Project Format Repositories for Teacher Collaboration
Don Hinkelman, Sapporo Gakuin University
Andrew Johnson, Sapporo Gakuin University
Re-submitted 2008.01.30
Abstract
Teachers who a) use Moodle, b) work in collaborative teams, c) generate their own materials, and d) utilize a blend of audio, video and text activities face challenges when trying to share content amongst their courses. This paper targets such teachers and is a preliminary report of a three-year research and development effort. The purpose is to aid intra-school teaching teams to easily share multi-media activities and resources in a repository built for Moodle - an open source learning management system. Based on a design for digital repositories proposed at JALTCALL 2006, (Johnson & Hinkelman, 2006), a Moodle plug-in referred to as the "project course format" was developed to allow teachers to view, backup, restore, and move complete collections of interactive activities or resources that are based on a single theme (i.e. projects). The project course format is based on the notion that teachers want to share units, topics or projects more than macro-objects (whole courses) or micro-objects (single files). After placing content into a Moodle course accessible only by teachers (i.e. our repository), teachers could then use the project course format to quickly move their own or other teacher’s projects to their class courses. Projects can include a variety of video-based quizzes, student surveys, flash-based lessons, audio recordings, discussion forums, and other digital resources. During its first three months of operation by five teachers in a general English program at Sapporo Gakuin University, a private university in northern Japan, new needs that were unforeseen when the plug-in was originally designed were revealed such as a tool for cloning individual activities, and some original needs were confirmed, such as a searchable data bank. Our conclusion is that an iterative development strategy based on the direct needs of a teaching team is critical to developing immediately useful online tools such as Moodle plug-ins.
Background
Nowadays, teachers have access to a plethora of teaching materials. One example is Quia Web, an online sharing network, which claims to have a library of over two million sharable learning objects (Quia, 2008). However, none of these objects are portable outside of the Quia server and access is based on a subscription system. Teachers who experiment with more open collaborative sharing on web-based repositories, such as Google Docs, are not limited to using a proprietary site, yet the formats for sharing are limited to word-processing, spreadsheet, and other standard office file formats. Language teachers require a variety of rich audio, image, and video media used in complex activities (quizzes, drag-and-drop activities, cloze exercises for example). The problem remains of how to incorporate and share various types of multimedia activities with multiple formats on a single site. Caws, Freisen, & Beaudoin (2006) may have been the first language learning researchers to address the problem of sharing a variety of types of content in their development of a French learning object repository. However, the objects they chose to exchange required separation into smaller discrete units and later re-assembly into lesson packages, a highly labor intensive approach. Furthermore, their approach was to use an external repository for students to browse, with no integration to an institutional learning management system. The urgent need for the SGU teaching team was a repository that aided quick course creation and assembly within a Moodle LMS.
In 2003, Sapporo Gakuin University decided to use the Moodle LMS for its e-learning site because of its popularity among language teachers worldwide and its ability to be customized by users. As a university platform for blended learning or distance learning, adoption of the open source Moodle LMS has been growing rapidly, while use of proprietary systems such as Blackboard have been decreasing (Instructional Technology Council, 2008). Unfortunately, Moodle has yet to offer teachers an efficient tool for sharing their multi-media content between their courses (Moodle, 2008). Rather than focus on an in-house Moodle repository, developers instead have focused on top-down approaches that link to external repositories such as Door or Hive. The absence of in-house Moodle repositories may be because developers do not understand how teachers actually use Moodle for course building or simply due to the enormity of the task. Our task was to fill this gap with an intermediate repository that would fill the sharing needs of teachers using a single Moodle site and to gain a better understanding of the challenges that need to be overcome when designing a larger scale repository.
Development Strategy
At first, our design team sought to replicate a top-down, global design that may apply to any teacher in the world. However, we quickly found that such an external repository would take more time away from teachers who wanted to quickly make their online activities. Therefore, we chose a localized development approach that immediately solved problems of collaboration within a single school teaching team by keeping complex packages of multi-media files as “projects” and exchanged as whole units that could later be modified or simplified by the borrowing teacher. This organic approach may prove useful to other teaching teams as it is based on open source standards in e-learning such as the XML packages of the Moodle LMS, MySQL databases, PHP scripting, and IMS-Learning Design principles, as summarized in earlier research on the relation of international e-learning standards to Moodle (Hinkelman, 2004; Berggren et al, 2005; Hinkelman, 2006). Once we decided to use Moodle code as the base of the repository, we found the project course format could be built fairly easily due to Moodle’s modular nature.
Description and Use
The standard Moodle LMS offers users six course formats for organizing content (i.e. weekly, topics, social). Using these formats, course creators can group related content that appear as boxes on the screen and called course “sections” in the Moodle terminology. Unfortunately, it is not possible to backup, restore or exchange sections in Moodle, only whole courses or individual activities/resources. Therefore, to allow sharing of a package of related objects in a section, the authors designed a third party Moodle course format titled the “Project” format. Using the Moodle standard topics format as a base, a hired programmer implemented five new features (A, B, C, D and E) that are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Project Course Format View in Moodle (with editing on)
Notes: The screenshot above (“Introductions”) is a sample project filled with activities and resources.
This “box” of content is called a “section” in the Moodle LMS.
A) Directory Name – Each section has an associated directory name in the files section of the course. When teachers edit this directory name, the file path of media embedded in standard Moodle activities and resources (and a limited number of third party activities) is also modified.
B) Upload File(s) and display them here – This is a simple way to upload files which are to be resources. After selecting the files to upload, they are automatically placed in the directory associated with the section. By default, the title of the resource is title of the file.
C) Upload File(s) without displaying them yet – Like (B), this is another quick way to upload files into a section. This upload feature is useful for uploading media that is to be embedded into resources and activities but not displayed individually as a resource.
D) Backup Section – This allows all the resources and activities, plus all the files in their associated directory, to be saved as a backup file. This file is placed in the backupdata directory in the files section of the course.
E) Import Section – This allows you to search and restore a section backup from anywhere on your Moodle site to the current section.
After a teacher has created a project or ‘section box’ of resources and activities, it can then be backed-up using the ‘Backup Section’ button. This creates a backup zip file of the contents and all embedded files. To restore this content, go to another section box anywhere on the Moodle site which also using the project format and restore it into the desired location. When this is done, all the links to media used in the resources and activities will automatically be changed to the new location.
Testing of the project format for sharing theme-based content began in the beginning of the spring 2008 semester at Sapporo Gakuin University. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, teacher training on how to use it was not initially available. While the two authors primarily did the initial testing, three other teachers used it later in the semester. Additionally, a teacher based in a university in the UK, via communication on the official Moodle site (http://moodle.org), provided feedback and bug-testing. With this community feedback, we were able to add an AJAX drag-and-drop editing feature, vastly improving the operation.
Although the authors initially thought the project format would facilitate sharing amongst teachers in a teaching team, the primary use during the first semester of use was for single teachers to replicate their projects in their various courses. For example, a teacher teaching five freshman English communication courses using the same syllabus would create the resources and activities for a project in the in-house, teacher-only repository and then use the project format to quickly duplicate them to their class courses. One issue that was noticed was the inability to duplicate a single resource or activity to existing project sections. This functionality, called the “sharing cart”, was added in the next phase. This was programmed to be installable by any site administrator as a plug-in block.
Projections for Development
Our projection to go beyond the project course format (section backup/import) in the initial phase of design will include four additional phases spread over two years of development. These include: 1) a sharing cart, 2) a searching/browsing interface, 3) community functions, and 4) contribution functions. These functions will lead towards a public repository that will enable teachers across institutions and across nations to share language learning project packages. First, the sharing cart is a tool that allows a teacher to browse a complete site and pickup individual activities and resources freely and place the objects in a personal library or “cart”. Pedagogic aims and specific requirements of this proposal have been published in the Moodle documentation wiki (Moodle, 2008a) and discussed in a community forum (Moodle, 2008b). The next stage, an interface for searching and browsing, will be based on a framework of metadata specifically appropriate for the language learning field, including the ability to cross-reference according to age/level of ability, functional/notional aims, grammar/vocabulary points, strategies, topics, audiences and other criteria. Finally, community and contribution functions will need to be developed to ensure ratings, reviews, and material quality by a wide community of authors. The difficulty of educational repositories to attract contributions suggests that a model of exchange based on bartering and online incentives will need extensive consideration.
Conclusion
In this paper, we introduced the development background and described the use of a local digital repository using the open source learning management system Moodle. The repository was applied by five teachers in a foreign language teaching program and has shown success in its ability to assist a single teacher in moving and copying complex collections of activities with text, audio, video and image content amongst multiple courses. Our conclusion is that an iterative development strategy based on the direct needs of a teaching team was critical to developing immediately useful modules. Further development requires an easier method of sharing which allows a teacher to roam a whole school site and select individual teaching activities that can be copied and adapted to another course. In addition, the project course format was developed for general public use using a pluggable format and in consideration of international learning standards.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Sapporo Gakuin University grant titled, “Public Digital Repository for Sharing EFL Teaching Materials” 「英語教材共有データベースのデザインと開発」. We wish to thank Seiichi Miyamachi and Timothy Grose who also participated in this research team and offered valuable advice.
References
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Moodle (2008a). Project course format. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from the Moodle Documentation Wiki: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Project_Course_Format
Moodle (2008b). Easy sharing across courses – Project format and sharing cart. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=87044
Quia (2008). Quia web brochure. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from: http://www.quia.com/static/brochure/quia-web-brochure.pdf
Project Course Format Download Site
Available under General Public License: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/projectformat/