How to embed YouTube videos in your moodle page

This post might sound a bit trivial to all of you moodle experts out there but I thought I’d put it up anyway as many of us are still novices to the full potential (or the tips and tricks) of the moodle LMS.

If you found a great video on YouTube that you must share with your students, you have two ways to do it on moodle; (i) put up a post in the forum or (ii) add it as a URL type resource. However, these two methods kind of diminish the impact of a video as the students need to click on the link and proceed to YouTube before viewing it. It also distracts students from the LMS. As an alternative, try embedding the video in the course page so that the students see a large thumbnail of the video on the page which allows them to play it directly from within moodle.

Here’s how to do it:

On YouTube

1. Go onto YouTube and locate the video you want to share
2. Click on the "Share" button at the bottom of the video pane. If the box with the embed code doesn't appear, click on the "Embed" button.
3. Copy the embed code (you can try more advanced stuff when you get the hang of it)

On moodle

1.    “Turn editing on” at the top right hand corner

2.    Add Resource of type “Label”

3.    Click on the “HTML” button to turn on HTML source editing

4.    Paste the embed code and click “Update”

5.    Click “Save and return to course”
6.    Now you will see the YouTube video as a thumbnail within the course page

Now go crazy and bombard your students with hours and hours of video!

Development of faboodle to Interact on moodle through facebook

With the rise of social networking portals such as facebook, twitter and myspace, the masses congregate and exchange ideas, ideologies and knowledge more liberally and more frequently. As an increasing number of learners as well as educators turn to social networking for education, Open Distance Learning (ODL) also needs to evolve to ride the wave in this fast paced flow of information.

Many ODL as well as conventional institutions rely on Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as moodle to facilitate teaching and learning in cyberspace. The success of these LMS are largely dependent on the learners and educators proactively pulling information from them which requires them to access these systems consistently on a regular basis. This has been found to be challenging as the frequency of the users accessing these systems consistently is not vey high. However the frequency of users accessing social networking portals such as facebook has rapidly increased over past few years.

“faboodle” or facebook for moodle is a facebook application which enables educators and learners to keep track of their courses and interact on moodle forums from within facebook. The application, built using FBML, ASP.NET and VB.NET utilising the moodle architecture, serves as a gateway between moodle based LMS and facebook where users can (i) securely login to their LMS from within facebook, (ii) check for updates in their courses and (iii) participate in the moodle forums.

This paper describes the rationale, development process and the workings of faboodle. It also discusses the implications of implementing the system in a real world environment.

Abeywardena, I.S. (2011). Development of faboodle to Interact on moodle through facebook. Proceedings of the 24^th  International Council for Distance Education World Conference, Indonesia (http://library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-25.pdf)

Development of faboodle to Interact on moodle through facebook

View more presentations from Ishan Abeywardena.

Implementation of facebook study groups as supplements for learning management systems (lms) in adult odl environments

Being an Open Distance Learning (ODL) institution, Wawasan Open University (WOU) employs a blended approach for delivering courses to its undergraduate and postgraduate students who are entirely adult learners. In this approach, the use of a Learning Management System (LMS) is absolutely crucial for student support as well as the enhancement of the whole learning experience to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction between the students and the academics. WawasanLearn, the Open Source moodle based LMS system used by WOU, is a comprehensive online tool which enables students and academics to effectively interact in a virtual environment. However, the analysis of data from several semesters shows that the rate of student interaction is low on WawasanLearn with respect to sharing of knowledge.

In order to qualitatively and quantitatively identify the factors contributing to the rate of participation of students in WawasanLearn, a survey was conducted among the undergraduate students studying in various disciplines including science and technology, business administration, liberal studies, education, languages and communication. Feedback regarding what manner of support students expect from WawasanLearn was gathered from close to five hundred and fifty students distributed throughout Malaysia. Another aspect of the study was to identify whether and why students are drawn to participate more frequently in social networking platforms such as facebook (facebook.com).

Resulting from the findings, a pilot project was implemented to study the use of facebook groups as study groups for supplementing WawasanLearn. These study groups were run in parallel to WawasanLearn for seven course modules over a duration of two consecutive semesters. This paper discusses the findings of this pilot project with respect to the implementation of facebook groups as supplements to LMS in an adult ODL environment.

Abeywardena, I.S. , & Tham, C.Y. (2011). Implementation of Facebook Study Groups as Supplements for Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Adult ODL Environments. Proceedings of the 25th  Asian Association of Open Universities Annual Conference, Malaysia. (http://library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-17.pdf )

Implementation of facebook study groups as supplements for learning management systems (lms) in adult odl environments

View more PowerPoint from Ishan Abeywardena

Did we ask our students whether they liked moodle before saying no to facebook?

As ODL practitioners, many of us are fascinated by moodle (http://moodle.com) and the “neat” things it can do for our students. However, did we for once stop and ask our students whether they actually liked moodle?

Well I DID when I surveyed approximately 500 adult ODL students at Wawasan Open University (WOU) asking them how they felt about the moodle based learning management system (LMS) WOU uses. To my surprise (being a bit sarcastic here) many of them pointed out some serious flaws with the system when it comes to providing them the support they need. Okey…. Then I asked them what features they wanted in an LMS which resulted in them suggesting a whole list of possible enhancements to moodle. However, when I started analysing the suggestions, I found out that they can be broadly categorised into four categories: (i)  a better user interface; (ii) more quality discussions; (iii) faster response time; and (iv) a proactive approach to discussions which would e-mail/SMS you as soon as a new post takes place. Being the devoted facebook user I used to be, it was blindingly obvious to me that they were comparing facebook to the moodle. This dictated the next two years of research where I used my students as guinea pigs to identify how exactly facebook could be used in place of an official LMS. You can read more of my endeavours at  library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-17.pdf .

Sure enough, once the students got used to using facebook instead of the moodle LMS, they wanted to stop visiting moodle altogether. This then put me in a bit of a pickle as I had to duplicate all my posts on the official LMS inside all of my facebook course groups. Although I did this mechanically early on just to see the glee in the students’ feedback, I soon got tired of it and wondered day and night how I can make my life easier. Sure enough, being true to the cult of techis, I started writing a facebook application which could infiltrate moodle and bring all of its postings onto facebook. This would potentially solve the problem for both the parties as the students will get all the info posted on moodle in their facebook account. As such I will only need to post stuff once.

All was well until I found out that I will not be allowed access to the moodle backend of WOU (“as security is of the utmost importance and moodle is viewed as a safer place than facebook from hackers” ;D ) to extract the necessary information directly from the database. Not giving up, I wrote Faboodle, which is essentially facebook for moodle, incorporating an intelligent algorithm which mimicked the student on moodle by working on the HTTP request (more details can be found at library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-25.pdf).

Since then, I have been using facebook to support all my ODL courses. With the push information architecture of facebook as opposed to the pull information architecture of moodle, the students get instant alerts about new postings which in turn promote more discussions. We (myself, tutors and students) conduct group revision using the group chat features and constantly keep track of each others research activities.

I was once asked by an experienced distance educator whether I saw facebook as a replacement for moodle and conventional LMS. My answer at the time was that facebook will never replace an official institutional LMS simply because the institution has no control over facebook. However, if it were up to me, I would prefer to give the students what they want rather than giving them what we want.