DOULS

During November Judith (our DOULS project manager) organised a number of meetings with various stakeholders throughout the university to discuss ideas for VLE gadgets with the intention of producing a candidate list of gadgets ready for research and development. These meetings included staff from a number of areas of the university including IET, student services, communications, LTS, LIO, MCT faculty and KMi SocialLearn.

We now have a initial candidate list of gadgets and our next steps are:

• Investigate feasibility of all options
• Undertake usability testing of some of the concepts
• Liaise with Personalisation strand of the VLE development programme
• Identify any issues and dependencies for the options
• Take list to steering group to approve final choices for development.

Candidate gadgets:

1. Optimised search tools for students in different faculties.  Integrate curated search engines for particular groups of students.
2. Gadget to show current week of calendar view (study planner / calendar)
   Gadget needs to know userid, passwd, makes a request to Moodle
   Moodle needs to expose data first in a way that the gadget can consume e.g. RSS feed, web service or going to a web page that returns data back.
   Gadget displays planner.
   Maybe facility to add Module calendar events to your Google calendar?
3. News feeds – module specific but also specific to a particular topic area, e.g., psychology (therefore broader than module).  These news feeds could be internal or external to OU.  Faculties and /or library would need to build/define these sources, e.g., delicious tags etc.
4. Gadget to display the latest forum post(s), wiki entries or blog updates.
5. Gadgets which update Moodle following student interactions with gadget in Google, e.g.1, if a student checks tick boxes to indicate study complete, this automatically checks the corresponding tick boxes within the study planner., e.g.2, a widget related to ePortfolio (in Google) that reports when someone’s left a comment associated with a Google document or site (could be the tutor part of formative assessment)
6. Gadget which exposes tracking data collected about a student, making it available to that student e.g. percentage of module completed.
7. Gadget for voting and rating content
8. Social gadgets, e.g., My OU story.  This will enable students to select emoticons which will track their mood over the duration of a course.  Tracks and reports on the emotional highs and lows on the student journey.  This is already a facebook app.  This app doesn’t feedback or use the VLE, therefore perhaps not a DOULS gadget as such.
9. Study buddy gadget.
   Would be able to capture and display data identifying students who are at a similar stage in their study of a module, e.g., all students who are studying chapter x or attempting to do activity y.  This information could be made available to students (who opt into service), giving them the option of studying together / set up their own forum etc.
10. A ‘future course’ gadget that gathers student’s personal interests and suggests courses based upon those interests.
11. TMA gadget.  Enables student to select a visual way to represent how far they have progressed through a course.  The visualisation should have a playful tone (because it sits in iGoogle), e.g., an egg timer, a cake, a clock etc.  Students can select a visual representation from a range of options.  Students could also sign up for prompting in the lead up to TMAs.  The prompting should be able to be modified by the student, i.e., the student can amend if there are periods when they can predict they won’t be studying, e.g., it takes account of holidays etc.  Students can choose whether they would like the prompting to be particularly frequent, e.g., ‘yes, please hassle me’.  Again the hassling should be more playful / informal outside of the OU VLE.  The gadget could be further developed so it links with the OU story (mood) gadget enabling students to respond e.g., with ‘I’m on it’, ‘I’m struggling’, ‘help’.  Perhaps a conditional response to the student reply could be the triggering of tutor support.  After submission of the TMA the student could then feedback how happy they were with their submission which may link with their final scores (linking again with OU story gadget perhaps).

iGoogle mockup showing Open University gadgets. Produced by Sarah Crompton for the OU VLE development programme event 02/12/10