This quote from Albert Einstein resonates to me like the perfect antithesis to most of the Learning Management Systems that I've seen up to now. In terms of technology and functionalities they are perfect, but there is no experience, no emotion when you use them. They deliver the exact opposite of what learners expect: they deliver just information.

But how can we deliver an experience through a Learning Management System?

Your LMS is more than a simple tool, it's an environment. For your learners it is their Learning Environment. Think of this environment from their perspective: how they learn, what they expect, how they interact with this environment. These type of questions can open endless opportunities to improve their digital learning experience. Below you can find 5 simple steps that will guide you in this new journey.

Step 1 : Create the vision

Before thinking of what your produ

our choices being for the prioritization of the features, tools to integrate as part of your solution or partners you would like to have building this solution for you.   

Step 2: Identify your stakeholders and understand them

Stakeholders

Your stakeholders do not restrain themselves to your learners. Anyone that will have an impact on your environment or is going to be interact directly or indirectly with it, has to be considered. Any of the stakeholder can bring a different piece for your solution: a need or a constraint. Get to know them, understand what are their hopes, pains and influence. Knowing as many as you can, helps you have a complete overview of how your solution could best satisfy them.

Step 3: Design their experience

The experience your learner will have using your solution will be key for its adoption and ultimately its success. Beyond the learning material, assignments and any other feature your solution will bring, the design is the part that can bring emotion and facilitate the learning process. “Small” things like the colors, the font, the amount of information display at once or intuitive structure can change everything. Intuitive and smooth use can move your learner mindset from “another ugly and technical tool that we have to use” to “amazing learning experience”.

Step 4: Formulate your requirements

At this point you have two important pieces of the final puzzle: the needs and constrains your solution have to satisfy and the way your solution can satisfy them. In order to get things done, you need to formulate all of them into requirements.

A requirement captures a comprehensible representation of a need or a constraint. You can for example use User Stories to formulate your stakeholders needs and constraints into requirements.

Step 5: Define your project

You have to start your project before the project starts. Hum… that's a strange statement… In fact, not so strange. Before starting building up a team and start working on your project, you need to properly define it. Why? So that: the sponsor supports you, the project team understand want needs to be done and the users know that to expect at the end.

The sponsor may have a budget that can cover only partially everything you imaged during the four first steps, so you need to prioritize.

Needs and requirements may change, so you need to know how you want to handle it. Little hint over here: Agile Requirement Management and development could help you.

To conclude

These five steps may seem simple but they are essential. At the start of a project, you should always take the time to carefully define what you want to achieve. It order to support you in the definition of your perfect digital learning environment, I will provide an in-depths explanation of each steps.

Context: offline training only

Over 100 courses are organised for the FEI by local federations every year. The difficulties of organising these events are significant, particularly for emerging or geographically remote countries. 

The aim: an interactive, personalised e-learning platform

Among other things, an e-learning platform will help to strengthen training provision and make it more accessible. It will be personalised for different users, who will be able to access a variety of media, audio and visual content. 

It will be run centrally by the FEI and also serve as a management platform for all events. Combined with local events, it is the ideal solution for exchanging information without geographical constraints.

Our role – including advice, coding and design – is to develop a tailor-made platform

All our development work has been done based on the information provided by the FEI. The user experience and design are crucial to the success of this project: as well as looking good on all devices, the platform has to convey the FEI's values and excellence. 

The platform is tailor-made to create a unique and attractive learning experience for every user. Thinking about ergonomics and graphic elements were at the heart of our cooperation. We are looking forward to the project going live in the near future.

At the time of writing there were already 4447 people enrolled. Impressive and exciting stuff.

This system allows for a much more complete picture of your learning than the diplomas and certificates we are used to ever could. You can group your badges, to provide insight into your soft skills achievemts, like communication or leadership skills, specific technical achievements in a programming language for example, vocational achievements such as sports awards etc. Now if you put yourself in the shoes of someone working in recruiting, you can imagine the usefulness of getting access to a potential employees badges, grouped to fit the application submitted. You can actually verify the information contained in the badges and you get access to a much more specific and – at the same time – broader picture of an applicant's skills.

The place to keep your badges is in the Badges Backpack provided by the Mozilla Foundation, the creators of Open Badges. The Backpack is the place where you can put your badges into groups and manage privacy settings of your badges.

Illustration taken from “Open Badges One Page Summary” courtesy of the Mozilla Foundation https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:OpenBadges–_One-pagesummary.pdf

It helps to understand the three main roles in the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI); the earner, issuer and displayer. The earner is you and me, the issuer can be an institution, organisation, company etc. using tools like Moodle or Totara learning management systems or credly.com to issue the badges. Credly provides a service for institutions or individuals not using Moodle or Totara to provide badge issuing, display and the actual creation of badges.

The integration in Moodle and Totara makes it very easy to set up badges (provided you already have a graphical image for your badge). You drag the image into the designated area on site or course level, you enter a title, description, duration… All this will make up the meta data of the badge and you're pretty much done. You can then decide on the criteria of how the badge can be earned.

There's a pretty cool tool to create badges online too: openbadges.me

What helped me better understand the benefit of Open Badges is to see the system in action from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, take a look.

Badges come in the png format, with the meta data embedded in the form of json blobs. This means badges and the information associated within them can easily be downloaded and uploaded. It is however a format meant to live on the internet, i.e. in a digital environment and there's currently no easy way to display and maybe print the information contained in the badge once it is downloaded as far as I know. The most valuable information in a badge is linked from it rather than embedded, pointing back to the badge issuers site, adding authority to your badge.

Although not central, there is an element of gamification in Open Badges. They can encourage a competitive element, the element of pride in what you achieved when you're displaying your badges as you would your trophies or cloth badges earned in a swimming course, the scouts or at a Northern Soul night.

Open Badges is a great initiative from the Mozilla Foundation and I'd like to thank them for it.

I am also much obliged to Richard Wyles and the team at TotaraLMS and Mahara.org for bringing Open Badges to my attention and for the excellent integration work they put into Moodle, Totara and Mahara.

• This year's MaharaUK conference is on in Birmingham on July 4th 5th

Within the e-learning team at Liip, we are very excited to see this new version of Moodle released for public consumption: it's various new features and performance improvements will power all our next Moodle client developments.

Let's review some highlights from the announcement:

New icons

During the 2.4 development phase, the Moodle HQ designers have worked hard to provide refreshed and modern-looking icons: this was long needed and will certainly help shifting the perception of Moodle towards a modern and nice-looking LMS.

See also:

• Visual comparison between icons in 2.3 and 2.4

Performance

The introduction of the MUC (Moodle Universal Cache) in 2.4 reportedly makes Moodle instances lighter on server resources and faster for user experiences. Its high configureability and flexibility (that allows the use of memcached, move session caches out of the database, etc), will allow us to fit its configuration to our various clients needs and we're eagerly looking forward to that!

See also:

• Caching in Moodle 2.4
• docs.moodle.org/dev/The_Moodle_UniversalCache(MUC title: Moodle Wiki: The Moodle Universal Cache (MUC) text: The Moodle Universal Cache (MUC))

Assignment improvements

Moodle 2.4 has also received a bunch of improvements in the Assignment activity. With these improvements, teachers can now:

• require students to explicitely acknowledge a submission statement;
• grade assignments offline;
• create “group” assignments (a work that has to be done by a group);
• implement “blind” marking, where students and teachers are made anonymous to each other in the marking process.

All the rest

There are plenty of other changes released in Moodle 2.4 (see the huge release notes page) and this blogpost would be kilometrical if we were to list them all, but here are some highlights of things that will be important to our customers or to us, behind the scenes:

• HTML5 is the default doctype;
• Cohorts can now be synchronised to course groups;
• LDAP authentication synchronisation now includes PHP 5.4 paged support;
• Integration of external calendars, such as Google Calendar;
• … and plenty other big or small changes all around the place that will make Moodle a better product yet again!

If any of the above change would look like an interesting improvement to your current Moodle installation, don't hesitate to get in touch with the Liip e-learning Team to discuss this opportunity with us.

Cheers, Didier

Half a year ago we at Liip had the feeling Mahara wasn't really going anywhere. We suspected there were not enough contributing developers and generally not enough interest in Mahara outside of New Zealand. The user experience and it's tie-in with institutions (as opposed to easily available services like tumblr, wordpress, facebook etc) is not where it should be for students to genuinly embrace Mahara as their own. Also the underlying idea of Mahara as a platform for life long learning never really seemed to get a chance, due to the lack of independent Mahara instances actually providing a life long hosting option. The only option going in this direction now is the occasional allumni instance provided by some institutions.

There was one very positive signal recently to counter this impression of stagnating Mahara commitment: the quiet arrival of comprehensive documentation for users and administrators via manual.mahara.org. It puzzles me somewhat that there wasn't more noise around this wonderful tool.

Then there was the release of Mahara 1.5 with important improvements that pointed in a positive diretion, coupled with the announcement of a faster, more regular release cycle and work on the next version advancing nicely. These improvements, the plans for the 1.6 release and some very interesting plugin developments were summed up passionately by Dominique-Alan Jan's keynotepresentation. One of them should make those people happy wanting to have more control over learning goals and outcomes: An adapted version of the Moodle checklist plugin to work with Mahara. The other was Extresource, making use of oEmbed which should make its way into Mahara core soon, to ease the use of embedding external content.

There were more positive examples of Mahara usage by Jon Bowen from St. Peter's College in New Zealand, listening to Jon really made me feel Mahara was THE way forward for how pupils collect, display, discuss and submit their work from an early age.

A bit of a downer came from the brief discussion that ensued from Jon's presentation about government backing of the NZ Mahara project, where Richard Wyles said after the recent departure by a key figure in the department of education the government backing was everything but certain. Both Richard and Jon assume the NZ Mahara project is now “too big to fail”. A lot of us had assumed the NZ nation wide Mahara project had been initiated and backed by the government from the start and could be used as a role model for other countries. Sadly this was never so. The project was driven by individuals from the start. I'm pretty convinced Mahara needs to be available life long from a trusted provider and I don't see who else but governments could do this. In Switzerland I believe we still have a chance to get there, but discussions have been dragging on and I feel time is limited.

During the technical workshop we had some discussions about making adding and editing content more central, maybe by changing the look and feel of the TinyMCE editor or using a different editor to get a more modern look and feel. I think much work needs to be done on user experience and I saw some interesting work in that direction by Mike Kelly from the University of the Arts London and I hope he gets this into Mahara core soon! Mike also presented a new use or feature rather with the listings directory he built for the art students. Their site is public and well worth a visit on workflow.arts.ac.uk.

Gregory Anzelj presented his work on the repository plugin for Mahara which is almost complete. It allows the use of external repositories like Dropbox, Box.net, Flickr, Google drive, Windows Sky Drive, Picasa.

Simon Story presented the use of SimpleSAMLphp to integrate Mahara with other systems. I have yet to understand in what way this adds to, extends or replaces Shibboleth.

We often hear that Mahara's too complicated for users. Again at this conference. I agree to an extent, there's too many clicks involved for many things, you can get lost, adding content is not central enough. Inline editing would be great to have. Just click on a text you want to change and immediately start typing, including autosave. There was a good input from research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/steven-wright(93bd52e4-fbf6-40a0-b3b1-a0ffc99d98af.html text: Steve Wright) (trials and tribulations of using Mahara as PhD learning journal) suggesting a simple step by step wizard for first time users when logging in to Mahara to set up the profile, create the first entry, share.

I've heard the request for better mobile integration a couple of times from our clients, now there's good news courtesy of Jon Sharp and Roger Emery presenting MaharaDroid app version 2 . Now you can do all the essential stuff like adding a journal, messaging etc from your Android device. There's nothing for Apple's iOS yet. The responsive theme I've been dreaming about might help there, but what users seem to want is a native app with on-screen “badge” notification etc. A good solution for the meantime would probably be blogging by email. This would be really helpful particularly for students reporting from work experience or research in the field.

It was a pleasant surprise to see a presentation of Mahara for midwives on the programme, as one of the universities we work with have shown interest in exactly this. I missed the presentation though because I was on the other stream with a refreshing presentation by Toshifumi Sawazakion Mahara usage in a more rural part of Japan, where several universities and private colleges (!) have collaborated to create an e-learning platform using Mahara and Moodle inside a custom portal ( F-LECCS). Apparently there is no Mahara partner in Japan, so there was a steep learning curve involved in setting up and maintaining this setup on university infrastructure.

One of the more stirring presentations was a remote one by Kristina Hoeppner on how new features make it into Mahara. She was presenting from Wellington NZ and a strong earthquake occurred in the middle of her presentation, throwing things about in the room she was in. Kristina was very brave in continuing her explanations on how to submit and track feature requests, development cycles, priorities and progress in Mahara development.

Richard Wyles presented the Open Badges project they're working on in conjunction with the Mozilla Foundation. I have yet to grasp the use for this, but judging by Richard's enthusiasm it probably makes sense :)

It was a good conference, I'm glad I attended and I hope I can bring the drive I now feel behind Mahara home to Switzerland and our new e-learning team at Liip so we too may innovate and commit to Mahara again. At the moment we're swamped with Moodle V2 migrations, so it won't be easy to keep up the momentum.

Thanks and respect to all the good people involved in organising MaharaUK 2012 and to those who presented, – great work.

It started off by me asking if they were still running Windows on the school computers used for IT training. My friend was reluctant to answer the question and said they didn't do much computer training in the classical sense anymore. Apparently using electronic devices seems to come naturally with kids these days, especially with the young ones. Even with children (like his own 7 year old) who don't have a lot of apparent access to computers, you no longer have to explain how to move pictures around by touch or mouse or trackpad, how to find software to do stuff, where to type, click, drag and drop.

I never thought of it this way before, but agreed there seems to be a lot of truth in what he said. This would be very nice indeed, as it allows to focus on actual content much more, rather than spending hours explaining the basics. I argued it was still important to learn the basics of how “the machines” that do all that stuff for us are made. And more importantly to learn about who controls what at what cost, learn about alternatives, different ways of doing things. My friend replied this was at the heart of what they try to teach the children anyway, knowing there is always an alternative way to achieve something – and this should not be limited or focused on IT. I like that approach a lot. He also said it is more important to teach the parents to find their way around this ‘digital age' as to not have this big knowledge gap between parents and children; as parents should still be able to offer guidance on what is the Internet in particular. This seems right but doesn't sound like something a school could achieve. Although it's true that the kids I know in Switzerland and the UK have impressive basic skills at handling digital devices and software I wonder if with the ones growing up around iPhones and iPads the skill won't be limited to swiping / touch screens. I think (and hope) not, but we'll have to see about that.

Mahara is…

… a web based tool to track, nurture and document your learning path.

… a container to store your artefacts (textfiles, audio files, movies, pictures) in one place.

… designed in a user centered way, giving you (and only you) full control over your content, with easy tools to share only what you want to share.

… ecouraging self reflection, self learning and learning in peer groups.

… designed to practice and encourage peer review with a system-wide feedback functionality.

… designed as a kind of reversed “walled garden”, giving you easy control over the “gardens” you work in.

… made for social networking without distraction in a controlled environment.

Mahara use cases

The most obvious use case is in education. Mahara is made to accompany you throughout an educational career, from primary school, higher education to further education and vocational training. Mahara is made for life long learning.

Since you have your CV, diplomas, awards, journals, feedback and discussions all inside Mahara, a job application is easily assembled, choosing from the elements in your Mahara that fit the job you're applying for. This leads to the use case of Mahara as a software for job agencies , – to manage and “sell” their clients.

Easy to create forums, groups, institutions, feedback forms (wherever you want them) and the option to have several blog instances per user, let you create a social networking site out of the box.

Drag & drop embedding and arranging of movies, photos and audio files make it fun to create, work with and share your content. In the primary school use case, Mahara can be used to train media skills, by having a class work with Mahara on small research projects like gathering, reporting and sharing nature observations or a day at the zoo, museum etc.

Speaking of nature, Mahara can be a platform for breeders and growers (…), to document, discuss and show off their “items”, be that cattle or flowers.

Mahara is an ideal place to document and report on work placements (which is often a requirement in higher education), voluntary work and political or environmental activism. Any example where you want to have discussion as well as documenting activities illustrates this use case really. You can write a journal, embed video, photo galleries, run discussion forums, share with and invite people to join – all inside Mahara.

I'd be happy to read about further examples of how to use Mahara, please leave a comment.

Find more information on the Mahara website mahara.org. A good place to start is manual.mahara.org