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I was flattered when invited to present at the inaugural iMoot Conference but a little worried about how many would tune in to listen as the only available timeslot that suited my schedule was Sunday 4:00pm NZ time. That means it was 11:00am for Perth, Australia (the birthplace of Moodle), 10:00pm Saturday night in New York and 3:00am Sunday morning in London... now if I lived in New York I'd probably be out at 10:00pm and if I was in London I'd be sleeping!
Speaking to a global audience via Elluminate Live! was an interesting experience... Even though we work in an online environment every day with email, blogs, online video conference and of course Moodle, at least during a face-to-face conference I know people feel obliged to come along to fill seats to make you feel better.
iMoot was a three day e-conference broken into three streams. Registration provided you with access to all recorded Elluminate sessions which is great because you can only ever be in one place at once and you always find two sessions you're interested in that are scheduled for the same time!
My Panel Presentation covered how the University of Waikato manage user and course administration processes in Moodle, I encouraged discussion so participants could share how their organisations managed these processes. Waikato use several custom-written process to automatically create course shells and import teacher access and enrolments; we also have a custom authentication method which relies of a browser cookie. Many others in the session use LDAP with the odd csv upload. There was discussion about how long students should be able to access their courses. Like Waikato, most other institutions hide their courses or alter the student's role to read only after a set time, however, there were a few of us that believe students should have access for longer.
I also had time to share how we manage upgrades and the installation of 3rd party modules which was of interest to much of the audience. The testing life of a module has several stages at Waikato before it sees the production site. A module will start by getting installed on a development site and fully tested. If this goes well (which it usually does!) the code is pushed in a git repository and another developer will pull the code to their development site for testing too. After this peer approval the code will be pulled to the full test site which is a weekly duplicate of the production server. Testing continues to ensure it plays well with the other modules on a duplicate environment to the real thing etc. When we are happy we pull the code to our training site. The training site is a production site used for staff training material and is the last step of testing before the code is pulled to eLearn, our production teaching environment. Quite an ordeal for a new module but it's better to be safe than sorry eh?
All in all a great session and useful to share our different experiences within the community.
iMoot was a three day e-conference broken into three streams. Registration provided you with access to all recorded Elluminate sessions which is great because you can only ever be in one place at once and you always find two sessions you're interested in that are scheduled for the same time!
My Panel Presentation covered how the University of Waikato manage user and course administration processes in Moodle, I encouraged discussion so participants could share how their organisations managed these processes. Waikato use several custom-written process to automatically create course shells and import teacher access and enrolments; we also have a custom authentication method which relies of a browser cookie. Many others in the session use LDAP with the odd csv upload. There was discussion about how long students should be able to access their courses. Like Waikato, most other institutions hide their courses or alter the student's role to read only after a set time, however, there were a few of us that believe students should have access for longer.
I also had time to share how we manage upgrades and the installation of 3rd party modules which was of interest to much of the audience. The testing life of a module has several stages at Waikato before it sees the production site. A module will start by getting installed on a development site and fully tested. If this goes well (which it usually does!) the code is pushed in a git repository and another developer will pull the code to their development site for testing too. After this peer approval the code will be pulled to the full test site which is a weekly duplicate of the production server. Testing continues to ensure it plays well with the other modules on a duplicate environment to the real thing etc. When we are happy we pull the code to our training site. The training site is a production site used for staff training material and is the last step of testing before the code is pulled to eLearn, our production teaching environment. Quite an ordeal for a new module but it's better to be safe than sorry eh?
All in all a great session and useful to share our different experiences within the community.
Your post clearly shows the effort that you have put in for Panel Presentation. Speaking to the global audience must have been a wonderful and an exciting experience. Great work.. Keep it on.