 This session, a principle-based moodle with Karin Brown from ETH Zuri. Thanks, Karin, over to you. Thank you very much, Helen. And thank you to all of you who have chosen to come and watch this live stream or to attend this session. I'm really looking forward to hopefully having some interaction with you in the form of questions in the forum. So don't wait until the last minute. If you have any questions or comments, please pop them into the forum as we go along. So just a few words about me. I work at ETH Zurich, which I was explaining earlier. Apparently Einstein went there and that's one of our main claims to fame in the middle of Zurich City. And we use moodle as our main, as our strategic learning management system. So I want to talk to you a little bit about this, this topic of a principle-based moodle and what I mean by that. So this project was born out of a desire to make the link between good teaching practices and our particular moodle service explicit and to centralize them in a way that was much stronger than what we currently do. So in this presentation, I've got sort of two sides to it. The one is I'll tell you the why, the what and the how. But then also really if possible to have a conversation and find out if the ideas in this presentation are useful to you and if so in what way, or if they pose any challenges. And if so, what kind of challenges do those pose? So keep those questions in mind as I progress through these slides. So why did I decide to present on this? And the first answer to that is that I'm a systems person and I'm pretty analytical. So when I first joined our moodle team at ETH, I found myself asking the question, why a lot? I'll be sitting in Change Advisory Board meetings where important decisions are made about how moodle will be developed at ETH. And decisions were being made and I'll sit there saying, well, why did you make this decision that way? But this other decision in another way. And sometimes the answers were things like, well, it's the rules around here. There's a policy that dictates that this is how we have to do it. Or sometimes the answer was, well, depends on who asked for this change in moodle. What's their position at the institution? How much political power do they have? Or another answer might be, well, that's just how we've always done it. And to me, that was a little bit dissatisfying because I thought it was important for us to, first of all, internally become really clear about why we are developing moodle the way we're developing it. And also so that we could communicate those decisions externally, which would go a long way to being more transparent with our users. So then that would also hopefully inform the change request that they submit to our service. So what did we do? And how did we move towards a principle-based moodle? And the first thing I have to explain is that I wear several hats at our institution. One hat is in the moodle service team. And the other hat is that I'm a faculty developer, which means I work closely with faculty and individually and in courses to help them improve their teaching practice and to become more innovative in their teaching practice, potentially using moodle. So I was part of a conversation where we asked ourselves the question, what does good teaching practice look like at ETH? And this was something that we wanted to describe so that we could use it as a vision for our work as faculty developers. And we did this by collecting important documents such as the vision of our institution or policy documents about quality teaching at ETH or quality criteria, all those kinds of things. And then we sort of filtered those through our hearts and our eyes, our experience and our own training as faculty developers. And we sort of condensed these down until we had a list of 10 principles of good teaching practice. I always avoid the word best and there isn't one best way to do this, but rather we wanted to have these guiding principles or what I started referring to as North stars to guide us in terms of what good teaching practice, particularly at our institution, looks like because it is different than individual from institution to institution. So what happened next? So I took these 10 principles and I went to our service owner of Moodle at our institution and I said, look, I think this offers something here. Not only do we have some guiding principles for good teaching practice, but actually we could look at this as good online teaching practice. Let's give it a go. So we got together and using these principles, we asked ourselves, well, if these principles are true, what does that mean for us as a Moodle service? And so I'll show you how we did that using my little letters here. The first one is the P for principle. So we started with the principle and said, if this is true, if this principle is true, then what is it that is the student will experience when they're in Moodle. And if this is what the student experiences, then what does T the teacher have to be able to do in Moodle to make better reality. So if you want dialogue, you need dialogue modules, you need the forum, you need messaging, you need, you know, you need the students to be able to communicate with each other and with the teacher. And if this is what we want the teacher to be able to do, well, then what does M Moodle, what does Moodle need to offer? Which settings do we need to enable? Which blocks do we need to offer? Which plugins do we need to install? And so you can see by working backwards from our vision of good online teaching, we were able to start coming up with concrete ideas that will guide our Moodle team in the future. So let's look at one of these examples in detail. So the one principle I've chosen here is participation. Now I am deliberately not giving you my entire list. That's strategic because I don't want you to look at these principles and think, oh yeah, that'll work for me in my context. It may or it may not. The process is just as important as the product. Okay, so if you go to email me later or in the forum asking for the principles, of course I'll send them to you. But keep in mind that it's more valuable for you to identify the values and the principles that are inherent in your context and those are culturally defined. So that's another thing to keep in mind. So participation, which we defined here as students and staff experiencing access to suitable teaching and learning and can have an active role in its development. So we looked at the student experience. Well, what would that look like? And I'll just let you read those four bullet points then. So you can see we looked at it from both access to Moodle, but also removal of barriers, active learning that can participate in active learning, but also active participation in Moodle development. So okay, so that's what we want students to be able to experience. Next, what must teachers be able to do? I'll let you read that. One example there is accessibility. Lecturers or teachers should have easy access to guidelines for maximizing accessibility and removing barriers for learning because these prevent participation. So what does that mean for Moodle then? Let's have a look. So an example here is that Moodle is integrated with our university systems or with other university systems. For example, if you're a student and you register for a course, you are automatically enrolled in a corresponding Moodle course. Simultaneously, if you're a lecturer and you register a course in the course catalogue, you automatically have access to a corresponding Moodle course and the two systems talk to each other and the student enrollments are automated. Then what was really interesting is we sat down and we thought, okay, this is the world we would like to have. How close are we? And we could give ourselves some ticks, but we also felt that there were some areas where we had work to do and that's what this last column is, our action plan. I'll let you read that. And so what that means is that if you can sort of link these circles, the blue circle is our operations manager. So what he does is he's responsible for ensuring that the system does what we want the system to do, but that the lecturer doesn't do what... I'm just going to stop my webcam because I'm thinking I'm experiencing some lag. Then if you... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... of our goals and roles, and to be in a visionary space where we could really ask yourself, what is the type of online environment we want to create? And that was really satisfying and was really different from the daily business of discussing server response time and that kind of thing. So yeah, that's my last slide. I want to move to the slide where I asked you those questions at the beginning, what opportunities might something like this present to you or what challenges does it present to you? How could we overcome these challenges? And I'd love to see some questions from you or some ideas because I don't know anyone else who's doing this right now with Moodle and I'd love to hear from you if it is something that you're doing. Thanks very much. Thanks very much, Karen. Yeah, there was just a short time in the middle where your sound started breaking up and you stopped sharing your webcam. I think that helped but it seems there's no questions or other points in the forum discussion yet. So I don't know whether if you want to go back to a previous slide and talk about it again. Which one was the one where I started breaking up? That's a good question. I think it's the one before this one. It was after that one. Okay. Yeah, so yeah. Yeah, so basically I was just saying that if you compare this to the earlier slide, we were in a position where we were making decisions at Change Advisory Board meetings that were not always consistent or we couldn't always explain the rationale. It felt a bit random at times but now with the principles, what we're hoping is that our conversation will look a lot more like this so that we can say well, so-and-so has requested a plugin. Does this process further participation or does this support student-centered learning? So these are three of our principles and it's gonna help us use a more strategic view of the type of system we want to have and therefore the types of plugins that we will approve or not approve when they come in as change requests. I'm really curious if anyone has something similar to this at their institution or what longer-term principles they use to make decisions at Change Advisory Board meetings. How many stakeholders were involved in the dialogue is a question I just see. So it's working backwards. So when we decided how these principles would apply for Moodle, it was everyone with a decision-making, with an operative decision-making roles as a service owner, IT operations manager, of the course Moodle. We also have an exam Moodle. He was there too and me. So it was four of us thinking about the application of the principles to Moodle. But the principles themselves were the result of our entire faculty development team. And then the documentation that informed the principles went through a massive consultation process. So we have a policy called Quality Criteria for Teaching at ETH, which is a mouthful of the policy. And that one went through an extensive consultation period with lecturers at our university and administrators. But what we're also doing is we're using this as a process to feedback on the principles as well. So as our Moodle team talked about the principles and whether or not they work for our context, we could then give feedback to faculty development and say, look, this definition didn't really work for us, but this bit really did. And so we see the principles as a living document that will and should change over time. And as they change, I feel like they'll sort of balance out and then we'll come to a centralized understanding of what they mean. Does that answer your question, Ian? So I have a little question. Hope you didn't answer it already and I missed it. But I was just wondering, how long did the whole process take that you've described? Well, that's a good question. So what we did is we had about, I want to say about four meetings in the Moodle team, which were an hour long, where we worked through the principles and we went through each column. And then we had sort of one more where we looked at the action plan. So it was maybe five hours, but it was important, I think, to have it rest in between so that we weren't constantly working on it. But to get to the principles did take a lot longer because there were more people involved in the discussions and we're still not quite happy with them. But I suspect that as we use them, we will develop more of like a loyalty towards some principles over others. So for example, participation is one that I'm sure we'll keep coming back to. And Tim, you asked how hard was it to get down to 10? It wasn't that hard, but we actually feel like 10's too many. And the reason why is because, as you know, the human memory doesn't like numbers over seven. So we feel like we should really whittle it down to a small set of numbers that are easy for us to remember. So we can go, oh yeah, our five principles are. And you can list them all for soon as you have a lot more and that becomes harder to remember them. And then you tend to only remember the same five, same days, we'll just use those. So we're still trying to actually get down further to 10. So it seems like the questions are pouring in. Now people have had a few minutes to think about things. We have a question from Jessica, saying, hi, Karen, I love this. We have a very loose version of this, but have such a small group that runs our Moodle that we're finding it difficult. Could you talk about how many people were involved at each step? So when we, so if I'm working backwards again, so our Moodle team is relatively small as well. We have, as I mentioned, the two IT managers or the operations managers, our service owner who I see is in the group here as well and myself. But then we also have developers and system administrators and we didn't involve them in the conversation. So we kept it at a certain tier. So it was the four of us there. And then when it came to actually developing the 10 principles, initially there were about eight of us, but then we developed a working group of three and we sort of really nutted them out. And then we thought the best way to really do this is just to use them and see what works and what doesn't work. So it's all kind of bubbling up to the surface. And it's another way to, because otherwise I think it could feel quite rigid if we now said these are the 10 and this is exactly how we're gonna work together. So it gives us some flexibility to still say, you know, I'm not sure this principle works and there's no hard feelings because we know it's all still in flux. Then I see a question there about making principles, transparent, so we're defining principles to start a process, yeah. I think this is also really important in terms of capturing culture. So one reason why this is so important to me is because when I lived in New Zealand, there was a very strong influence of indigenous culture and everything we did. And they have a very different worldview. And so by defining principles at the beginning of a development service, as you suggest, of a development process, you really are able to give yourself that North Star. So when you start losing your way, you can go, so where are we going again and what are we doing this for? And you can go, yeah, that's the way because that's the way the principles are showing us. So did you answer Silke's questions about how did you get the lecturers and students involved? So the lecturers and students were involved when it came to defining the policies that we mined in order to determine our principles. But we haven't taken our principles back out to the lecturers yet because we're still kind of playing around with them internally. So we are still trying to actually work across the teams in our organization and see if we can get it to really feel useful to us internally and then we plan to make it more transparent externally. And one of the ways we communicate that is through a blog that we use to discuss things like our guiding principles for Moodle. So we use a blog for that communication tool. Right. I also think it would be included in any documentation that guides people around putting in change requests because we would like it that if people, before they put in a change request they ask themselves that question, is the change request going to actually further the principles and if so how? So a comment from Jenny, she writes, I wondered if the TESTA project might be of interest. I think there might be some similarities. Great, I'll look that up. Remember everyone watching on the live stream, you're very welcome to post in the discussion forum afterwards if more things come up or if you have further questions that Karin can answer. We're actually running out of time now. So we'll have to finish there I think. So to say thanks again very much, Karin, for your presentation and thanks to all of you for your interest. Thank you.