DOULS

The Online Student Personas have been updated in light of recent student testing activity.  A full report can now be viewed.

A podcast that describes the Open University’s new ePortfolio Toolset is now available to view .  The podcast briefly describes the toolset which includes the ePortfolio Activity Tool which brings integration between Moodle and Google.  This tool enables module teams to scaffold students reflective activities and content generation in two modes.  In the first mode Module teams will be able to configure the tool to enable students to pull specific documents, templates or collections of these into their Google Docs accounts.

In the second mode module teams are able to configure the tool to deliver forms to students via the Moodle interface. Student data entered within those forms can be saved to the students Google Docs account or as a .RTF.

A number of project developments have now cleared testing and have been added to our VLE code-base ready for the next system release (which is the beginning of December).

These are:

• Portfolio activity Moodle module
• Google collaborative activity Moodle module
• OpenSocial gadget connector for Moodle
• VLE Study planner gadget

The code source generated from the project now has a place to live:

https://github.com/JISC-DOULS

Some of these developments are up in the github area now – note that documentation is a bit sparse at present.

We will hopefully have some blog posts up in the next few weeks detailing these developments and demonstrating their features.

Some will be demonstrated as part of the JISC Innovating e-Learning pre-conference  activity week.

In late-November/early-December the project produced paper-prototypes of some of the gadget ideas that were formed during the staff workshops.

The paper-prototype is available to download from the documents page in pdf format.

During December some usability testing was undertaken with end-users, taking them through the paper-prototype. Some of the key points raised were:

• Getting information on events such as assignment deadlines into Google calendar was seen as useful
• There needs to be help and support around using the gadgets
• Alerting users when assignments were due was seen as useful, but there wasn’t necessarily an understanding of the features of the TMA gadget
• It should be made clear what information is being shared with Google when using gadgets.

Welcome to the DOULS project blog.

This site will contain information about the project, links to deliverables and updates on project progress.