Houghton Kepier School chose Moodle as its Learning Platform of choice from a bank of commercial alternatives. I will explain the selection process and some of the key items that have been of benefit to the school in relation to take up from staff, learners, parents and integration with our school ICT infrastructure.
Houghton Kepier Sport College - a Trust School is an 11-16 school based in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. Our ICT support team consists of three staff (including me). We support around 350 PCs and 300 laptops. Several Windows servers and several Linux servers.
My background is not that of a teacher, but a Technical Design Architect, so I will be going through the processes of how we came to pick a Virtual Learning Environment(VLE)/Learning Platform(LP) from a non teaching perspective, as well looking at the business need, which, in the context of the school, is the ability to integrate the LP into teaching and learning. For the teaching and learning objectives I liaised with the SLT and the ICT across the curriculum (ICTAC) coordinator in our school.
We wanted to provide the school with a Learning Platform that would easily integrate into the curriculum and provide access to existing school data systems The Learning Platform would also need to allow access for parents.
We are currently using Moodle in four departments, and as predicted by the other schools using Learning Platforms, it is now the learners that are helping to drive forward the use of the system. I am also glad to report that we now have a series of Moodle champions that are encouraging others members of staff to take the plunge with our Learning Platform. Most staff are finding that after a thirty minute training session, then they are ready to start moodling.
The first teachers that started using Moodle are now starting to move beyond the initial phase of adding resources, and are now looking to build activities. One of our next goals is to start building revision and homework activities that are fun to use, some will even be games. We are also looking to build a bank of questions that can be used for more formative assessments in KS3 and KS4. (Anybody wanting to help share in this activity, then please let me know.)
Perins school has already done an excellent write-up up on how they have implemented Moodle within their curriculum and I can certainly second a lot of what they have said in their case study, so I will keep the focus of our case study on how we integrated Moodle into our our existing ICT infrastructure.
Moodle Integration.
Windows Active Directory integration
We use the standard LDAP integration that ships with Moodle so that users can login using standard network login details. This should be a standard feature on most Learning Platforms now.
MIS integration
Full credit for the MIS integration must go to Ossett School for a module they produced called Facility to Moodle. This module provides integration for learners and their teaching groups.
Teachers are able to add learners to Courses using the block, which save a lot of administration work and enables the teachers to easily management enrolment for their courses.
Teachers simply have to pick their relevant teaching groups and them to the course
As learners have been imported via teaching groups, it automatically enables viewing of data via groups if you have enabled groups in the course.
Our parental access system had been using eportal, but we have now switched this to Moodle access. Parents can view can view the normal Moodle data such as grades, acitivty, forums posts etc. However, the Facility to Moodle integration block also allows parents to view attendance, behaviour summary, timetable information, formal teacher assessments and reports. One of the biggest administration benefits of this system, is that as the MIS has details of all parents and carers then they are imported using the Facility to Moodle integration block creating a username and password for all parents.
A couple of example screen shots are shown below.
Access to Windows Server Shares
Windows Share Web Client lets users access SMB shares on Windows/Samba servers. This lets the staff and learners access their personal folders and other shared folders on our Windows network via Moodle. This has been of a great benefit to the learners as it enables them to access their My Documents folder from home.
I am enjoying the fusion between the technical and the direct impact which Moodle is having with teachers and learners. Of all the projects that I have started since joining the school, this is a project that has truly engaged both the staff (technical and non technical) and learners.
I have enjoyed the challenge of learning PHP and starting to extend how our Moodle system works. Please do not think that you need to have a strong technical background to use and implement Moodle though. Without the help and support of the OSS community as whole, it would not have been possible to achieve what we have done! The level of help provided by the community has been better than many commercial suppliers we deal with. There are also a number Moodle partners that can also help you host and install Moodle. I would also like to extend a special thanks to Our Lady's Catholic High School, for all their help.
It was also very worthwhile visiting schools that were using various Learning Platforms(LP) in the area to see how they had faired in implementing their LP into the curriculum. What soon became apparent, was that the schools that had planned their installations and discussed at a whole school level, were having far more success, regardless of which LP they had implemented!
Make sure the school is aware that although Moodle is free in relation to the software requisition, that rolling out Moodle within your school is still a major project, that requires buy in from the SLT and members of staff. Get quotes and evaluations from other suppliers to see which Learning Platform best suits your need. It can also be worth costing how much the systems costs that provide the level of integration detailed in this case study. Comparing Moodle to commercial systems also helps to prove that OSS is on at least a par with many non free systems. Showing the staff the free add ons and modules for Moodle really helped show the added value in relation to the curriculum provision.
We our now planning to integrate activities via a series of formal and informal learning tools. This will include the provision of games to formative testing via the quiz activity. If any schools are using a Moodle and would like to collaborate on this part of the project then please let me know!
From a personal perspective I want to continue giving the staff more responsibility for the day to day running of courses and Moodle. I want to spend more time helping extend the Facility to Moodle integration block and also further enhance the integration between Active Directory. So that accounts can automatically be created and disabled as staff/learners join and leave the school. Also need further work to integrate Moodle into our catering system.
Using Moodle has also raised the profile of OSS within the school, and we want to further extend the use of OSS within curriculum and administration provision.
Hosting
Our Moodle server is hosted internally by the school on a virtual Linux server, this gives the school high speed access to resources on the server, and we are able to guarantee very high availability via a virtualisation solution. Hosting the service ourselves was very important, although the era of cloud computing may be almost here. We could not afford to have a key part of our ICT infrastructure unavailable because of a lack of internet access. Remote access to the Moodle server is handled by a proxy server, that we have situated in the DMZ of our internet provider.