Moodle day

The day went well. The best part was being away from the office and its demands and therefore having "permission" to think of nothing else (or be distracted by nothing else.)

Three high schools and three private RTOs were represented. Only two of these institutions are actually online in any way shape or form. Three of the participants were technical support people; ie not trainers but the support staff who would be dealing with a large amount of the workload in maintaining the site and managing a major part of student support requests.

Peter, the main facilitator (grant high school) gave us an overview of online delivery from his experience. (this can be found in the workshop moodle sandpit on my website in Peter's space).

After that it was the practicalities of the tools available for delivery, assessment and student results management as they were available in moodle. We also dicscovered a few more blockages created by the existing server, for example the wiki does not have the freedom it needs to operate and email direct out of moodle is blocked as well.

The last topic of discussion for the day became very technical but we looked at a range of servers both in and outside of australia and their relative costs and services. The politics of why australian servers are so very expensive by comparison was explained by one of the high school system managers (something to do with ancient history on pricing structures by telstra on per mgb model rather than flat service rate).