Moodle Academic Showcase and Launch Event

To mark the launch of Moodle in Bloomsbury, staff in the Bloomsbury Colleges have been invited to attend an Academic Showcase, taking place on Thursday 7th June at SOAS

The day’s event will be in three parts:

0930-1200: Moodle for Distance Learning
1000 Welcome and Introductions
1010 Ayona Silva-Fletcher, RVC
1040 Richard Campanaro and James Abdey, LSE
1120 Comfort break
1130 Isobel Bowditch, IOE
1200 Peter Leffek and Julie Voce, OU
1240 End

1330-1630: Moodle to support campus-based learning
1400 Welcome and introduction
1410 Wendy Hein and Pat Costall, Birkbeck
1450 John Potter, IOE
1520 Comfort break
1530 Karita Razzell, SOAS
1600 Olivia Fox, City University
1630 End

1630 -1800: Launch Reception
Opened by Keith Harrison, Secretary of Birkbeck and chair of the BLE Migration Programme Board

To book your place, please email Sarah Sherman

New Theme for SOAS users

We are very happy to announce that the lovely new  Moodle theme for SOAS was implemented last Friday and it was already welcomed from the Marketing department!

If you would like to admire their lovely theme please visit  ble.soas.ac.uk

The Month of Moodle at the RVC

Over the past fortnight, the RVC ran daily Moodle taster session in each of its campuses. Reactions to Moodle from academic staff have been positive, as VLE Developer, Sachin Taank describes below:

The people who have attended have been pretty senior academics. They could be ambassadors for the less techy academics and could set a great example. One of the academics who had been almost in tears when we did the initial RVC Learn training back in January came into our office today saying it is one of the easiest platforms to use and she is so glad we have decided to move over. Extremely satisfying!

The Month of Moodle

The Month of Moodle is now officially closed in Birkbeck and I wanted to say BIG thank you to everyone involved in the Month of Moodle – presenters, helpers and most of all participants. It was an incredible month!

This project has been a great example of collaboration between the Bloomsbury Colleges and it is interesting to know that we have had around 100 attendees all curious to hear about Moodle.  There have been lots of interesting questions, suggestions and discussions that we will take on board for the next 6 months and we will try to implement as much of theses as possible. All comments were very positive and we like that you find Moodle very intuitive, easy to use and that you cannot wait to start using it!

For those of you who like numbers I would mention that 70 % of our participants were Birkbeck staff members, 16% were from SOAS and 7% from both LSHTM and IOE.

Workshops and training sessions have already started for all the colleges so don’t forget to contact the team responsible in your college and to book a place.

College	Contact  Details
Birkbeck Support	moodle@bbk.ac.uk
IOE Support	vle@ioe.ac.uk
LSHTM Support	elearning@lshtm.ac.uk
RVC Support	learn@rvc.ac.uk
SOAS Support	ble@soas.ac.uk

BLE Moodle mini guides Part 2

We have added another 10 Moodle mini-guides for staff to the migration website, which the Bloomsbury Colleges - and the wider education sector - are very welcome to use. There are now 21 guides in total (each one or two pages long), covering topics such as uploading images, creating quizzes, collecting user feedback.

You can access PDF versions here:
https://sites.google.com/site/blemoodlemigration/important-documents/training-materials

During the summer, we will be working on guides for student users, too!

Moodle and Meerkats

This photo is of Jenny Maud, who graduated as a vet from Cambridge University in 2006 (and a friendly meerkat!). The photo was taken in the middle of the Kalahari desert where she was carrying out a research project on meerkats whilst simultaneously administering the online content of distance learning courses at the RVC. Using a satellite modem link and a laptop, Jenny was able to log in to Moodle and enrol new users whilst watching her meerkats...... now that is a pretty cool use of technology!

(Thanks to Nick Short for the post!)

The Month of Moodle

19th March saw the start of Bloomsbury's "Month of Moodle" - lunch-time taster sessions introducing staff to the new learning platform; these sessions precede full training events, to be managed locally by the individual Colleges. So far, attendees have provided useful feedback and seem to be very happy with the look of the new environment.

The last few remaining dates are on:
11th, 12th and 13th April in Birkbeck, Malet St.

PLEASE NOTE: OUR ROOM HAS BEEN CHANGED

11th April - Room 152

12th April - Room B02

13th April - Room 151