How we encourage our district to use their new moodle instance....

We support school districts in their use of technology, specifically, Moodle.  We can *put up a new moodle instance in about an hr.  Technically, its a little work, but since we have been doing this for a few years, creating the site, the DB, creating a couple admin users, piece of cake.  The thing that IS NOT A PIECE OF CAKE, is getting the district to use it!

We encourage our district to use the Moodle instance by making it easier for them!

Our other districts who have moodle instances use them a little, a bit more, to not at all.

We went to one of our districts last week, for a 2 hr admin. training, of which I pulled together some Moodle administrative information and used as a guide during the training.  During this session, we listened, a lot.  Along the way we learned that the teachers at the district are over taxed, over system ed, are busy and maintain multiple accounts on different systems.  Why does this matter?  During our training, the conversation went to using LDAP, which we just implemented for another district, to authenticate accounts in the moodle.

In other words, we would leverage the existing account data, defined in an LDAP server, rather than making new accounts and passwords.  Not a huge deal, but a convenience for the teachers.

Today, my customer who we meet with, sent this message to her colleague about the use of the LDAP data.  The language that she uses is interesting to me, it is a little incorrect, but still interesting.

"In order to make Moodle accessible for any teacher interested BOCES is going to load all of our teachers using LDAP. That way they will all be enrolled and will have the same login credentials as they do for their computer."

The will have the same log in credentials as when they log into their network.  Their account will actually be created in Moodle the first time they attempt to log into the Moodle using their LDAP matching credentials.  First log in = create account.  There are no *enrollments taking place here, strictly account authentication.

Top 11 ways to encourage our districts to use their Moodle site! 

1 - configure it to use LDAP

2 - Help with whatever account creation \ enrollment process they want to follow.  If they want to allow students to create their own accounts and enroll - help them do this.

3 - Set up reasonable site policies.  Do not kill them with worries and lengthy password policies and tiny file upload limits.

4 - Show them how to use the big three activities in Moodle (assignments, quizzes, forums)

5 - Set up a sandbox course for play, enroll a sample teacher account or two

6 - Offer to go to their site and train them.  Help!

7 - Set up period review sessions (once a year at min.) discuss what has been working, what else we can do for them

8 - Provide them with data, to help justify their decision to use the Moodle.  Report logs work well for this.

9 - Show them how to send a forgot password request, how to reset a password in the account (if applicable)

10 - Show the site manager how to log into a different role in Moodle.  Great for troubleshooting issues.

11 - Allow some of the site content to be accessible to a guest.  Meaning - the consumer of the content does not have to have an account in moodle - that is easy!

If this helps the teachers to embrace the use of Moodle, i'm all in.

We shall see.