You’re on your Moodle course page. Just before you go to make phone call, you display a BRB (Be Right Back) status next to your username on the block. Or before you attempt a quiz for the next one hour, you display a Busy status.

Well, I’ve done it on my Moodle site, and so can you. All thanks to a talented Italian PHP developer named Matteo Scaramuccia.  Thanks for help on the PHP code, mate! Much appreciated and credit to you, Matteo.

A trivial feature? Frivolous? Childish? A complete waste of time? Tell you what, give it a try on your victims, erm…I mean users. Inform them of this feature. Demo it to them. Then sit back and see what happens. If no one in the class sets a mood for others to see, then yeah, this is a waste of time. But if just one student sets his or her mood, then you might have chanced upon something here. Perhaps you have managed to make Moodle a bit more human-like. A bit more Web 2.0ish. Perhaps this one feature will make the Moodle experience a bit more social for your students.

If you would like to experiment with this feature on your students, read on! Otherwise, well, you can just hit the Back button of your web browser.

Still with me? Great! Here’s how we did it. >>

My personal opinion about any specific Learning Management Systems is driven by two things: 1 the ability to control/customize the system to do what is necessary and 2 the availability of content and resources that can be integrated into said LMS.  Those two driving forces really open the door to utilize any learning management system (and deep down if you really look they all provide the same basic tool set and could each be customized to mimic one another, Blackboard included).

The most recently released LMSs have embraced a few distinct usability features.  Specifically, they each showcase activity streams, updates, email and text notifications, social network integration.  These are all great ways to make a learning management system sticky, but the real value I think comes from the community and here’s why:

• A community of developers provides additional LMS capacity and capability (and/or the wherewithal to contract your own customizations)
• A community of practitioners have a depth and wealth of knowledge on how to take X and delivery Y
• A community of users equates to a worldwide repository of content for all levels, subjects and uses

I’m certain that each new learning management system offers something novel and great to its growing user-base.  I’ve had a chance to try each one or at least get an in-depth view through a webinar or online tutorials and each works to put the learner central to the experience.  While social is the buzzword, learning-centered is still the most important feature and I think that Moodle is the leader by miles.  As it goes with LMSs though, it only achieves this with the right configuration.

Is your Moodle learner centered? How do you ensure that students have a simple and easy interface? What’s your opinion of the other “Social” learning management systems?

At the upcoming iMoot (http://imoot.org) Chad Outten is going to show how to make Moodle more social.  Managing and helping to design Moodle sites as director of mylearningspace (@mylearningspace), Chad has the experiences and expertise to back up his session presentation.  His session will,

demonstrate the benefits of Moodle’s social constructivist approach to education using its inbuilt tools such as blog, chat, comments, forum, tags, wiki and the integration of web 2.0 services via the repository plugins for flickr, google docs, youtube, wikimedia and more. We ARE the web, so let’s get social with our learning!

Sounds great.

For more information or to register visit http://2011.imoot.org/enrol/index.php?id=6 (still the great low price of AU$65).

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYLK34ug0D8

What is Joule? http://www.moodlerooms.com/lms-solutions/joule/

The Moodle Bar is an always available navigation tool which creates quick shortcuts to all of the most often access Moodle activities and resources.  The content is completely based on a user’s enrollments and new content directed towards them (including messages, the user’s profile and any other direct links as specified by the site administrator).  Like popular social networking sites like Facebook, the bar is always available and constantly updating.

As an improvement on standard Moodle features, the Moodle Bar will alleviate any issues with message pop-ups which often are blocked by browsers today.  Additionally, the shortcuts provide a brief tool bar linking directly to many of the most sought areas of a Moodle installation; creating a more personal and user-centric experience within the site, not to mention advancing the overall “social” character that has previously eluded Moodle.

The Moodle bar will provide each logged in user with links to:

• My Moodle page
• Profile
• Messages
• Calendar
• All blogs
• Adding a new blog post
• All Tags
• additional links

Here are two images of the Moodle Bar deployed (click to enlarge).  Note that each Moodle Bar takes on characteristics of the main theme; the bar also is located at the bottom of the Moodle page (similar to the Facebook notification bar).

The above is from http://iMoot.org, which uses the Moodle bar but is customized by Julien Ridden (http://moodleman.net)

The lower example of the Moodle Bar can be seen at http://moodle.parklane.ac.uk/

As a point of reference, this is the Facebook bar:

According to Lewis Carr, the Moodle Bar will be released to the Moodle community early this year.  He says, “I expect to see lots of variations of it once it comes out.  There are some talented coders who there who will rework it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what others do with it.”

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