 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Christa Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover various library commission or just library related activities and library topics in Nebraska. We have commission staff that do these presentations. We bring in guest speakers sometimes. We do this every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time. It's a one hour session. It's free to attend. And we do record the session so that you can watch and listen to them if you're not available to attend the live session. This morning we have Laura Johnson here who is going to tell us all about Moodle and how the commission has been using that. Hi. There we go. Hi, this is Laura. We're going to talk today about Moodle and what we've been doing with it here at the commission. We're starting out by saying, do you Moodle? The Moodle community is a very active one and they're, so let's get going. How are you writing the option? Okay, this is the button. Oh, okay. I should. Yeah. There. Okay. No, that's it. That's the next one. Oh, that's awesome. Moodle. So let's start by, what is Moodle? Moodle originally stood for modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment, but now it's just a name. They just, they say that Moodle doesn't really stand for anything anymore. What is Moodle? Moodle's learning management software. It's like Blackboard or Angel, those are the programs that most people seem to have used. It turns out there's a lot of different learning software, learning management programs out there. Moodle is open source. So it is initially free, although as Michael's fond of saying, it's free like, free kittens, not free like, free bear. We can add to it or modify it if we want to. Moodle was created by Martin, and I think it's Dougie Amas, I'm not completely sure that I'm pronouncing that correctly, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She's active in Moodle discussion groups, and today the Moodle community includes, and this is what the Moodle people say, about 37,000 sites with over 25 million users. There are people all over the world, Moodle will work in a number of languages, who are working with Moodle, and they share the various things they do with Moodle at Moodle.org, and this is what Moodle.org looks like. You can go into support and get answers to questions. You can get discussion, you can get FAQs. This is where you would go if you wanted to download the software. I elected not to go into a lot of the technical stuff about the software today, partly because here at this website it will explain it, and you'd find that it's really very easy. You can download Moodle and it will have pretty much everything it needs with it. It has to have Apache and SQL and a couple of other things to make Moodle work, but really it has been very easy. Many schools, colleges, institutions and organizations use Moodle to offer online learning. For example, here's the University of Washington Moodle site, then we have the University of Barcelona Moodle site. The American Library Association is using Moodle for some of its online learning, and of course we are using Moodle. We have just elected to name our Moodle site in campus, and yeah, I did kind of, it was sort of take off on in college, but I liked it. I thought in campus actually worked very well. This is a pretty standard skin for Moodle. Moodle can look a lot of different ways and still work the same way, but this is what we have right now. We started Moodle last spring when we, or I, put one of the basic skills classes up on Moodle, the public service class, and instead of making it one big class, I turned it into four learning modules, customer service, reference, readers advisory and programming and outreach. We are using it now for the next class that we'll be having, which is collection development, and that class will include four modules again, and those are going to be collection management, policy writing, community knowledge, or writing a community profile, and intellectual freedom issues. So we're following the same basic formula that we did the last time. We can gussie this up, and we're hoping to at some point kind of make it fancier, but right now we have a pretty plain vanilla. The first thing we have to do when we're on Moodle is to log in. That's up in the upper right hand corner. You put in your username and your password. We're going to be special guests. Some courses do allow guest access. I have not yet set this up for guest access. This was partly because I felt the people who were logged in as students and were taking the class kind of deserve their privacy. At some point we may get a sample class or a sort of a orientation class up, and I would like to do that, but then you could get guest access, but right now you have to have registered for the class to get in. And campus here was the customer service class, and this is the one we'll be showing you as an example of the classes. When you log in, Moodle knows which classes you've registered for, and it will only show you, give you access to those classes. So we're registered for customer service, and you see the Moodle, and we can contact it. Why do we want to do this online? Why would we want to do this instead of having an on-site class? Well, for one thing, we don't have to get everybody together, and we don't have to travel. That was one of the big things. You can study when and where you like. So if it's a nice day, you can study outside. Taking the class does involve basically reading and writing. You are, instead of class lecture, you are going to get most of the material that you want to cover in class. You will be reading. Now, I have made a real effort to try to make readings fairly short, fairly pithy. And then you will be writing replies. So there is quite a bit of give and take. One of the things we like about Moodle is not only can we have give and take between a participant or student in the class, but we can have participation among the students. This page shows you that you go to the customer service. We click on customer service. We get into the customer service class page, and you see that the topics are listed in the middle column. And we're going to zoom in and look at just one of the first topics, which is customer service in the library. This has, first it has a reading. You want to read the five laws of library science. And when you click on this, here's the reading. So see, I wasn't fitting. They really are short. Not all of them are this short, but they're short. Then there's an assignment. And this assignment was the five laws in customer service. And so you go to the assignment page, and it tells you what the assignment is. This was the first assignment. What we wanted to do with this assignment was to get people kind of get their heads into the idea of thinking about customer service, and we wanted to see if we could get students kind of relating to one another a little bit. So this assignment was to discuss what rank and athens five laws had to do with customer service and to make a posting to a forum. Now the forums are one of the ways for students to relate. We also have chat rooms, which I have not used and probably won't use because that means that everyone would have to be online at the same time. The advantage to a forum or kind of a bulletin board is that you can go into it any time during the time the forum is open and make a posting. And other people then can go in post, comment on postings, and we can get a nice discussion going, but you don't have to all be in the same room at the same time. So this is what the forum looked like. The question is posted at the top, and then the list of postings that people have made are much, is much longer. You'll notice that one of the people here did put her picture in, and that's one of the things we'll get to, that you can have student pictures. I wasn't sure I'd like this at first. I'm not crazy about having my picture up places. Oh, then I shouldn't tell you that your picture's up in this session. Well, what can I say? But I actually found that I liked this very much. I felt that after all, one of the things you want to do in a class is kind of get to know the people who are taking the class. These are your peers. These are people who can really help you out sometimes because they've done something that you'd like to do. So these are good people to get to know, and I thought this was a nice thing that you could kind of get to know people by having the student profiles. But here, our first assignment, we had a forum. We discussed something. I thought we had a pretty nice discussion, and you'll notice that Moodle always keeps us informed about where we are. I don't know if you saw because they're very small, but next to all those assignments, there were little icons. Now, I've blown them up here so they look kind of blurry. But the icons really will always tell you where you are and what you're doing. So there's a forum webpage. The forum icon will tell you that you're going to enter a forum. I thought at first that was a little broadcast tower kind of sending out rays, but it's not. It's two little faces facing one another. Then you'll have, for the readings, it will tell you if they're a webpage or they're a PDF. A lot of the readings that I created myself, I put in PDF format so that no matter what kind of software the user had, the student had, they'd be able to use the material. One of the things about Moodle that we liked was that it really didn't take a lot of special stuff on the student end. Pretty much everyone can interact with Moodle. It works on PCs and Macs. It works on PCs. It works on Macs. It works whether you're using all the Microsoft products or not. And we thought that was probably a good idea. If you have an assignment, it always has this little hand with a piece of paper in it so you know it's an assignment. There are tests in Moodle and they have their own icon. So we always know where we are because we can use the icons. You'll also notice that there is more on the screen than just this middle part. These are little notes from the instructor to the student. And then you have postings and you have readings and you have assignments and they are all listed here in the topics. But there's also stuff in the right-hand column and the left-hand column. And in the right-hand column, they're telling you what's going on. So that will tell you upcoming events. There's an assignment. Oops, it's due today. But it'll always tell you what the assignments are so you know. There's a calendar and the calendar here has a couple of things on it. If I clicked on this, it would tell us that September's library card sign-up month and we put that on our calendar so we all know that. And then the ninth is our assignment being due. So the calendar tells us stuff and then it tells us that we can have global group, course, or user events. And the user, the student, does actually have control of these things. They can shut them off and say, I don't want to see those things, which I think would be foolish, but you could do it. There's also, it also tells you who's online. When I captured this screen, I was online and our group for whom I created a student, Diana Prince, was online. I even gave Diana a little icon of her own. And it tells me if I have messages, one of the things you can do in Moodle is send email messages to one another. They'll get the message within Moodle, but they'll also get the message sent to the email address they've entered. So it's easy to communicate with one another in Moodle. Then we also have things on the right-hand side. There's a list of all the people, and if we click on that, we would get a list of all the participants in the class. We could click and get a list of assignments. We could get a list of all the different forums, because there are different forums. The forums can be dedicated to a particular use. So for instance, we had the Ranganatha discussion forum. We had several other forums in here when we discussed things, and they were separate forums. You can have glossaries, I didn't use that. But it is something where the whole class can compile and a list of terminology or things if they wanted to. We have quizzes, and we have the resources, which are the readings. This, for instance, is a list of the students that are signed up. And if you go, if you click on one of the profiles, here's our Diana Prince's profile. Yes, that's who I chose to use as an icon for Diana. I don't know if anybody, Diana Prince was actually, maybe it was a little too subtle, that's wonderful. I know, Wonder Woman, yes. Yeah. But that's not her picture. No, that's not, well, I think she is a wonder woman. Actually, but so we have a. The library and action figures. It is the library and action figure picture. You can edit your profile if you want to. You can put it in your interests. I felt that we were interested in tooth trust, justice, intellectual freedom, the Dewey decimal system, and reading. So you really can use Moodle to get to know one another. Moodle will also allow for people to have blogs. Again, that's not something I've used, but we could, if we thought it came up and it was working for us. And then, for instance, if we want to get a list of assignments, here was a list of the assignments we had in the customer service class. This, the five laws in customer service was a form we discussed. The library user's bill of rights, people had to write a little thing about the library user's bill of rights, tell what they thought were the most important things in a user's bill of rights, and then upload a file. That's how you turn in an assignment. You go to a page and you upload the file, which is very easy to do. It's clicking a button. There were offline activities. The customer needs was to talk about various kinds of customers, categories of customers, if you will, and what they might have special needs. Telephone features, this was another offline activity. This activity was actually about the idea that it's important to get the most out of your resources, so it's important to understand all the features on your telephone. It's important to understand your computers. It's important to get your online databases and understand them because those are the resources you have. And that's one of the things you can do to offer people good service and have more resources yourself. So that was the point of that assignment. This fall, we're going to have four modules again, as I said. Intellectual Freedom and the Core Values of Librarianship. That sounds, I think, deadly dull, but it's turning out that it sounds dull, but it's really very interesting. She made it very interesting, yes. Collection Management, in which we talk about selection and acquisition and de-acquisitioning and taking care of our materials. Physically taking care of our materials. You're trying to W a word. Yes, it is the W. But even we can kind of be fun because it helps you see the flowers better. Then we're going to have a module on library policies, why it's important to have policies and how to write policies. And then the community and the library because, of course, libraries serve their communities and we need to understand the community to understand what we need to give them. So this is also known as Basic Skills Collection Development Online. Registration for that is open right now. And so the current class is going on now that have that thing do today. That's the, what have already had started? That was already, actually that was just a demo. Okay. There isn't really a class going on right now. We're currently, it was public service. We're still scheduling the basic skills classes one every six months. And there are four basic skills classes, so they're taking two years. There's a two year cycle. At some point, of course, you can see where this would go. All of a sudden, when you have these classes online and you've made them smaller classes, it would be easier to schedule them more often. And so that's one of the things we're working toward. This class, as I said, one coming up is collection development. And I am working very hard to get it done so that we'll be ready to do it. It will be starting November 2nd, right after NL&EMO. And register now. We need for you to register. The class will be held online. And we will also be holding it on site, as we always have in person, in six locations around the state. We'll be having it in Waterloo, North Fork, Lexington, Hastings, Seward, and Alliance. All of those classes will be during November. Next spring, the class will be Organization of Materials, a.k.a. cataloging. I envision having that again in six places around the state. Probably not quite the same locations. We tend to move those locations around a little bit. But six locations around the state and online. And then the next fall will be Public Library Administration. At that point, if all goes well, then we will have all the classes in modules. And we can start talking about maybe we want to do this a little bit differently than we have done in the past. Does anybody have any questions? And we can go live to Moodle if you want to see it. It doesn't look different than the slides did, but we can see it live if you'd like. Anybody have any questions? If you have a microphone, feel free to use that. Or if you do not have a microphone, type into the questions area, and we'll be able to see those there. And we have one here. How much training do you have to give students to use Moodle? Someone at the commission here is asking you, how much training do you have to give students to use Moodle? Does it take much? You know, I tried to kind of explain as we went along. This is how you upload a document. This is how you do this. But really, you don't need a lot of training at all. It turned out that we kind of just talked about how you did stuff as we went along and got two things, and it worked fine. Moodle is very good about making it very clear, as I said, where you are in the class. It makes it pretty clear what you need to do. The navigation around Moodle, it uses several different things. It has a navigation, I can show you, it jumps, but it also always has breadcrumbs, so you kind of always know where you are. So it's actually, really, I thought very easy to use as a student. So it's pretty intuitive. Yeah, the whole system. It's like anything. You have to look at it first. You have to click on some buttons and see what happens. But it wasn't... You didn't have to learn new skills. A lot of the same stuff you've been using elsewhere in your job. Oh, yeah, it was really, I thought was pretty intuitive. Not hard to use. Okay, Laura, you have a question mark. Did you have a question? Give me a microphone, you can use that. If not, you can type into the questions section there. We can see, no, okay, no problem. Does anybody else have any other questions or comments or anything about Moodle, about using it, the system itself, how the commission's using it? If you have a microphone, I've got everybody, except Amy, unmuted, or you can type into the questions section there. Show the basic skills announcement. Oh, sure, we can show the basic skills announcement. Yeah, that's the commission announcement. Is there a commission announcement on the page? Yeah, I think we just have to... Yeah, but here's the announcement for what the ones that are coming up. So you'd want to go to the library training calendar. And the best thing to do is to just keyword search on basic skills. Each of the online session runs from November 2nd through December, I think, 18th. The on-site classes are at different days of the week. They're all three sessions. So you would have to go three Tuesdays in a row or three Thursdays in a row or whatever. Yeah, if you're able to hear me, I'll tell you. And this is for the Hastings one. Yeah, you do need to go to all three classes if you sign up for one of the on-site sessions. And this is the registration, the online session was registration for the Moodle that we just showed. That is for the class that's offered through Moodle. I kind of think that what's important is what's in the class. And that's one of the things I liked about Moodle is I felt Moodle wasn't going to get in the way of the material. That Moodle would be easy enough to use, that people could kind of, oh, yeah, you know, there's a little anxiety when you first get in there. That's just doing something new, has a little anxiety attached to it, but you get used to it pretty fast. And then I think Moodle doesn't get in your way. It presents the material to you so that you can do what you need to do and not worry about the software. And that's what I thought was good about it. How many people did you have in the first one you did? We had 20. That was the class limit. We will probably, I limited this class to 25 this time. They're filling up, definitely. People are interested in getting it this way. They're not too afraid. No, they're filling up. We did a class evaluation last time, and people didn't seem to have anything. They had no real beef with Moodle. A couple of things I, a couple of assignments they weren't thrilled with, but they weren't. I learned a great deal. And that always happens. I was nervous about putting it all together the first time, but it worked pretty well. I found it pretty easy to put the material in once I kind of got used to, oh, yeah, this is how you do this. As I said, there are a few things that we haven't used in Moodle that we might try, but I don't see the point in using something unless it's a good way to present the material. I liked the forums because I felt it gave people a chance to discuss and to relate to one another, but didn't require them all to be in one place at one time or all locked in at the same time. Which a chat room would. I also thought that there were times when handing in a written assignment was appropriate. So you try to do what's the best way to cover the material. Any other questions? Questions, comments, anything? Well, this has been kind of short and sweet, but I didn't, it pretty much covered what I thought we needed to cover. If you're interested in the classes and you have any questions, do let me know. And if you'd like to try Moodle, I would suggest going ahead and downloading the software. If you do have questions about it or anything, give us a call. Diane has really helped a lot with some of the technical aspects of Moodle. But as I said, the Moodle community, it's also very helpful. Yeah, it really is. So, anything else? Do you think else? This is Laura wants to know, how often should we take these classes if we had them in the past? Basic skills classes in general. Okay. When are you supposed to retake them? We really have required you to have, and once we have always said, and the requirement is, once you've had the basic skills class, we figure you've taken it. If you want to take it again, you can. I think probably if it's been, oh, you know, more than five years, or you have been out of the biz for a while, this would probably be a good thing. I think we do, there are some things that are sort of eternal in libraries, and so we'd probably be covering some things that you've done before. On the other hand, yeah, there's probably some new stuff too. Things change, new technologies come along, new ideas, yeah. So, I think that's kind of up to you. You would earn continuing education credit for taking the classes, even if you already have fulfilled that basic skills requirement. And you can pick and choose too, if just one of the basic course classes is something that you want to refresher on. You're suddenly moving into the cataloging world you hadn't been part of your job before, you might just take that one and get a refresher on that. Yes. And this, of course, is one of the reasons we're talking about maybe making these into smaller modules eventually, is that this would make it much easier for people to pick up one class if they kind of wanted to refresher. Any classes other than basic skills being offered through Moodle? Right now, we are not. Right now, I think we're in a strange place between beta and full on Moodle. The last time we did this was the first time and we had to consider it really a trial. This time, I was pretty pleased with how it worked and I think we're going to continue with it. But it's taking me a little while. Putting your class together is kind of a intensive thing. And translating it from an in-person class to a online class is not the easiest thing in the world. You gotta rethink about how you present. You really do have to rethink how you present the material. You want to present the material in a really interesting way. You want to make assignments and exercises, things that will really help people master the material. So you don't want a lot of busy work. That actually just takes some time. I would think in the future we would be looking at more classes in Moodle just because Moodle is a pretty efficient way of delivering material. On the other hand, for a one shot class, like this, and that's in no way putting down a class that we offer a single time. It's just that it might not be worth putting that in Moodle. It might be a little bit more difficult to put it in Moodle than it would be worth. But a class that you think you're gonna offer multiple times, yeah, we'll see more of those in Moodle. Something to keep experimenting with, obviously. And more than you ever wanted to know, by the way. So anything else? Anything else? Okay, well, if there's nothing else, I think we can wrap it up. Well, thank you. Thank you for spending some of your Wednesday morning with us. I hope this answered some of your questions. And I hope we'll see you here at Encompass again soon. Thanks. And if you do have any more, if you don't want to know about Moodle, you have to think of after the fact, of course you've got Lars' contact info here. Yeah, just give me a call. Thank you very much, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.