Student feedback experience and opinion using Moodle

Student feedback experience and opinion using Moodle Marko Hölbl, Tatjana Welzer, Lili Nemec, Andrej Sevčnikar University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Maribor, Slovenia marko.holbl@uni-mb.si Abstract- In this paper, we present experience with learning management system Moodle when used in our educational process. We discuss the use of a feedback form enabling students to asses and comment courses. Additionally, the results of a questionnaire compiled to gain data on student experiences with Moodle with focus on features of the platform and specific privacy concerns are presented. Further, the relation between the experience gained with the course and the questionnaire results is described. Students were asked about Moodle features they use and specific privacy concerns, including visibility of profiles, results and grades. Also students’ relation to giving feedback feature of Moodle is analysed. Keywords-Moodle, experience, student feedback, privacy, student opinion. Introduction Modern trends and best practices in education require usage of courseware tools in order to support the teaching and learning processes, as well as efficient assessment. In modern education the role of information technology, particularly the internet gains more importance. The term e-education is widely used to describe the information technology supported educational process. E-education can also be described as software founded on established theoretical postulates, trends in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and pedagogy. The most widely adopted accession to e-education is the form of Learning Management System (LMS), which is the basis for a reliable e-learning platform and complies with standards and best practices recommended by respectable educational and corporate stakeholders . At the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor in Slovenia we use such a solution for the design and implementation of courses that are used to support classroom training . We have decided to use an existing e-learning platform for our eCourses instead of developing a new one from scratch. After testing several systems and consulting a number of comparative studies such as , , , , we decided to use a well-established general purpose open-source LMS . Apart from flexibility and cost savings an open-source system offers the possibility of customization. After an evaluation of open source LMSs according to a set of criteria which included active community, stable development status, good documentation, didactical objective and focus on the presentation of content and communication functionalities, the final choice was Moodle , . It was chosen owing to its features, great extensibility potential and potentially adaptive features for further development. Additionally, the solution has been accepted by University of Maribor as the official LMS. Moodle is a modular and extensible platform, supporting different educational styles (e.g. distance, and web-based learning). However, we wanted to investigate, through practice and experience with student, the students’ perspective on Moodle regarding feedback and related privacy issues. In this paper we present the experience with students regarding the learning process, their feedback and additionally, results gathered from a questionnaire reflecting student experiences with Moodle regarding privacy issues. Moodle was introduced at the Institute of Informatics in 2007. Since the start of the study programmes compliant with the Bologna declaration, Moodle has to be used by all teaching staff as well as all students. All courses in our study programmes are supported in the Moodle. Additionally, localization was conducted in order to make the learning platform more accessible and easier to use. The standard modules and features provided by the Moodle community are used. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents experiences gained when using Moodle as a learning platform at our institution as well as results gathered during feedback activities conducted among students. In section 3, results of a questionnaire regarding specific privacy and usability of features in Moodle is presented. Conclusions are drawn in Section 4 which gives us possibility for further research and improvement of the education process. EXPERIENCE WITH MOODLE AND STUDENTS’ FEEDBACK Moodle has been used for several years in the teaching process, we wanted to investigate how students asses specific features and issues of Moodle. All courses featured by our department make use of Moodle as the supporting teaching platform. Lectures and practices as well as project work is supported by Moodle in form of slides, PDF documents, examples, forums, quizzes and other supporting teaching material. In the last two years we also started to collect student opinion on the performance of the teacher and teaching assistant using Moodle’s feedback form. This enables us to capture the students’ opinion while enabling anonymity, since no user credentials are stored. Therefore the students participation is satisfactory and the opinion often very realistic. The student feedback questionnaire acquires information on the assessment of teacher and teaching assistant as well as the course itself and possible supplementary parts of the course where applicable. The teacher is assessed with regard to: clarity and understandability of lectures, cooperation with students and to what extent they help and guide students in their course. Teaching assistants are assessed regarding: clarity and effectiveness of forwarding instructions for completing the exercises and projects, cooperation with students and to what extent they help and guide students in their course. The scale for assessing the mentioned issues is a mark between 1 and 5 (1 being the worst and 5 being the best grade). Furthermore a possibility for students to give further remarks and comments on the teacher and teaching assistant as well as the course in general is given. The comments section was primarily aimed to foster students’ constructive comments which could improve the teaching process. If the course incorporates additional teaching methods (e.g. seminars which are conducted in scope of lectures) this are assessed using a scale of 1 to 5, and further present the possibility of comment on the supplementary teaching methods is given. An example feedback form is depicted in Figure 1 . In general students like to asses both teachers and teaching assistants, since in general we have a reply rate over 50% of the active students in courses. However, they more rarely give additional comments and often these comments are useless, since they give replies in the sense of “I like the teacher”, “you rule”, “bad teacher / teaching assistant” and similar. Nevertheless, some students indeed give comments which have already been incorporated into courses. Later the impact through the course and the feedback form will be evaluated and if needed further changes will be made. ANALYSIS OF STUDENT OPINIONS We have additionally conducted a questionnaire to provide better insights into student opinions, expectations and reservations regarding privacy of Moodle and specific features that are used in the teaching process. The privacy aspect is tightly related to the feedback forms provided to students. The aim was to analyse the opinion of students on specific privacy aspects which is reflected in the feedback of students. As Moodle has a lot of different features including forums, messaging and graded test, a questionnaire was conducted to analyse specific aspects of these features. As students were also asked to share their opinion on the course and its performers, we wanted to investigate some privacy issues related to the issues of anonymity and possible consequences of uncovering one’s identity. Figure : Students' Feedback Form The questionnaire was conducted on a sample of 136 students from two different study programs - Informatics and Communication Technologies, and Media Communications. The two groups are also included in the before discussed feedback activities on the course and its performers. The shares of the two participating groups were 65% for Informatics and Communication Technologies students and 35% for Media Communications students. Of those 37% were first year students and 64% were second year students. The gender distributions included 77% male students and 23% female students. As both study programmes are technical study programmes, they have a majority of male students which is typical for Slovenia. However in Media communications study programme about half of the students are female which is above the ordinary distribution for technical studies in Slovenia which have about 90% of male students. The results of the questionnaire indicated that most participating students (92%) are satisfied with privacy in Moodle. The most frequent reason for dissatisfaction is that other students who participate in the same course are able to see when exercises of other students are submitted, whereas the second most frequent reason is the ability to track the status of other participants in the course, i.e., when they are online. Additionally, the view of accessibility of other users’ profile data was investigated (figure 2). The slight majority or 54% of the participants answered that all the course participants should have access and 27% believe that nobody should have access. Furthermore, 18% of the students believe that all registered user should have access to other users’ profiles. Just 1% answered that anyone should have access which indicates that students are prepared to share some personal information, but only with people they know and are not prepared to share data with strangers. The most sensitive data according to students are grades of students, contact information and the time when an exercise is submitted. Since almost 54% of the students agree that course participants should have access to other course participants’ profiles, we have considered their opinion and adequately modified Moodle’s settings. In the education process also communicational capabilities of Moodle have shown good results and better communication and collaboration with students. Such features include different forums or messaging. The questionnaire showed that 89% of students do not use the forum functionality mainly because they do not need it. The second most frequent reason was that students do not use the features generally at all and the third reason is that they do not know that this functionality even exists. Similar results were acquired for the messaging capabilities in Moodle, as 60% of students do not use it and mainly because they use e-mails instead. The main reason for using the discussed functionality is for educational purposes, e.g., to ask questions related to subject or exercises, to get help from other students or teachers and to submit exercises. Accessibility of user data Since we had good experience with the students’ feedback activities regarding teachers, teaching assistants and courses, we wanted to investigate students’ views related to expressing an opinion about teacher, teaching assistant or course using Moodle. Firstly, we wanted to investigate if students are afraid of consequences after they express a negative opinion about a teacher or teaching assistant. Nevertheless, the results show that 63% of the students are afraid of the consequences if they criticize a teacher, 84% of these students added that they opinion is not based on previous negative experience. The rest of the students, 37%, are not afraid of consequences if they criticize a teacher despite the fact that they are not anonymous. However, regarding our experience with students’ feedbacks, students are prepared and do not have problems to criticize. It has to be noted that we ensured the students anonymity which is surely an important factor when considering the sincere opinion of students. Also the survey indicated that in general students would asses a teacher if anonymity would be assured. If we further analyse the students’ relation to answering surveys, 81% of students would participate in the same survey (as was conducted for the purpose of the paper) on Moodle and would answer the same if they would be assured anonymity. Indeed, the rest of the students, meaning 19%, would not participate in this kind of questionnaire on Moodle because they do not trust that questionnaire would be anonymous. To conclude the questionnaire we also investigated students’ general opinion on e-learning and Moodle. The thing they like the most about Moodle is the fact that they can access learning material and exercises from anywhere and that the learning material is located in one place. A positive side of Moodle resp. an e-learning system is that they are informed about almost everything through e-mail. Overall the students’ opinion on e-learning is positive and they observe it as very interesting possibility for learning. Conclusions In the paper we presented experiences when using Moodle in teaching and students feedback on teachers, teaching assistants and courses. To further corroborate the relevance of the feedback, a questionnaire analysis conducted among students investigating specific aspects of privacy and usability as well as the general opinion of e-learning and Moodle was carried out. It is interesting to point out, that students were willing to participate in the feedback activities and answer the questionnaire. More than 90% of students said that “they have no problem with filling-out these kinds of surveys, anonymously or not”. We suppose that this enthusiasm comes from good experiences our students have with the addressed Moodle’s features. The feedback answer rate was also satisfactory, since more than 50% of students in general give feedback regarding the course and its performers. While we are still drawing exact conclusions, and deciding on the impact these results will have on the future usage of Moodle, it is already visible that the opinions are not unique, and that requirements, attitudes, and beliefs of students are rather diverse. A lot of students are very willing to present ideas for potential changes in the application of certain features of the system in our practice, and initiatives for upgrading of teaching material and techniques. Some of the student’s suggestions have been incorporated into Moodle, e.g. the ability to view only data of course participants for the same course. A general picture revealed, that students are satisfied with Moodle and are prepared to actively participate in developing courses with their suggestions and comments. Some issues regarding privacy of user’s profiles which were emphasized by the interviewees. Nevertheless, students are generally aware of the benefits e-learning strategies keep introducing to our teaching practice. Our future work could include topics on students’ opinion on potential improvements on the contents or features of Moodle. References Moodle web page, http://moodle.org/, last visited: 15th March 2011. The department of Informatics Moodle web page, http://moodle.informatika.uni-mb.si, last visited: 15th March 2011. O. Ahmed, “Migrating from Proprietary to Open Source Learning Content Management Systems”, Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2005. Z. Budimac, Z. Putnik, M. Ivanović, K. Bothe, K. Schützler, “On the Assessment and Self-Assessment in a Students Teamwork Based Course on Software Engineering“, Computer Applications in Engineering Education, Wiley Periodicals, 2009. F. Di Domenico, E. Panizzi, A. Sterbini, M. 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