Join the dots

A little while back I wrote a post about using Moodle as a Community Hub rather than as a conventional LMS, with particular mention of the Educause Australasia 2009 conference website. I promised that I’d come back and talk some more about the tools used to create the Hub.

After having created two more in the past month for two higher education professional groups, I’ve also thought of a couple of other things that can make a Community Hub a success.

Now is probably a good time to point out that I am not making reference to two of the biggest Moodle Community Hubs going around, namely the Moodle Community website, providing a worldwide hub for almost 700 000 Moodle users, and Edna Groups, which provides a collaborative environment for Australian educators (and which Tom Worthington in my previous post notably pointed out is difficult to recognise as a Moodle site at a first glance due to the way it has been contsructed). The reason I’m focusing on the sites I’ve constructed recently is that they both use (more or less) vanilla Moodle sites (appropriately themed), but without any code customisations, and are things that require no code changes at all. It would be interesting to hear from those who constructed (in particular) the Moodle Community site to learn more about how the largest Moodle site in the world hooks together - hint, hint…

But I digress - on to the real stuff.

Structuring the site

Some Community Hub sites need to be open to all comers, some need to be closed to those who have been invited, and some need to be a mixture of the two. Getting the structure of the Community Hub right up front will make the task of maintaining access and expanding the site easier as time goes on.

Although there are a range of decisions to be made around things like guest access, self-registration and user account management, the one that stands out for me is what to do with the Front Page. The Moodle Front Page is a course, even if it is a course with some special properties. This means that it can do most of the things a ‘normal’ Moodle course can do, like having enrolments, containing resources and activities, and displaying blocks. This means that anyone setting up a Moodle Community Hub has two options for the front page:

1. Use it purely as a portal to show introductory information and link to other ‘real’ courses in the Hub; or
2. Use it as a genuine course, complete with resources and activities, that will act as the default community area for all users.

The plus side to using the Front Page as the default community area is that users can be automatically allocated in the ’student’ role to the Front Page, reducing administrative overhead for the site admin, not to mention reducing the number of clicks a user needs to make before getting to the good stuff. The down side is that there are some things that the Front Page can’t do as well as a ‘real’ course. For example, the Front Page can only have one topic, so any arrangement of content must be done within one topic, segregated using labels to make it at least look like there are topics.

Ideas for tool usage

With a dozen or so activities and a handful of resource types available in Moodle, plus many other third paty plug-ins and a new Web2.0 tool seemingly every week that can be embedded into a Moodle course, picking and choosing the right ones is important. With that in mind, here are my top five things to add to a Moodle Community Hub course.

1. Discussion forums - the staple communication tool in Moodle, the default Latest News forum should be complemented by one or more other forums to engage participants. Setting the defaults on forums to subscribe all users initially will also promote users to get involved, while still allowing them to opt out if desired.
2. Some external content - whether it be an RSS block showing a Twitter search, or an embedded YouTube playlist of relevant content, adding Web 2.0 content will allow the social-networking types in the Community to contribute to the environment, while showcasing some of the potential of Web 2.0 technologies to newbies. These benefits aside, it also keeps the environment fresh, with new information being shown regularly.
3. A way of collaborating on information - depending on the audience, this may be best done using a Moodle Wiki (which in spite of not being as powerful as tools such as Mediawiki can still provide a great way of collaborating on information), a file sharing database activity, or by using forums with attachments. Of course there’s nothing to say that something like GoogleDocs can’t be used, but these are options within the Moodle environment itself.
4. Some help information to assist new users in getting started - this could be a Glossary of terms or questions, web page resources or some short screencasts showing how to make the most of the environment, but having support is important to get users going.

There are many other tools which can be added, but these are a few which stand out as being good ones to start with.

Customising the language

While courses, enrolments, teachers and students are fine in an LMS environment, groups, memberships, facilitators and members will make far more sense to Community Hub participants. Moodle’s language editing capability makes it possible for all of these terms to be modified, as well as changing block headings, confirmation messages and just about anything else you see in Moodle.

The hardest part of modifying language can often be finding all places where a language setting needs to be modified, and often it is trial and error as to which terms need to be modified, but with patience and persistence then the Moodle site terminology can be modified to remove all traces that it was once aimed at a teacher/student relationship.

A final word on layouts

It struck me while reading a recent post on visual design mistakes I was reminded of the importance of applying good design principles - both aesthetic and structural - to a Moodle site, just like in any other web site, and a Community Hub is no exception. Avoid long lists of links and the resultant ’scroll of death’. Use some (consistent) graphics to break up text. Err on the side of minimalism. Give users quickest access to the most commonly needed information. Make the most of the prime real estate you have on your Front and Course pages.

And finally, always be open to feedback - no matter how brutal. Every time I have put together a Moodle site, whether it be as a Community Hub, an LMS or a collaborative space, I have learned something new about how to achieve different ends in Moodle - its just that kind of tool.