RSC Wales’ information and resources area (Moodle) has had a facelift! For the last 9 months or so we have been gradually developing the contents of the RSC Wales’ Moodle to make it into a (hopefully) useful place to visit if you are looking for information and resources on things like access management, accessibility,  eBooks, emerging technologies, information literacy, Moodle, reader development, using technology in teaching …

We decided that we would like to start the new year with a cleaner, fresher look to the homepage and have gone down the route that a number of others (including Moodle.org) have gone down, with a largely icon driven / visual front page (Note: the icons used are from the same source as those used by Coleg Gwent). As the amount of information and resource areas have grown and are continuing to grow the facelift means that rather than having one long A to Z list of all areas we have also grouped similar topics by introducing the categories that you can see identified by the icons on the front page … shared resources, Moodle stuff, technical things, ACL, WBL and HE information.

Enough about the facelift – we just hope that you like it and that you are happy to share any comments you have about it with us.

BUT before I go … a note of caution. Although the majority of the areas in our Moodle are open to all (i.e. no login required) at the moment you may experience some difficulty logging in if, for example, you want to post to a forum. Unfortunately we are having a few problems with the site’s security certificate because of a domain name ownership ‘issue’. This means that when you try to login securely to our Moodle you may be presented with some scary looking warnings. For some idea of what I mean, click here. I want to assure you that our site is secure, please choose to ‘continue anyway’ (Internet Explorer), ‘add an exception’ (Firefox) or ‘proceed anyway’ (Chrome) and we will resolve the ‘issue’ as soon as we possibly can.

My Moodle Buzz RSS feed dropped this link (Moodle from a Student’s perspective) into my Outlook inbox yesterday afternoon and I have been mulling over what I read ever since. The student’s comments that really jump out at me are:
‘We sense the resistance from teachers to tackle new technologies and we feel limited by this’
and
Most of our issues are not with Moodle, they are about the fact that the teachers are not able to use the system to its full capability – skill up!
but especially
‘Our teachers don’t know enough about the capability of these systems, which frustrates us, let us help!’

The students who expressed these views are 17-18 year olds from Australia … but I’m sure that they are the views of many young learners around the world … and it’s not just Moodle that this would apply too.

So what do we do? Say … what do they know, they are only young? Or do we do what one Hertfordshire college is doing and admit that the teachers don’t have to know everything and that the young people can help when it comes to technology? Oaklands College started its e-mentors scheme in 2006 and won an award from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service for it in 2008 . I first heard about it (several times) 2 days ago at the JISC Online Conference and I’ve since found more information from the Institute for Learning, an article about them on the BBC website and a video on You Tube.

The whole idea of ‘Learner voice’ and listening to what learners think is, in my opinion, a step in the right direction … but actually showing that you have listened and doing something different as a result has go to be what it should all be about … hasn’t it?