Workshop Week
Following my last posting, I’ve been trying to not think about what may or may not happen 3-6 months in the future, and concentrate on the immediate few days ahead. Although for info there is a possibility that I’ll actually be back in UK July or August – depending on whether any extension is approved and whether there is anything actually happening at the University during the holiday break!
Anyway, back to the last few days… I’m now at the end of a week long series of half-day Moodle training sessions for staff, although it’s not been as intense as first sounds. Monday was a public holiday and the posters for the training sessions had only been approved and distributed to departments after 5pm on the Friday the week before, so given the short notice, I wasn’t too surprised when no-one showed up for either the Tuesday morning or afternoon sessions!
The attendance rate was (fortunately) vastly improved on the Wednesday and Thursday sessions, 35 teachers in all. Although we did have several disruptions, notably due to power cuts of 10-15 mins at a time – at least one power cut per session, it did give us time to go for a coffee in the staff lounge and generally the sessions seemed to go down well.
The main problems occurred at the beginning of the session when I was showing teachers how they could log into the site. I’d been given a list of all Business College staff so I could create their accounts beforehand and give them appropriate permissions. When Ethiopian names are transliterated into Latin script, there can be numerous variations of the same name, so what was on the list I’d been given may not reflect how that individual usually writes their names in Latin characters.
Because of these differences, when I then ask the teachers to log in, it very often fails. I then spend a few mins sorting out their account profile so they can finally log in to the site. This can be very disruptive to the training, as it can be 30-45 mins into the session before everyone has even logged in – it doesn’t get the session off to a good start or give a good impression of the site.
I’ve been having a think about how I can overcome this for future training sessions, but haven’t come up with any suitable solutions. A couple of the options I’ve considered are:
- Using a set of generic user accounts ‘teacher01′, etc. This may work better for the training sessions, but when teachers come to log in with their real accounts, if they have problems (and on the evidence of my training at least half will), I won’t be on hand to fix their account details.
- Creating the accounts as staff arrive at the training. Attendees don’t usually arrive promptly, so there may be time before the session starts to set up the accounts, ensuring the correct spelling is used. Setting up the accounts and permissions like this can still be time consuming, and although everyone doesn’t arrive on time (usually 20-30 mins late!), they still often come all at once.
If anyone has any other suggestions as to how I might handle this, then please post a comment below 
