Alex Little

Spent most of the last week at work running the training sessions for students in how to use the Moodle website we’ve set up – to fairly mixed results. I’ve had several problems/issues so far, the main one being that although the students have signed up for particular dates/times, these arrangements seem to be almost completely ignored. The day before the training I’ve posted up the list of students and times for the sessions the next day, but this doesn’t seem to have helped.

On Friday I had 20 students scheduled for both the 2:30pm and 4pm sessions. At 2:30, around 30 students arrived, only 3 of whom were the ones who had booked for that session. Given there are ony around 12 working PCs in the training room, it’s difficult having around 3 students sharing one machine – I was also reluctant to send any away, given that at least they’d turned up and seemed keen. I gave the the option of coming back for one of the other sessions, but no-one seemed to take me up on this. For the 4pm session only 20 showed up, but again these weren’t the ones who had booked.

The training during the rest of the week was similarly chaotic – so am expecting the same on Monday – with another 3 sessions each of 20.

The abilities of the students seems worryingly mixed, given that these are 1st, 2nd and 3rd year computer science students, I would expect them to know how to go to a website and enter a username and password they’ve been given – but not so in all cases. During the training I must spend at least the first two thirds explaining how to login, leaving little time for much else. When they first log in I’ve set up the site so they need to change their password, unfortunately many seem to change theirs to ’123456′ or even ’123′.

OK, maybe I’m being a little unfair and certainly not all students need much help to get going, but it does surprise and worry me that so many have such difficulty given what they are studying and that in a couple of years (or maybe even only in October) they’ll be teaching computer science or getting jobs as computer ‘experts’.

I spoke to the head of dept about this and basically he agreed with me and that he thought it was mainly just due to lack of experience and practice using a computer. The first years I can partially excuse as they’ve only just arrived at Uni and are unlikely to have even used a computer before, but the 2nd and 3rd years have had relatively good access to computers in the labs – which are quite well equipped and open almost 24 hours.

Something else I’ve noticed is that although most of the female students signed up for the training, only one has actually turned up. Around 20% of the students are female and I’ve had around 150 students attend training, so around 30 should’ve come along.

On the plus side of all of this, 250+ students have logged in and used the site – so maybe I’m only getting the less confident students coming for training and the others haven’t bothered to attend.

I’ve also had a request from Dr Zaid (Dean of the Business College) to train all the business college staff (around 150) in how to use Moodle, with a view to getting the post graduate students using the site. This is really positive for me, it’s good to have someone in the Uni management who is really positive and keen to get the system actually used.

There’s certainly going to be enough work to keep me going for a little while yet!