The flexibility of Moodle is showcased in this presentation by NetSpot Consultant Minh-Tam Nyugen at Moodleposium 2013 about the recent release of University of New England’s Massive Open Online Courses site - uneOpen. Providing an efficient and cost-effective solution, NetSpot used the university’s existing code repository from their centralised NetSpot hosted Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) and created the MOOCs instance from it. This ensured that any customisations of the MOOC site could be easily completed without it affecting their central Moodle LMS. Supporting 21st century learning, NetSpot created extra functionality that enables students to have interaction with social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This included adding the like/share/+1 buttons to pages and Facebook comments to pages using Facebook’s commenting system. Visit the MOOC site at www.uneopen.com

1. Your premium eLearning technology service partner netspot.com.au
Using Moodle to enable uneOpen

2. About uneOpen
• Offers real university subjects for free
• Self Paced
• No entry requirements
• Students can book tutorials with real tutors
• Students can sit challenge exams to gain UNE
credit

3. Why Moodle?
• UNE already uses Moodle for university
courses
• Easy transfer of material
• Teachers already know how to use it
• Very skilled Moodle admin staff at UNE
• Easy to extend and integrate

4. Other systems
• Microsite to advertise the initiative
• CRM to keep track of pre-registrations and
registrations
• Social Media authentication and sharing
• Tutorial booking system
• Exam booking system
• Payment gateway
• Moodle clearly only a piece in the puzzle

5. Many teams
• Many different teams working on the project
• coordinated by UNE: a challenge to keep all
the teams on track
• Content developers
• Course designers
• CRM specialists
• Moodle customisations and integrations
• Theme
• Marketing

6. Challenges relating to Moodle
• Marketing needs to decide on branding
before theme can be developed
• Content can’t be fully tested until theme is
done
• Google changed their authentication API
without much warning, LinkedIn did so twice!
• Policy around tutorial and exam booking
needed to be developed

7. Customisations to Moodle
• Started from UNE code base Modified login,
enrol and logout mechanisms to integrate
with CRM and microsite
• Customised FaceToFace plugin for tutorial
bookings.
• Custom Exam block
• Grid format
• Many changes to email behaviour
• Many language and user details changes

8. When it all comes together
• Discovered that the flow through some
learning content was unnatural or unintuitive
• Get rid of Grid format, replace by Tiles format
• More theme changes
• Customised navigation buttons plugin
• Role permission changes wrt. privacy

9. Go-live
• Check and double check content
• Create and enrol pre-registered users in
Moodle
• Change CRM to process registrations and pass
on to Moodle
• Switch over microsite to reveal Moodle