MoodleMoot San Francisco 2008

As Director of Instructional Design Services, Jared M. Stein oversees all aspects of the design and development of technology-enhanced course content and educational technology for Distance Education at Utah Valley University. Mr. Stein has over 10 years of experience designing, developing, and delivering distance education. His strengths are centered on an extensive professional background in Web development and design, tempered by an academic background in education and teaching.

Mr. Stein will be co-presenting with Mr. Kenneth Woodward, Web Development Specialist for Distance Education at Utah Valley University.

This session will present and describe a modification for Moodle called the Open MetaMod. This modification facilitates open courseware or open educational resources by providing instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual Resources or Activities within a Moodle course as "private" (only visible for registered students) or "shared" (allowing anonymous guest viewing). A third option for Moodle Activities, “open”, allows registered non-student users to interact with the class in Moodle activities. This is different from “shared”, as it allows authenticated users on the Moodle system who are not officially registered for the course to interact with students and instructors on the discussion board, take quizzes, complete activities, contribute to wikis, etc.

Instructors and designers can mark resources or activities as “Copyright cleared/Creative Commons” and as “shared” either individually through the normal course module/block interface, or en masse through the Open Settings in the Administration block. All Creative Commons license types are supported in the latest version of the Open MetaMod

By allowing instructors and designers to open up one or more distinct resources or activities to "open users" without opening the entire course, one may use one's regular Moodle LMS course for both ae live class and as an OCW/OER server without impacting my real students re. FERPA, Fair Use/TEACH Act, and other issues. The primary advantage for institutions that use Moodle as a primary LMS and wish to engage in the open education movement is the Open MetaMod eliminates the need for a separate OCW server with duplicated content which may quickly lose it’s currency.

This session will present the Open MetaMod and discuss its current features, lay out our plan for future versions, and provide for dicussion of additional features or the general feasability and applicability of the mod.