Moodle Update

Following a review of online teaching and learning support and in response to issues raised in the Institutional Review, the University has funded a project to establish an ‘enterprise wide, opt-in’ Moodle Service. By that, we mean that the Moodle service will be capable of serving all departments but changing from current provision to Moodle is a departmental decision.

Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) software platform, widely used in education and increasingly in HE, specifically designed to support online delivery of teaching and learning. It will complement the tools currently provided at Warwick to support teaching and learning.

Progress to date 8/10/12 :

We have selected the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) as our hosting partner, preferring external hosting to allow us to concentrate resources on supporting the use of the VLE rather than on technical support.We have appointed Stephen Brydges, eLearning Advisor in IT Services, as project lead.ULCC have set up the Warwick Moodle environment.We have achieved integration with Web Sign On, providing a seamless transition between Sitebuilder and Moodle.We are working on the integration of Moodle with student data from the central student records system, SITS.The first version of the ‘look and feel’ is complete and borrows elements from the latest Sitebuilder design, ID6.Final interviews for an additional post to join the project team are on Tuesday, 9th October.The eLearning Steering group will provide guidance and set overall priorities; the operational group/project board will manage the implementation project.

Plan 8/10/12:

The first two departments to go live are Life Sciences and Chemistry. These departments have particular drivers and local resources to use Moodle for teaching and learning. They went live for selected modules for the start of this academic year.Following the implementation for the first two departments, we will review what needs to be in place, both in the project team and in the department, to enable a successful implementation across campus.We then expect to start rolling out to departments who choose to implement Moodle as their VLE. We anticipate that this might be a whole departments or course(s) within a department. We will work with each department to work out what needs to be done and how best to embed the use of Moodle in their community.

We anticipate the need to add ePortfolio and Repository software to Moodle. We have budgeted for these features but are not yet at a stage where we have a firm schedule for roll-out. We expect to work with interested departments on the implementation of these features.

You can track our progress as well as register your own interest in using Moodle by visiting these web pages: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/moodle

If you have any questions, please contact Mary Stott ( mary.stott@warwick.ac.uk Ext:23997 or Steve Brydges (Stephen.brydges@warwick.ac.uk ).