Hello and welcome to the Moodle podcast.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Moodle podcast. This is Ryan Hazen and I am so excited to be here today. We'll be hearing from Mark Glynn, head of business development at Catalyst it Europe. In today's conversation, we're going to take a look at templates and reporting to streamline and unify learner experiences in Moodle.

Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

Thanks, Ryan. Delighted to be here.

So, uh, let's start by framing today's conversation in broad terms. Uh, where can we use templates in Moodle most effectively?

Oh, I would say everywhere, to be honest. Coming at it from a higher education background, I spent 20 years in the higher education sector before moving into catalyst. I think course templates would be incredibly beneficial. You obviously can use templated, uh, assessment, feedback and all sorts of other different aspects of templates.

But for me, course templates is an easy win, easy for the lecturers and the institution to implement, and it's a definite win for the students in terms of ensuring a consistent experience across their various different modules that they're studying.

Let's do a high level overview of the benefits of templates first. But I really want to come back to that consistency of user experience as one of the benefits. Consistency of user experience. What other benefits do you see to using, uh, course templates in Moodle?

For me, Moodle is great because it has such versatility and flexibility, but with that you're going to get people using it in different ways and some with all the best of intentions. But with that, a little bit of ignorance can come in in terms of not just course design and, uh, the ux side of things.

And I know Moodle HQ has done a huge amount in improving the Ux of, of Moodle itself. I'm thinking about the course, the layout of the course and the structure, ensuring that it's designed with UDL in mind, universal design for learning in mind. And you can do that quite easily.

Um, with templates, for example, you can ensure that every course page has a picture of the lecture and has their email address, contact details when they're in what would be the virtual office hours. Simple things like that can make a big difference to the student, knowing how to contact a lecturer out of class hours and maybe even having a copy of the university plagiarism policy on every single course page, uh, what the learning outcomes are for the modules or who the subject librarian is for that particular module.

Simple little things, all easy to add for a lecturer to add them to their module. But if it's pretty. Populated in a template, it's easier again.

So let's zoom in on that consistency of user experience. As a learning designer, I'm constantly thinking about what the end user sees and how the end user is interfacing with the material that we create, uh, especially in higher education. Why do you think it's so important for course design to be consistent between courses?

Um, I think it's crucial, and I do appreciate there might be, because it's an international podcast, there's sort of different languages and terminology that's used. But, uh, on a moodle course page, let's just say, for example, a student on a science program would have a chemistry course, a physics course and a biology course.

You don't want, or you shouldn't want a student to have to relearn Moodle for the three different course layouts and see how they are. You want them to be able to focus their attention on what they need to learn in that subject, not in how to relearn moodle every single time they're logging in.

You want them to be able to find where the assignments are, you want them to be able to find where the discussion forum is. You want them to be able to have opportunities to engage with the content in a consistent way. And with all the best of intentions, every lecturer is not going to know how to fully optimize the features of Moodle for course engagement.

And that's where the expertise at the center, the teaching and learning comes into play, where they can help design these templates to ensure that the user gets the, uh, the user, and I mean the educator as well as the student, gets full extent to the benefit of Moodle.

You and I share a similar background in that way. I came from higher education as well. And the one thing that came to mind while you were talking about that is I always encourage teachers to use the gradebook, for instance, to calculate grades and serve them to students, because it is additional cognitive load for the student to calculate grades across different courses.

I imagine that we might have a, uh, uh, similar taxing of student cognitive resources, having to change the way they interface with different courses from different faculty.

Yeah, 100%. And it's also difficult for lectures to engage as well. Uh, so if you can make it easy by having pre populated templates, you're making their life easier as well. So everyone's a winner. It's not that you're disadvantaging one audience in favor of another. It's all about removing barriers, uh, or ensuring there's no barriers there in the first place that have to be removed.

So let's talk a little bit about the technical side of using course templates. Do you have best, uh, practices methodology for deploying course templates at scale?

Yeah. If I can just take a step back first, before I go into the technical implementation of it, I would actually recommend that, uh, you don't need a template that does the entire university, every single course page in the entire university. I would engage the staff from the various different faculties and agree, a program based, again, going back to that example of a science program where you'd have chemistry, physics, biology.

Agree, at the very least, a program based faculty, if not a school, uh, or a faculty based, um, template. Sorry, I said faculty later on. Excuse me, a program based template. Um, or a school or a faculty based template. Because some of the arguments that you will get from staff, uh, that don't want to use templates is they lose their autonomy, or what works in engineering doesn't work in humanities or vice versa.

So build something that works in humanities or build something that works in universities. And then, uh, you are sending out circulating, um, the appropriate templates to the appropriate courses and faculties, and now answering your technical description. It's really easy to implement it. I know not everybody is blessed with the expertise that I was in the institution that I had.

But technically, to roll out course templates, you can integrate it into the, um, as part of your course creation processes, where you can just literally say if it belongs to this faculty, roll out this course, look at course id, whatever, 123, and replicate that one for all of the courses that fall into this category, and then do the same for the other categories.

Have a category for each one of your faculties, and therefore you have a template that spread through every course that's created in that particular faculty.

I was reminded again, while you were talking about that, about the gradebook. A gradebook can have multiple different calculations. You can have one who's using sum of grades, one who's using percentage weighted categories, but the presentation to the student is the same no matter what's going on in the background.

So I really like that. Templates for different areas, different programs within the university that meet their individual needs.

And again, you mentioned that earlier on, I think it might have been off microphone, uh, when they're looking at the grade book, the cognitive load that they have on the grade book, even trying to decipher it, but also trying to figure out, okay, well, I got 90% in that one, so that's weighted at 15% overall.

And trying to then figure out where they are at the end of semester. Gradebook does all of that magic for you. I used to always say to students and to staff, great book. Does it automatically because it literally just calculates out the great fun. So take advantage of these features.

And if your template has all of that set up, well then happy days.

Exactly. One thing that I. You know, thinking about in my experience in higher education, there were a few things that were common to every course. We had a course evaluation template that fed back to a parent course. We had a uh, disability statement. We had some of these common things.

Do you have a list of what you would include in the base template that departments would then develop from?

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I mentioned earlier on the photograph, uh, an image of the lecture. Some people are for that and some people aren't. And I, and I understand both sides of the argument. Ah, I would definitely have contact details of the lecture and office hours. I mentioned the plagiarism policy, but I'd also have learning outcomes for the module.

I'd also have assessment dates. I'd have a program handbook. I would strongly encourage you to have links to the student support services because students might be at risk. Students may need counseling to let them know that support is there. Um, I would also have links to the library. And depending on the size of your institution, you may have specific libraries for particular faculties and courses and indeed specific, uh, staff, um, that would represent various different faculty.

So have direct contact to that person. Don't necessarily just have a generic phone number that's there or generic website address, uh, against subject guides, um, stuff like link to student resources on how to cite, ah, and how to reference properly little bits and pieces along those lines, but they all add up.

Even if you only have nine or ten common features. Those nine or ten common features are something that a student then will become familiar with, that structure to scaffold the rest of the course. They will come familiar with. They'll know where to look. And I think that just makes everybody's life easier.

Absolutely. So as we create templates and we use them, how would you evaluate and revise course templates moving forward?

Really good question. So there's two angles I take on that. First of all, I would make sure before we distribute the template to the various different faculties, I'd get it evaluated for accessibility. I'd ensure that what we are rolling out is the right font, is the right colors, is the right colors on the right background, all sorts of different bits and pieces.

So ensure that we are not just relying on one person's intuition, that we're actually getting it properly evaluated for accessibility. I'd love to think from the get go that the entire moodle theme is accessible, but we want to make sure that the, the course template that we devise is accessible.

Again, something simple like ensuring any image has, um, alt text in there and so on. Uh, so that's the first stage of evaluation. Then the next stage is, I would. Look at, and we've done this with some clients where we look to see how was it actually implemented. And I'll give you an example.

Let's just say we had in a template for the lecture when we roll it out here saying insert learning outcomes here and we would provide the blank space and we might have learning outcome one, two, three and four and then a blank space afterwards. We have done an evaluation uh, that automated the analysis where we could see well how many modules still have inserted learning outcomes here as a piece of text.

And you would be surprised at how many modules did actually still have it. So it's fine looking at uh, the start of the semester and I'll uh pick a figure and I'll say 1000 modules and a thousand modules at the start. And then a week in you could look and see well how many of those 1000 have the, still have the insert picture here, insert text here.

And that's a simple report that you can do. Well. I say simple, I passed it off to some of my technical geniuses in the it uh, department to do it. But it is very possible to do, and we offer that service to our clients where ah, they get a report on a category basis as to what percentage of their courses have each element of the template implemented.

Like is the plagiarism policy still visible? Is the uh, are the learning outcomes there are the assignment dates put in, simple little things and then you've got a, if you imagine an excel spreadsheet and I'm simplifying it there, but uh, my apologies. But if you imagine uh, an excel spreadsheet with a list of all of the modules in the category down on the first column and then the various different elements of the template listed across the top one column for each element and a simple tick in the box saying yes or no, that's still visible or that's not visible.

And it's a very, very powerful report where you can then say to the head of faculty or to the appropriate staff members in that faculty saying you have 60% adoption of this, you have 50% adoption of this. And if you set up your category structure correctly within your Moodle instance, you can actually compare this year modules to last year's modules.

So it's not that you're comparing engineering to science or engineering to humanities, which I always encourage a friendly bit of inter faculty competition, but it's not that you're doing that, but you also have the option to say well, how did engineering do this year versus last year? How did they do this year versus the targets that we set for, uh, last year, because it's always a good way for a a, uh, faculty using reports like this to figure out how mature they are at their use of Moodle.

Everybody can have moodle, but how mature is it is a different story. And how mature is their use of M Moodle? And that's why we use reports like this to identify how good their practice is. And the extent of that good practice in moodle.

Are there any student oriented metrics that you would use? So we've talked about faculty uptake of, uh, the templates. Do you have any ideas for how student engagement might measure how efficacious a template is?

Really good question. We, um, tried to have student focus in the particular example that in designing the template, we made sure the student voice was very strong in that focus group to design the template. But in terms of measuring it specifically student engagement, I haven't thought of anything and I'll be open to suggestions, if I'm honest.

Uh, and you'll say something like, oh, damn, why didn't I think of that? But again, this is the benefit of podcasts like this and putting yourself out there, but I think there are ways to monitor student engagement. But how you can correlate that to the fact that to template is a difficult one, but I'm open to all suggestions.

Yeah, uh, the only thing that I could think of that I used a lot was the course participation report. If we could use that to drive something at a site level, that would be fascinating. I never implemented that myself, but just thought of it now and what a fascinating possibility.

Uh, it would be brilliant, but I think there's too many variabilities there in terms of, uh, we've done, uh, analysis before comparing some modules to other modules, but then you have the variability of the subject, you have the variability of the lecturer and their knowledge of moodle and indeed what features were available at the time, uh, and what works for some courses and doesn't.

So it's difficult because you're comparing apples and oranges. I don't think I'd even say cabbages and apples, not even, ah, two fruits together. But it's definitely sparked something in me. Now, though, I'll have to think about that one.

That's a great response, again, just to sort of an off the cuff idea, but, um, definitely needs to be thought through and implemented carefully.

It's a bit where we invite people, listeners to put a comment in the margins afterwards and we can look back in this.

I love it. Great idea. So put your comments, uh, on the podcast for us and we can learn something from you as well. Now, I want to take, we talked a little bit earlier about how faculty can feel constrained by a course template. I want to take this idea and turn it upside down because at Moodle, us, we work with a lot of corporate learning clients who have folks that are doing their professional development and compliance training that aren't necessarily learning designers.

So if we can design a template for them, we can. It's not constraining them, it's actually reducing the burden on the person that's deploying the course. You mentioned earlier, accessibility as a major benefit, uh, of templates. And having worked in higher ed. I know faculty are very concerned and often have trouble keeping up with accessibility standards.

So are there other ways that you see templates reducing the courseware development burden on faculty?

I think there's numerous ways. And for the benefit of the listeners. As you were asking the question, I was nodding feverishly in agreement to the. Various points that you were saying. Um, I go back to what I. Said earlier on about easy win. You want it to be easy for people to do.

When you want it to be a. Win, you want it to be a benefit for them. Um, templates for somebody, uh, that's working in the workplace as opposed to in. Higher education, that may not have the. Pedagogical background that lecturers have, um, and. May not have the teaching experience.

Instructional design I appreciate is different to, to teaching experience. They may not have those expertise at hand. A lot of companies, a lot of universities, I should say, have an instructional. Design department or at least somebody they can call on for advice. So having a pre made template actually is a godsend for somebody that doesn't.

Have those resources there. So, uh, it's something I'd highly recommend. And actually, if I was in the. Workplace, I'd look to get advice from. My local university's instructional design department and partner up in that respect. Um, because it's the same issues that. We'D have in university versus the workplace, but we have, on the rare occasion universities have, um, better resourcing than the workplace may have.

Well, I'll include a plug for Moodle partners worldwide as having instructional design folks on staff that can help companies, universities, nonprofits, governments develop these well designed course templates that you can then, um, use to engage your subject matter experts, getting things to out there.

Absolutely. And uh, I'll definitely give the plug for catalysts specifically. Obviously I'm a bit biased to say that we're the best in that front, but even stuff like going beyond course. Templates, which we're talking about, you may. Have activity templates that would save you an awful lot of time and effort.

And, uh, one example that springs to. Mind would be the database feature within. Moodle, which a friend of mine, a lady called Michelle Moore, who uh, was. Referred to as the evangelist, the Moodle evangelist, she always said that the glossary and the database were like the swiss. Army tool of Moodle.

They can do so many different functions, but if you have a template provided for what information you want your learners to populate into this database, all these predefined templates could just make your life so much easier and again, learn from Moodle partners, but also learn from your. Local institutions as to, uh, how can.

I create those templates? Or where can I go on the. Moodle community to get some m that. Were prepared earlier, as they say in all the good cookery shows.

That brings to mind the learning design jam that I participated in in Barcelona, uh, last year at the global moot. We have another global moot coming up. Um, I know Catalyst is sponsoring a moot in Canada this week, actually. Um, so I would include a plug there for moots is another great place to engage in learning about template creation and learning design from folks that are in the community.

Yeah.

And go into those moots, whether it's the one in Canada this week or Finland next week or wherever, because they are, ah, worldwide and the Mexico on the global one. And coming up now in October, go into those with an open mind. Go into those with a mind where you're willing to share your experience, but you're also willing to accept learnings from others.

And you will do incredibly well. Because the biggest benefit of moodle, and I say this as a m mad, passionate moodler, the, uh, biggest benefit for me is the openness and the sharing that the community give to, uh, back. You don't get that one. Any other commercial platform. You get people sharing, but they're nearly protecting their homework at the same time.

So for me, the moodle community, particularly the Moodle partners, um, are just, uh, incredible network to work with and learn from.

I have found the community around Moodle, globally, to just be invigorating, positive, generative. I can't get enough of moots, honestly, personally. So if you haven't been to one out there, listeners, please, please join us. We'd love to see you there. So we're coming up here towards the end. I have one more question and I want to know, do you have a favorite success story for templates?

Uh, have you had a template or a report or gone through a project where you've leveraged some of these tools that is really just succeeded that you can share with us?

Yeah. The one that worked best that I can think of off the top of my head is the one I mentioned at the start, which we're looking at rolling out these coursewide templates across faculties. And, um, we'd faculty specific templates where we shared the results. I mentioned that analysis earlier on where we had a list of the various different features and the courses.

And, um, we shared the high level results and said, yes, your faculty had 67% adoption on this and 75% adoption in this. And that said a good bit of friendly competition, let's just say, across the faculties. But it also opened the eyes of staff, because the staff that were engaging with us and the heads of departments, and they were the best staff anyway, they were the leaders anyway, so they were going to be doing the good stuff anyway, and they pretty much assumed everybody else did what they did.

But when they saw this report and actually saw the amount of people. That still had the insert name here, insert email here. They were mortified with it, thinking that their colleagues would actually do that. So where they may have taught that. I was going on a rant beforehand when I was saying, this isn't their practice wasn't universal, their good practice wasn't universal.

Now I had to facts and figures to back it up. But equally, after year two and after year three, I was then able to say to the Paris, that beverage, that within the institution that, look, we are making a difference. We realized that we're getting poor uptake of the various features of the templates.

So we ran workshops on the value of templates and the value of UDL in this particular case. And we were clearly able to monitor what the adoption was before the workshops and what the adoption was after the workshops. So, showing impact of the professional development that we had done specifically through using the templates, uh, was incredibly powerful for me when I was looking for more resources and more money and more everything that I could get to say, listen, we are making a difference.

What an important point for learning design centers, centers for teaching and learning, who are doing a lot of behind the scenes support for faculty as a way to concretely demonstrate their impact on the teaching and learning that's happening at the university. Uh, that's a great suggestion.

And the thing is that instructional designer, they're obviously limited in time. They can't go and do every single module across, ah, every single program, but they do the, uh, module, for example, in 2020, and then they roll off into another set of modules, and, uh, they're helping the rest of the university.

But what happens there is the lecture comes along in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. And of course, they make changes to this template out of, whether it's the best of intentions, there's no doubt, but through their ignorance, they may be reducing the accessibility of the course template or changing stuff that was put there for a specific reason.

So it's important to monitor it, not just to say, as an instructional designer, I helped design 10,000 courses. It's a. I helped design 10,000 courses, and they were still in use and still, and used to that high standards that I had implemented for four years or five years, or, uh, whatever the case may be.

So it's the constant monitoring of the good work that you've done. X amount of years ago is, again, a, uh, really useful exercise.

And what rich ground for faculty to have meaningful, rigorous conversations about the art and science of teaching and learning than to review templates together as a department. It's rare enough that faculty have the opportunity to get together just to discuss the craft, but doing this really gives us a, uh, springboard for significant conversations about.

Pedagogy.

And that's why we had the focus groups that I mentioned earlier on, because we said, right, in the faculty of science, we're going to have a faculty of science template. So let's bring in a couple of science lectures and a couple of uh, science students and decide what's going to be in the template.

And an awful lot of the benefit for us was identifying the why. Identifying why this feature needs to be in, identifying why this feature needs not to be in, uh, and so on, why you shouldn't have bright, illuminous text on your screen. So it was an educative process, it was discursive, absolutely was, but it was educated at the same time.

So, uh, it was, it was really worthwhile. What? Time consuming but worthwhile. But as well, because we did it with the staff and uh, with the students, we got buy in from the staff and the students and that was crucial for the long term adoption of these templates.

And having seen this in higher education, creating those significant relationships between teachers, especially between different areas and the faculty around pedagogy is just, it's so important. It creates the opportunity to have passing conversations where, hey, I did this today, it was really successful, or I'm trying this in moodle, what do you think about that?

Instead of feeling siloed like we have to teach our classes all independently of one another.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think as well, it's important to factor in evaluation and feedback along the way, uh, to ensure that there's continual improvement of those designs and those templates. Because just because you design it in 1990 doesn't mean that's it now you don't have to design anything anymore.

You're grand, you know, and educators really are a great audience that is intrinsically motivated to improvement as far as I've experienced.

Yeah, I have very similar experience as well. I think the main challenge that they have, it's not their desire to, uh, provide the best learning experience, it's the time, it's the resources, the energy. So again, coming back to the templates, if we can make it easy by saving them time, saving them energy, saving them cognitive load, it's an easy win.

Well, that is a perfect callback to end our podcast on today. Mark, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. Any last words you'd like to offer before we sign off?

Uh, no, thank you for the invitation. And I suppose my last words is keep learning and keep sharing, sharing the stuff that you're doing and learn from others around you.

Excellent. Well, thank you to our guest, Mark Glenn from Catalyst it Europe, and thank you to our listeners for participating today. Uh, we really appreciate your engaging with the podcast, and thanks again for listening. And as always, happy moodling.