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Exactly one year ago I joined South Devon College’s Web Team, as their Senior Web Deveoper (with a Lead above me and an Assistant below). Back then we were a Technology Exemplar Network college, meaning we were outstanding in our field (not the exact terminology used, but you get the idea) in the use of ILT.

Today, one year after I joined, we are once again a Technology Exemplar college, and actually we are really good at what we do. No, honestly, we are.

Last week we hosted a TEN open day, in which we showcased what we were good at and how we got there, and invited other colleges to attend and share our good practice. While we had a lot of information to pass on, I personally had 3 lots of 15 minutes to show good practice in developing and managing the technical aspects of our VLE (virtual learning environment) Moodle.

Many of the ways in which I do my job have been inherited from the Lead Web Developer, as he was doing it before I was, however it doesn’t make it any less relevant, or less good. What struck me was how many questions I received and how many conversations I was involved in, where what I perceived as the simplest things weren’t being done, were being done badly, or were being overlooked.

For example, we have four people directly involved in the training and development of Moodle: two technical people (the Lead Web Developer and I (Senior Web Dev), as well as two front-of-house people (the Blended Learning Manager and e-Learning Coordinator). The technical people manage the servers, codebase, and do developent as required by the other two, who teach the teachers how to use Moodle to ensure effective teaching and learning are taking place.

The Moodle Development Team meets every two weeks, and to be honest, they are the best, most productive meetings I have ever attended. I think this is mostly because we are all peers with nobody dictating what is and is not done. (It is worth mentioning that the Blended Learning Manager has the final say as she is the business manager for Moodle, but as she responds to the needs of the teachers and the learners, we are not doing things for no reason or at someone’s whim. Everything we do is driven by the needs of the learners, as they are the reason we are here.)

At the open day, one chap we spoke to (in the context of a whole IT department, not just in terms of Moodle) said that his college’s IT Manager ran the IT aspects of the college as his own personal fiefdom, dictating what was allowed and what was not, regardless of the request or the reason behind it. Consequently the OFSTED report for this college showed that teaching and learning were being prevented from taking place.  Not just ineffective, but prevented. This is a very sad state of affairs indeed. (Please note that so far I’ve been unable to verify this via OFSTED’s website and I’m not naming names.)  Why the IT Manager is not puting the needs of the learners at the top of his list, or has been replaced by a more learner-centric IT Manager, is beyond me.

It surprised me, at our open day, how many colleges do not have a working link between the “front of house” (as I call them) teaching and learning people, and the technical people (whether they are Moodle-specific, as I am, or not). In one case, the people teaching and training the use of Moodle don’t have a channel to request new features be added, or even perform updates (quite vital as of the 1.9.7 release).

We use a code versioning system (called Git) to pull the very latest code from git.moodle.org (to keep on top of security updates, bug fixes and so on), and manage the changes we make to the code.  This way we can modify the core code to meet any needs that we have, and it won’t be overwritten when the next version of Moodle is released. Instead, changes from ‘upstream’ are merged with ours.

It’s simple to use, very effective, and I have trouble remembering how I used to develop code without it, however it strikes me as somewhat odd (maybe ‘unfortunate’ is a better choice of words) the sheer number of Moodle users who aren’t using version control.  Such was the short time I had and the number of questions directed at me that I didn’t have the chance to ask my own, but it would have been as simple as “Why aren’t you using version control?”

We also use the Ruby gem Capistrano to deploy our code to multiple web servers simultaneously and seamlessly.  I know very little about Ruby as a whole but the Lead has developed a number of bespoke in-house systems which use it, and it is simple enough to set up to deploy any code anywhere.

Possibly another example of many small things adding up to one big good thing, is our use of Linux. The Web Team (a small part of the IT department) use Ubuntu Linux on our desktops (three) as well as our servers (seven and counting).  The Moodle developers recommend a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) over all the other web and database server options, as do the Mahara people,  and our bespoke internal systems use the same but with the addition of Ruby on Rails.  We could use Microsoft products like every other server in the building, indeed there is a small yet constant pressure to do just that, to conform, what with all the Microsoft-specific knowledge and experience in our immediate team, but would it make our Moodle/teaching and learning/us “better”?  Just because something is popular, doesn’t necessarily make it right.  Likewise it’s not necessarily right because it’s less popular either, however the fact of the matter is that we use “non-standard” stuff and it works for us really well.

Example One

Recently we had a bit of snow.  You may have seen it on the news? The college was shut for one afternoon and the whole of the next day.  Despite this, learning was able to continue due to the college strategy of having (two weeks’ worth of) resources available on each and every Moodle course for just such an occasion.  Using Google Analytics we could see that although total ‘hits’ (logged-in page and resource accesses) on Moodle had dropped off to a quarter of what could be considered normal, the number of external ‘hits’ was up by 30%, proving that despite the snow being immense fun, some learners were going home, logging in and getting on with some learning.

Example Two

Did you know that even Technology Exemplar colleges get viruses?  Well, if you logged into Moodle when we had our virus, you wouldn’t have noticed, because like most viruses, it was targetted at computers and servers running Microsoft operating systems and software. We were, however, affected in two ways.

1. The account Moodle uses internally to log into LDAP to authenticate users was deactivated by the virus, meaning that for a minute or two, anyone trying to log in was unable to. A pain, but out of the control of the Web Team who have no authority to administer user accounts.
2. Our e-portfolio software Mahara runs on Ubuntu Linux, just like all the other servers, but this one  is running virtually via Microsoft’s Hyper-V on a host computer running Server 2008, which, you guessed it, fell victim to the virus and had to be (literally) switched off, killing one physical server and quite a few virtual ones. Mahara was off for quite some time (will leave out the actual time to spare some blushes) and it is a good job we are trialling it and it is not considered mission-critical.

Conclusion?

I’m less concerned that we’re exemplar now, but more concerned interested in how to do my part to ensure we’re exemplar this time next year, and one year is a very long time in technology.

I recently handed in my resignation, which is a scary thing to do especially as the financial climate is worsening daily, however I think I finally felt totally and absolutely justified in doing so, and actually glad too, because of a meeting at work this week.

I like working where I do, there are some good people there and most of the meetings I have attended have a sense of purpose and things actually get done.  However, I have been fighting what I see as a losing battle for over 15 months now (since I started the job) with me on the side of ILT, fighting against the injustice of lack of education and training. Of staff. In how to better and more easily do their jobs.

I administrate Blackboard, my college’s VLE of choice. Actually half my job is to administrate Blackboard, and the other half is totally unrelated, whcih makes both jobs 100% harder. I am the first person to have an active role with Blackboard for years, and have tried to do my best raising awareness of how Blackboard can assist with teaching and learning, save time, enhance the experience for teachers and learners etc, as well as try to sort out administration problems and quirks. It tends to fall on deaf ears most of the time, but I plug away regardless. I know there are a few teaching and non-teaching out there who appreciate my efforts.

I perceive a lot of problems with some aspects of ILT as a whole where I work, and as I believe a VLE is at the core of ILT, and very few people saw (or wanted to see) the benefits, I think it was time to stop banging my head against a brick wall and move on. Yes, we have Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs), who doesn’t these days, but for a lot of staff they are just screen for a projector, and to hell with the whole interactive aspect. We could have saved thousands and bought cans of white paint instead.

I have had to revisit this post numerous times as it was turning into a rant, however let me give you an example which epitomises the problem.

I attended an ILT Champions meeting this week. The ILT Champs are voluntary positions, with no remission. They have to champion the use of ILT for the love of it really, and there are those that do, however… In the meeting one person asked me to ‘not send her emails about Blackboard as it does not concern her’. Remember this was coming from someone whose role includes promoting the use of ILT (obviously not just Blackboard) to staff in her department. I was attending the meeting to suggest a system whereby all Blackboard courses need to achieve levels of content and quality (in summary: bronze, silver, gold for basic content, interactive course and exemplar course respectively (idea borrowed from another college, thanks VCW)) and while some people already have good quality courses and liked the idea, this person was agast at the idea! Absolutely dead-set against it.

Without going into specifics, it seems she 1) has never used Blackboard beyond setting up a course with no content, 2) has no plans to use Blackboard in the future, 3) actively suggests to staff that Blackboard is unnecessary and they could spend time on more useful tasks. And this person is a champion of ILT!! One thing she does which takes MORE time instead of less, is to create one contact group in Outlook for each of her classes, with each group containing all her students for that class, and uses it to email students. Any veteran Blackboard users will know, and rookie VLE users of almost any flavour will probably guess, that this is a basic function of a Blackboard course (and I believe similar functionality exists in Moodle, as well as others) and works from the moment students are enrolled onto a course.

You can appreciate my frustration.

I know that “you don’t know what you don’t know”, but the familiar ways of doing things are not necessarily the best, quickest or most efficient. I could spend 2 minutes with her in front of a computer and maybe save her half an hour’s work, minimum.

It doesn’t really help that I’m not keen on Blackboard, and while I am sure there are better options out there, I am not pushing for one VLE directly (as much as I would like to) but am pushing for questions to be asked instead: does what we have meets our needs?  Would those needs be better met by something else? (Sadly “What are our needs?” also needs to be asked, as we don’t currently know. I’m not asking for change, just discussion and evaluation.

My head will soon stop bleeding from all the head-wall interaction. Maybe someone else’s banging will have a greater effect.