The presenter will share how he set up a course to conduct an experimental study with three treatment groups. Because the students and teachers participating in the study were unfamiliar with Moodle, a number of techniques were implemented in an attempt to make the course as straight forward as possible. For example, built-in features such as availability restrictions and activity tracking were used to present the activities one-by-one so that the participants completed them in the correct order. In the second part, the presenter will show a number of third party plugins and filters that were used: Questionnaire 2.7.0, the PoodLL Filter (Once Player), and the Generico Filter. In addition to the use of these plugins and filters, other adaptions because of the three treatment groups needed to be made such as multiple versions of many of the questions and descriptions in the Question Bank. In the final part, the presenter will describe some of the mishaps in the process of setting up the course and the actual implementation of the study. It is hoped that this presentation may provide some inspiration and practical advice from a non-programmer's perspective for those who are considering conducting an experimental study with Moodle.

1. Setting up a course with
a research component
Adam Murray
Miyazaki International College
7th Moodle Moot Japan (20-22 Feb 2015)

2. Research design
• 3 treatment groups
• randomly assigned vs. convenience
• time-constraint? 1 x 90-minute class

3. User friendly enough?
• majority of teachers and students were
unfamiliar with Moodle

4. Action
• Handouts (teacher version, student version)
• Tweaks to Moodle site and course

5. Handout

6. Front page
Only one course available
Japanese interface enabled

7. Restrictions
*Moodle 2.7

8. User names

9. Low Control Group

10. Medium Control Group

11. High Control Group

12. For the listening
practice step, ID
numbers were used to
restrict access to the
the other two
treatments.
In other words, LC
students could not see
the MC and HC
activities.

13. Questionnaire

14. Questionnaire Results

15. A Tweak
“Answer the questions…” was changed to
“Click here to begin.” ここをクリックして始めて
ください。

16. Filters

17. Once Player

18. Generico
• Template 1
buttons
• Template 2
audio
• Template 3
script

19. Generico Settings

20. Snippet of “Code”
You will hear a short talk. Choose the best answer
for the three questions.
{GENERICO:type=buttons}
{GENERICO:type=audio,track=001_TOEIC_part4}
{GENERICO:type=script}

21. Buttons - HTML
Audio Control - built-in (Flow player)

22. Comments please!
@murraysensei
amurray@edu.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp