Things that make me happy:

I hope Matt will share more details on this blog soon!

Antony Makrinos has been developing practice quizzes for his Greek and Latin undergrads. He gave this presentation on how he’s been getting on:

Aside from quiz building being time consuming, the biggest struggle that Antony has faced during his project was related to Greek fonts and its diacritics. Moodle isn’t very forgiving: it simply marks a missing accent as incorrect. There is the option, of course, of deploying multiple choice questions, but these aren’t as effective for learning vocabulary as actually having to recall and type out a word using the short answer question type.

Antony brought a few students along who added a virtual Greek keyboard to their e-Learning wishlist.

Ask the Audience

At the ELDG Showcase event in December we asked the audience a series of randomly drawn questions. We asked, you answered:

If you had all the money in the world, what would you develop?

• “Virtual reality reconstruction of Pompeii & Herculaneum with information about architecture, history, lifestyle etc…”
• “Mobile computing for all. Multimedia capture for all. Server space for all. Support for all in the use of these things. Development resource to improve and sustain open source software for the above.”
• “A real/complete interactive tool for all undergraduates. Provide them with ‘a tablet’ that can be uploaded from a central location”
• “Secure written online exams. Develop wizards for MyPortfolio”
• “Online pronunciation course”
• “Full distance learning capability; even more development on UCL eXtend so that it works like e.g. Amazon in terms of user interface and feedback”
• “We could have a Greek virtual keyboard on the screen. Have a word box where we could pick out the Greek words from; link with texts we studied.”
• “Tablets for all students preloaded with timetables/syllabus/course content and exam questions/assessment. Dedicated software to deliver the content of all the modules”
• “I would set up lots of language/culture wikis aiming at world peace through mutual understanding”
• “MOOCs”

If you weren’t at the event in December, let us know in the comments what you would develop.

Lynsie and Alan have been working on glossaries and quizzes for accounting students.

Here is Lynsie with an overview of the project:

Ask the Audience

At the ELDG Showcase event in December we asked the audience a series of randomly drawn questions. We asked, you answered:

Moodle would be so much better if …

• “it had set-up wizards.”

• “it wasn’t so cumbersome (small changes take a lot of time) and worked on tablets”

• audio record and/or video lectures while you are delivering a powerpoint presentation which is uploaded in a moodle page”

• “it did distance learning easily; did group submissions to turnitin; it did online interactive forms (e.g. peer evaluation) which can be posted as an assignment; if Moodle assignments let you open multiple file submissions (you currently get an error message and have to click onto a file several times to open more than one)”

If you weren’t at the event, add your own answer in the comments below this post.