Browse Category: Elearning

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Ebooks have changed not just textbooks and but the whole learning environment.

Get in on the global conversation around elearning, and discover what people are doing to improve and advance education.

Moodle Analytics: Get More Out of Your Course and LMS

Most educators use Moodle without exploring or even less so, reaping all the benefits of this powerhouse system. Teachers’ main reason for using Moodle is usually that it’s the Learning Management System (LMS) selected by their institution. If you’re not using Moodle’s built-in tracking methods, analytics or integrating your course materials as a SCORM package, then you’re missing out.

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We’ll share with you how integrating Moodle with your course materials can help you get the most out of both your course materials and Moodle. We’ll cover the reports you can generate to track student progress, and  the more advanced Moodle Analytics available.

Moodle

If you’re in the education sector, then chances are you’ve not only heard of, but also, used Moodle at some point. But on the off chance you haven’t used it yet, here’s what Moodle is as per its website:

“Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments.”

In Moodle, you’re not only able to create a custom virtual learning environment for seamless assignments and communications. Moodle encompasses tracking student performance, analysis of course progress with respect to its objectives, and even some data-based insights and predictions of your student data within Moodle. As such, data in Moodle helps you to ensure that your students’ performance and progress is on track and that your course is helping your students achieve the skills you set out for them.

Course Materials

As magical as predictions sound, where this really gets interesting is when you can use all the aforementioned data tools and predictions to also track your students as they go through the course materials that you’ve gathered for them in an ebook or ebook library.

Nearly all teachers spend a good amount of time creating supplemental materials for their students, so that students may better understand, and assimilate the course topics and competencies. When the materials are collected into an ebook, not only do you save your efforts from being eaten by the proverbial dog, but you also save yourself time and improve the quality of education for your students. You’ll see how shortly.

Naturally, you want to make sure that your students are watching the videos you’ve selected, and answering the sample exercises you crafted. If you can record their progress in the various activities you’ve created, and have their answers to questions and quizzes automatically graded, and the grades automatically entered into your grade book, well then you just may be in teacher heaven.

SCORM

A grand magician, known as SCORM, and all its neat little tricks will have you flabbergasted. It’s most popular in elearning courses. SCORM is simply a standard to ensure that the course materials you’re creating can communicate with your LMS. The major learning management systems like Moodle, Blackboard, and Edmodo are all SCORM compliant.

As a result, if your ebook is SCORM compliant, then your LMS will be able to collect your student data from the ebook. Some of the collected data includes

  • where the student left off,
  • student answers to questions,
  • the time the questions were answered,
  • the correct answer,
  • the total score, etc.

By using objectives, you can group different question modules together to achieve certain learning objectives. The LMS’s will display the scores and results grouped by objective.

For the more techie side of what SCORM is, it’s a ZIP file that in simple terms contains your ebook’s files and instructions for your LMS. Rightly so, you’ll often hear it referred to as a SCORM package.

Creating a SCORM compliant ebook is quite simple in Kotobee Author. We’ll show you how a bit further on.

Moodle Analytics and Reports

Grades

Each course in Moodle comes with its own grade book referred to as the Grader report. Moodle’s grader report allows teachers to view grades by assignment, category, or student. Additional options for displaying, sorting, filtering, and exporting are available to make management and course analysis and student tracking easier for teachers.

While teachers have the option of manually entering grades, most educators prefer the more time-saving option of having any assessed assignment and quiz in Moodle automatically updated in the grader report.

Automatically updating the grade book is also available with SCORM compliant course textbooks and course materials once integrated with Moodle. Student performance on auto-graded assignments and quizzes within your course materials can be seamlessly recorded in the grader report.

For more on grade books, watch the Grader report video below.

Competencies

Moodle Competencies is a system of assessing and grading students’ levels based on skills and competencies. Among educators, this system is commonly referred to as Competency-Based Education (CBE), and competency-based learning, or more rarely, skills-based learning, as opposed to knowledge-based learning.

Moodle enables teachers to track their students’ comprehension and proficiency levels throughout the course in relation to particular subject-related skills. If the administrator has enabled competencies in your organization’s LMS, teachers can add competencies to courses and to specific course activities, view a competency breakdown report, and rate competencies.

For more on Moodle Competencies, watch the Competencies tutorial video provided by Moodle.

Course Reports

Moodle keeps you apprised of the goings on within each course with various reports like the competency breakdown report mentioned earlier. You will also be able to generate logs, activity reports, participation reports, statistics, and event monitoring.

Two optional reports that can be enabled by the administrator include the Activity completion and Course completion reports. They’re customized for each category and can be set to be manually or automatically checked once a student completes the course or activity requirements.

For more, head to Activity completion, Course completion or Course reports for other reports.

Students at risk of dropping out

This prediction model informs educators of students who are at risk for not completing a course, based on low-student engagement. Moodle bases this prediction, on the Community of Inquiry concept of student engagement in three different aspects:

  • Cognitive presence,
  • Social presence, and
  • Teacher presence.

For more, head to the Students at risk of dropping out page or watch the video below.

Custom Predictions

The predictions processors are machine learning backend plugins. Predictions are based on data from previously completed courses on Moodle. Allowing for A/B testing and evaluation of your algorithms predictions, Moodle’s powerful system supports multiple prediction models for one course.

API

With the Analytics API, site managers will be able to customize the indicators you want your prediction model to track in order to determine the likelihood that the target or event will occur. The more specific and detailed the indicators are, the more likely the model’s predictions will be accurate.

Beyond the excitement of accurate predictions, is the even more exciting question of what is to be done when Moodle predicts that the targeted event will likely occur. Moodle can be set to send messages, feed reports, or even build new adaptive learning activities.

Moodle and Kotobee

As Kotobee Author’s exported SCORM packages are fully compatible with Moodle LMS, you will be able to access all Moodle has to offer with ease. From displaying Moodle courses to receiving analytics, everything will be fully functional.

There are four basic steps to turning your course materials into a SCORM package.

  1. Set your SCORM Objectives.
    add scorm objectives in Kotobee
  2. Assign the interactive content in your ebook to a SCORM objective.select a scorm objective kotobee
  3. Export your Ebook as a SCORM file.kotobee export as scorm package
  4. Upload your SCORM package (the ZIP file) to Moodle.moodle scorm upload

You’ll also want to enable the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) for your Kotobee Library or Cloud ebook management to help automate user access. You only need to activate the LTI option in the Kotobee Library or the Cloud ebook management dashboard. For more information, head to Ebook and LMS Integration using LTI.

Conclusion

The education system is always changing, and technology has afforded us so many new ways to ensure a better learning experience for students. Being able to predict learning patterns and helping students when they’re struggling is a great advantage to Moodle’s analytics. Don’t miss out on this great feature and make the most of your teaching experience.

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The Amazing World of Elearning [Infographic]

The Power of Questions in Interactive Ebooks

International Book Fairs 2019

5 Ways to Use Ebooks to Drive Learning in Classrooms

With kids’ crazy schedules—soccer practice, violin lessons, and private tutoring—having ebooks on hand at any moment makes that half-hour of downtime between extra-curricular activities productive learning time. Now with ebooks classrooms are more effective.

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PTA meetings at one time used to discuss the burden of carrying heavy textbooks, then ebook vs textbook debates ensued for years. Now there’s no denying the advantages of using ebooks. Today we’ll quickly go over the simplest ways ebooks are driving learning in classrooms. In future articles will go in-depth with how ebooks are helping teachers with differentiated learning and how they’re making a difference for students with learning disabilities. Continue Reading

Six Reasons Why a Chromebook Is the Perfect College Laptop

Gone are the days when buying a reliable notebook for college meant breaking the bank. Today, the market is swarming with laptops that are perfectly capable of getting you through school, at a price that won’t deplete your college fund in one sweep.

Among the many choices at your disposal are Chromebooks; a relatively new breed of laptops that run Google’s Chrome OS. Essentially the Chrome browser disguised as an operating system, Chrome OS is designed to centralize all your work under one platform: your Google account. This means that nearly all applications are web-based, storing their data in the cloud.

It’s understandable if this dependence on the Internet comes as off-putting, but that hasn’t stopped the Chromebook from achieving mainstream popularity. In fact, Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in 2016, and as Gartner predicts, sales will have grown by 16.3 percent by the end of 2017.

chromebook

If you’ve been planning to buy a laptop, therefore, a Chromebook is at least worth considering. Why? Here are six good reasons. Continue Reading

The Amazing World of Elearning [Infographic]

Long gone are the days when you could only learn in a classroom or at college. Traditional methods of learning are certainly still important, but as the internet has increased in popularity, we have seen a new type of learning methodology develop – elearning. Let’s put a definition. Elearning (short for electronic learning) represents studies and education facilitated using electronic technology without the need for the confines of a physical classroom.

The cost of elearning, in comparison, is a fraction of what you would pay for a teacher and educational course. For example, the online course website Udemy often offers an extravagant 90% off Udemy discount for many of their courses, temporarily bringing the price way down and giving you a great deal.

The idea behind elearning has actually been around since the 1960’s when the first computer based instruction system was developed. Since then, various types of elearning programs, software, and technology has been created.

Today, elearning has taken a new angle and many businesses are combing mobile technology together with elearning. For example, many elearning courses are available to use on your tablet, smartphone or laptop. You can literally learn on the go and are not confined to a classroom or fixed position. Continue Reading

Ebook and LMS Integration Using LTI

It’s important to make rich content in an LMS reachable in as few steps as possible while maintaining security. With the various content/technology providers available, LTI makes it easy to provide reusable content and tools to your students, under correct authentication – something not possible with SCORM. In this article, we will be highlighting why you should start using LTI as a way of integrating your ebooks with your LMS, and practical steps on how to do so using Kotobee. If you’re using an LMS in your organization, this article is definitely for you.

lti integration

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Why Interactive Ebooks Are Your Best Teaching Resource

Technology is continuously becoming more and more dependable in our day-to-day operations. Whether it’s in social life, work, research and so on, dependency on technology is certainly on the rise.

Take education, for instance. Whiteboards have evolved to SMART boards, homework is being assigned and collected through online platforms, and the once-banned smartphones and tablets are now encouraged to use in the classroom. Also, due to remote learning technologies and platforms, people can now access what they want to learn through a multitude of channels, whenever they want.

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This presents numerous opportunities to both small and large educational publishers to create their own platforms aimed at supplying the rising demand for digital learning.

In today’s post, we’ll be discussing the ups and downs of ebook features; how they aid education efforts, as well as how they can be made more effective and their potential to distract learners from their goals.

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Creating a Technologically Balanced Classroom

Flexible learning platforms, including elearning and digitized classrooms, are just the latest innovative uses of technology in many parts of the world. Whereas it has opened up new ways of learning to students, the debate rages on as to whether technology in the classroom is really such a great idea.

But as with everything in life, a fine balance can be achieved in your classroom, so your students can really gain the best of both worlds. Just like traditional forms of learning, technology also has its place in the modern learning context.

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Below are a few pros and cons to consider in deciding how far technology can creep into your lesson plans. So there’s no need to become a techie luddite quite yet – read on!

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Engaging Elearning Tools in the Classroom

In the not too distant past, a student’s classroom experience meant they were weighed down by heavy textbooks that didn’t necessarily engage them in learning. If they were lucky, their most “interactive” learning experience with technology might have been the odd interaction with barely legible script on a projector.

Fortunately for students now, technology is grabbing its place and turning the classroom into a more fun and interactive participatory experience. Gone are the days of yawning at the back of the class over a dog-eared textbook, with a much bigger focus now on practical hands-on learning through activities and use of technology than there is through textbooks.

engaging elearning tools in the classroom

Classroom technology is essentially  an enhanced way of helping you help your students engage with the information and learn more effectively. Below are 10 ideas to make learning more inclusive and fun.

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Why You Should Create a Mobile Learning Platform

Mobile phones are quickly replacing many items that were previously thought to be irreplaceable. Consider, for example; cameras, calculators, watches, alarm clocks, radios, portable video devices, magazines, newspapers, etc. All of these items can now be stored on your mobile device – comfortably resting in your pocket.

Today, a large number of users have also switched from reading printed documents, to reading digitized content through mobile devices, whether they’re reading fiction, non-fiction, short stories, etc. A growing trend in recent years, is the utilization of mobile-based learning. This incorporates everything from fully-fledged and heavily sponsored library apps, to standalone MOOC software, to educational game apps and individual course hosting.

how and why to create a mobile learning platform

People are shifting towards doing everything they can while on-the-go. In many ways, they can be encouraged to even study and learn through their phones. Mobile learning is definitely on the rise, and in this article we explore the pros and cons of mobile learning while also offering our own insight to establishing your mobile learning strategy, along with a handful of tools you can utilize to start creating your own mobile learning platform.

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EPUB and SCORM: A Healthy Affair?

They are both the most popular ingredients of elearning. For some reason, they were just not made for each other. In education, ebooks are an essential component for delivering knowledge to students, remotely and interactively. SCORM on the other hand, is the popular standard for web-based elearning, with sharable content objects (SCO) at its heart. SCORM allows for communication between the LMS and the e-learning content, which leads to the primary advantage of tracking user activity and reporting progress.

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I am surprised how most LMS’s do not have built-in support for EPUB. Take Moodle for example. You can add a Book Resource, which allows you to manually enter book content chapter by chapter. Despite the existence of an external EPUB import add-on, I find it disappointing not to have EPUB as a supported resource at the core of the LMS. Some academic organizations prefer to have their ebooks delivered through a separate portal. Nevertheless, EPUB support in an LMS is crucial.

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