Blog

UK and Ireland MoodleMoot 2016

MoodleMoot UK and Ireland 2016 showed yet again that the Moodle ecosystem is in good health, with lots of new community members attending for the first time, plenty of old timers coming back, major institutions reaffirming their faith and Moodle HQ showing how the product itself is adapting to the future with new features and…
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#LTMOOC16 – Success in a MOOC

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8avYQ5ZqM0] I started the Curatr ‘elearning…. beyond the next button!’ MOOC this week, facilitated by Craig Taylor. I found the introductory ‘Success in a MOOC’ video really useful. This is a video by Dave Cormier from 2010, shared under Creative Commons on YouTube and pulled in to the MOOC to provide some orientation /…
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Building a learning analytics platform

As learning analytics continues to rise up the agenda in the corporate learning & development (L&D) sector, one thing is becoming glaringly apparent: we should not expect a one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf approach to learning analytics.  This is a specialist discipline that cannot be bottled up into a single product. Sure, there are products such as Knewton, a Product as…
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MoodleMoot 2015 Review

This year was my fourth Moot and it was another cracking event. Dublin is a welcoming and accessible location so it was good to be back here. I attended the two conference days on May 12-13, but the conference was topped and tailed by a workshops day on the 11th and a developer hackfest on…
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xAPI Barcamp – a Learning Technologies fringe event

The xAPI Barcamp at the end of the first day of the Learning Technologies conference attracted around fifty people, eager to talk xAPI over a few free drinks at the local pub! I was one of five invited experts alongside Andrew Downes from Rustici (@mrdownes), Mark Berthelemy from Wyver Solutions(@berthelemy), Ben Betts from Learning Locker…
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DrupalCampBrighton does the business!

I attended DrupalCampBrighton today for their Business Day, the first day of a three day Drupal extravaganza! LEO were sponsoring the business day which I was really pleased about, we do a fair amount of Drupal work and it’s great to both give something back to the open source community and to get involved in supporting…
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Data science: the new skillset for learning technologists

For all the talk of big data being the next big thing in learning technology, few people mention that in workplace learning there just aren’t any examples of big data to speak of. The data collected just isn’t at the same scale. However, big data has led to an explosion in data analysis tools and…
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What we can learn from the ephemeral web

Learning Platforms have flourished in the past decade, and as they have scaled with the rise of MOOCs, the data inside them has also become increasingly valuable. Different people see different value in this data. Some want to analyse data to predict outcomes and trigger early interventions when needed. Others want to analyse large datasets to…
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Virtual College trademarks the term VOOC

A few times in recent months I’ve had a new MOOC term pass through my Twitter feed.  We haven’t had a new MOOC spin-off acronym for a good 6 months. I don’t know what’s happened to the edtech marketers, maybe they’ve been off on holiday on their new yachts spending all those edtech venture capital billions. Anyway, after…
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Moodling around in Edinburgh

It was great to be at the UK MoodleMoot in Edinburgh this week. It has become an annual highlight for me as a place to meet old and new friends alike, to share some of the things we’ve been working on and to learn from the vast experiences of the Moodle community around the UK…
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