Project+Updates

16.2.2011

Last week Tina and Kirsty had a great workshop with the Foundations teachers looking at the Getting it Together Mateials from the Tasmanian eSchool. it was really exciting to see the iedas that started to fly around the room between the teachers about how the materials could be used, and also what would need to be adapted to suit the different cohorts and approaches.

We moved the materials across from the Moodle 1.9 server at the eSchool to the Poly test server running Moodle 2.0 using Peter Friesens Conversion Thingy tool. This was an invaluable tool to use, otherwise we would have been stuck with recreating the courses from scratch which would not be sustainable. Really there needs to be a way of moving materials from 1.9 to 2.0 sooner rather than later. I found that the conversion tool worked on all but one of the eSchool courses.

Links within the courses failed overall - we need to do some more investigation about which links broke and which worked. Because the courses are interlinked to achieve the seamless transition from one course to another, there is some pretty sophisticated stuff going on. These broken links are perhaps from the conversion process more than anything. Zuzi from the Foundations team has gamely volunteered to learn about Moodle and work at correcting links and start on the adaptations already identified as needed.

Summer hiatus - working in education, effectively we lost 6 weeks from the project, with people going on leave. It also makes it more difficult to get started again in 2011 than we expected with waiting for people to get back, grapple with timetables, get ready for the year and changes of responsibilities. Thrown into the mix was the next round of Tas Tomorrow transition where some project dream members are no longer in the Poly, and also Distance Education merged with the Online Learning Network to became the eSchool.

All that being said, we're now on a roll for 2011!

08/03/2011 Damian has developed some new customised graphics for the Poly teachers following on from the workshop held on the 23rd of Feb with many of the teachers involved. Preview the various options here in pdf format.

30/3/2011 Getting close to the end now and realising just how fast the time has gone!

Tina and Anita met today to make sure all is on track for the wrap up in a couple of weeks and to discuss progress to date. The trials have started with two Poly teams and have been well recieved. They will continue next week, along with feedback session with students and a 'final' wrap up meeting for the whole team.

There have been some interesting challenges over the past couple of weeks, one of those being the enthusiasm of the Foundations teaching staff to delve deeper into the courses and resources within GIT. It has been a task to keep them within the confines of the project scope!! This is great though, as it means that there is little chance of this project being forgotten about and lost once it formally finishes.

Tomorrow sees work on the creation of IMS packages for presentation as outputs and the fixing of some missing links before phase 2 with Foundations teams next week. Also next week will see the Auto workshop for Tas eSchool students. Next week sure is going to be a big one!!