1.3.1 Provide technical guidance

1. Context

Why should you give technical guidance to your participants?

A new course or work environment can be intimidating. Your participants might use Moodle for the first time and feel uncomfortable at the beginning. Giving them technical guidance could help them feel secure and comfortable within the course. It is necessary to avoid cognitive overload: while they fight with their computer or get upset with the technics, they may not have enough brain processing left available for learning.

Therefore, it is a good habit to have them test their equipment before the course really starts. For example, you could offer them a few files of different formats to check whether their computer can manage them (e.g. a PDF file, a MP3 audio file, an embeded video...).

A technical guide is useful to explain them other technical constraints of the course. For example, depending on the platform and its configuration, this guide could:

— explain them the maximum size and number of files they can attach to a forum post or an assignment;
— make clear the forum subscription choices;
— present the structure of the email received from posts in a forum, and how to answer these properly, or how to get attached files by connecting to the Moodle site;
— show how to drag and drop files to upload them to the platform;
— help them to find useful information using navigation blocks or their MyHome page;
— present external tools used in the course and how they deal with them;
— other technical features unique to your course. 

Once the participants feel safe, they are more likely to forget the technical aspects and put all their efforts in learning.

2. Example

Below, you will find an example of a technical guide.

Hello and welcome to this online training on .......

We will spend ten weeks together, thanks to the http://moodleplatform.yourinstitute.org/ platform, run by the Moodle software.

You need to be aware of technical aspects related to distance learning and Moodle.

Testing your environment

Part of the course will be provided as downloadable files, most of them in PDF format. To display them on your screen, you will need to use a software like Acrobat Reader (https://get.adobe.com/fr/reader/ ) or activate the Acrobat plugin in your browser. Ask your local IT team about these configurations.

You will also be asked to watch videos, or pictures, and listen to recorded sounds. 

This information is accessible by clicking a link in the Moodle interface, which usually opens a new popup window.

Then, to manage all these files and links, your browser settings should be set up to:

- Allow popups
- Allow cookies
- Activate JavaScript and Flash
- Activate the Acrobat reader plugin.

During the training period, we will have several opportunities to « meet » online during synchronous virtual classes. For doing this we will use Webex meeting software. In order to participate in good conditions, plan a quiet room, a microphone and headphones. Best if you can: use a headset. Therefore, we would like you to test your Webex access by connecting to http://xxxxxxxx to check that you're ready for the first synchronous meeting on 15.03.2016.

During the first week, we will learn to know each other, participants and facilitators, and we will test the technics. Please visit the first section of the course, where you will find a few links for tests: 1. a course material in PDF,  2. a Flash video and 3. a recorded lecture to listen to. Let us know if you are facing any trouble.

We will also have an icebreaker based on the Padlet external tool, this will be an opportunity to test this tool before we use it during the main parts of the course.

File size and number

During this training, we will often interact using forums. We will also work collaboratively with a wiki and a glossary. You could also keep a blog on the platform and share articles you like with the rest of the team.

So, during this course, you will have the opportunity to write quite often, and therefore attach files (images, sound, text, spreadsheet…) to your posts. Please note that you can attach up to two files to each forum post and that their size should not exceed 20MB in order to save disk space on our Moodle server—we share it with many other courses.

Besides, if you want to share a video, then drop it on a site like Vimeo, DailyMotion or YouTube, and just share the link on a forum post. Also, if you have many pictures to share, place them on a web space like Flickr, Pinterest, Picasa, etc. and share the link. For example, videos offered in this course are hosted on the Vimeo platform.

Forum posts

Every time one of us post a message on a forum, other participants subscribed to this forum will receive an email alert from the platform. But beware, attached documents or images included in the text are not directly available in the mall. To access them, you must connect to the platform with the login and password you received a few days ago. To answer a forum post you received by email, click on the ’’Reply’’ link at the end of the message, it will forward you to the forum on Moodle site. Don’t use the Reply feature of your mailing software or your answer will be lost!

Assignments

You will have assignments to upload to the Moodle site. Again, there are limitations: for example, section 4 assignment will allow you to upload a maximum of 3 files, and each of them must not be more than 800KB. Because we hope that your answers to be synthetic and your assignments to be not too long! If your files are too large, try to decrease the size of images you have included, if any.

3. Practice

Now, it is your turn to provide technical guidance to your student.

Considering how you want to use Moodle in your course, go to your platform and write your own guide.

You might copy-paste and adapt the example provided on the previous page, or write your own from scratch, depending on your own technical constraints.