user by name, and responds to their behavior in Moodle. For instance, when a student fails an assessment, they may have the option to resubmit. Moodle automatically reopens the assessment for a second submission and displays a pop-up explaining what’s going on and what steps they need to take next. We also find that the PLDs are really helpful reminders, especially for end of Trimester feedback. We use the “nagging” technique for this, as every time a student accesses that unit in the last week of Trimester the pop-up will appear until they fill out the form. So while they’re busy trying to finish off their assessments last minute, we’re constantly reminding them to give us their feedback! Point out PLD on image. NEXT SLIDE = Assessment resource glossary entries
- Screen shot of actual forum with glossary entries in description. Student Lounges. Studying online can be quite an isolating experience. The beauty of online is that you can do it anywhere, anytime. So asynchronous learning is inevitable. Having student lounges in each unit allows for asynchronous discussion between students and with their marker. For a while we trialed the role of “Academic Coordinator”, a person who would monitor the questions asked in those student lounges and provide an answer that is always consistent. However, this role became a bottle-neck so we have dissolved it and reverted back to referring those questions to the unit marker. This proves to be a difficult area as our markers are decentralized, so trying to get people who represent our college all on the same page, when some of them aren’t even in the same country, proves to be a challenge. Announcement Forum. We have a homepage that all of our currently studying students are enrolled in. In that course on Moodle we have included an announcements forum. When we first launched this I made the mistake of setting it to force subscribe and allowing students to post. There was so much activity in this lounge, students engaging in conversation with other students for the first time, telling them where they come from, what they’re studying… and other students flinging off emails to me because I DON’T WANT THESE EMAILS. SO Community Lounge. We changed tack a little bit. I adjusted the settings for the announcements forum so that no students could post in it and created a “Community Lounge” where students could connect. There hasn’t been a single post in that lounge now! However, there are many questions, which are directed to the course contact of that course. It used to be the Academic Coordinator but since that role has been dissolved I replaced it with my own account. It’s encouraging to see students can see a contact that they can message at the bottom of that page, and are happy to ask their questions via Moodle.
- Student Homepage. As I just mentioned we have a student homepage. We use a profile redirect to ensure that this is the page that all of our direct students first come to when they a) login or b) hit “home”. The dream for this page was firstly a location to upload common information and resources. Secondly it was a place for students to come to when they needed help using Moodle. Sadly, it was pointed out to me, that “if a student can’t figure out how to upload an assignment, they probably won’t find the FAQs section on the homepage”! Still, it remains a central location for all students, with access to our library and other online tools, and for those savvy enough to find them, our FAQs and Tutorials. FAQs and Tutorials. Our office in Sydney is only open 8:30-5pm Monday-Friday, not including public holidays. So what is a student to do when they need immediate help and no one is available to provide it? I’ve developed a series of text instructions and videos to help users learn Moodle on their own. Redirecting a user enquiry to a video, or an FAQ on Moodle, often saves us time because we don’t have to reiterate the same instructions every time. It’s also helpful for reiteration, because you don’t retain information until you really need it. Initially these instructions were isolated on the Moodle Homepage. Now, with the site-wide glossary entries, they can appear anywhere on the site – even in Moodle messages. So you click on a video link, it pops up and away you go! These are instructions that need to be updated annually because our site is constantly being updated and our processes are constantly shifting (hopefully for the better!) There’s nothing worse than clicking on a video that’s three years old and looks nothing like what you’re looking at on the page. Staff Homepage - Same resources and layout for staff (Markers, Admin, Academic etc.) We have a similar system for our staff. There’s a staff homepage with a link to FAQ’s and tutorials (some doubled up, some unique to staff), our library and other online tools, as well as a forum for discussion. I find using the forum is preferable to sending a mass message because it’s available to users who come in after the message has been sent. I also find that the discussion that a forum can generate is more helpful than the isolation of a message – bearing in mind that the messages I send are often general instructions to a group of users. Orientation document with login email. Obviously before a user logs into Moodle they’ve got no idea how to use Moodle. So, we developed an Orientation document that gets sent out in a MailChimp email with a new users login details. There are several kinds depending on the role you have, and it goes over the basics of using Moodle to hopefully get them to the stage where they feel comfortable enough to find the FAQ’s on the site! Study Skills and Student Support. In addition to the student homepage, we have a study skills and student support page. This page is oriented around the learning process at ACOM, rather than Moodle itself. Students can come here to watch a series of videos and access those guides to academic writing that I mentioned earlier. Since we enrol our students in these pages, they appear in the “My Courses” section on SNAP, which makes them as accessible as any of the units they’re studying.
- Discipline Lounges. The Community Lounge on the Student Homepage isn’t seeing any action. One of our dreams is to set up Discipline Lounges. The idea behind these is that if a student is studying Theology or Biblical Studies, they can go to the discipline lounge for that discipline, ask their question, or search through previous forum posts for the answer to their question. We’re hoping this structure will increase student engagement with each other and with the wider ideas around the unit that they might be currently studying. User Tours. User tours are a dream. They’re the kind of thing you want new, kind of hopeless users, to be able to click on and watch, step by step, how do I upload an assignment? The only flaw with these that I have come across so far, at least in our site, is that the tour is only available once. This isn’t helpful for someone who uploaded an assignment four weeks ago for the first time and now can’t remember the steps. “Need Help?” button (Moodlerooms Community). In light of the “one time only” user tour debacle, I wondered about the possibility of having a “help” button available in the header of every page of the site. This would be the perfect place to have our FAQ’s and Tutorials homed. A student can’t figure out where to find their grades, clicks on “help”, searches “grades”, finds the right (ACOM developed) tutorial and BOOM. Answer. It’s a dream that I’ve put forward to the Moodlerooms Community online, so if you’re in there, go find my idea and discuss!