administrators, when the LMS is based upon the cloud computing platform. ... significance of various components of cloud-based open source Moodle Learning ...
International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies Volume 11 • Issue 1 • January-March 2016
Creating Collaborative and Convenient Learning Environment Using Cloud-Based Moodle LMS:
An Instructor and Administrator Perspective Vikas Kumar, Sharda University, Greater Noida, India Deepika Sharma, Jagannath University, Jaipur, India
ABSTRACT Students in the digital era are habitual of using digital devices not only for playing and interacting with their friends and peers, but also as a tool for education and learning. These digital natives are highly obsessed with the internet driven portable devices and always demand for a multimedia rich content. This specific demand needs to be addressed by college teachers in the teaching -learning pedagogy design and implementation. The integration of pervasive computing in traditional classroom pedagogy can boost new learning experience for cyber savvy students in higher education. Learning Management System (LMS) as a pervasive computing can be embedded in classroom pedagogy to support learning inside and outside the classroom. LMS can play a supportive role to teachers and administrators in higher education to facilitate them in their work. This becomes more significant to the teachers and administrators, when the LMS is based upon the cloud computing platform. This paper explores the significance of various components of cloud-based open source Moodle Learning Management System with a specific focus on teachers and administrators in higher education. A learning theory approach has been followed to map the requirements of the teachers and the administrators and specific cases and examples have been presented. Keywords GLUE, LA-eR, Learning Management System, LTI, Moclog, Monsys, Moodle, Plagiarism, Survey, Workshop
INTRODUCTION Learning is an integral part of the human life and occurs from birth to life long. Learning refers to the process of acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviours, skills and values and it may also involve synthesizing different types of information (Phillips et al., 2010). Traditional learning pedagogy is limited within the classroom boundary with limited student’s participation. It is also restricted by time and place limitations (Lehtinen et al., 1999). The learning process traditionally is managed, governed and controlled by teachers in the classroom, whereas the student is a passive receiver. Various educationists and pedagogy experts favoured the student participation in learning process during classroom activities (Naidu, 2006; Felder & Silverman, 1988), advocating a shift in the teaching – learning pedagogy. Learning framework can be broadly categorised as: Cognitivism, Behaviourism and Constructivism. Human cognitivism is focused on the acquisition of knowledge (Greeno, 1980),
DOI: 10.4018/IJWLTT.2016010103 Copyright © 2016, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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whereas behaviourism focuses on observable aspects of learning (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Constructivist theory on the other hand focuses on activity –based approach to construct new ideas or concepts (Smith & Ragan, 1999). According to Froebel (Froebel quoted in Palmer, 2002), self-activity helps to exercise and develop intellectual powers and knowledge. Wenger (2000) also points out that learning is interplay between social competence and personal experience. Heidegger (quoted in Palmer, 2001) viewed learning as a demanding and participatory affair with active engagement of learner. This favours the learning approach of Kagan (1994) to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. According to Kagan, students can learn with face to face interaction, individual and in group for knowledge building. This method supports the group learning in academic environment with higher level thinking and improved social skills. In group learning communication is more powerful when participation of individuals is more active (Freire in Nyirendra, 1996). Johnson et al. (2009) have also described the individual growth of human in dynamics of group. The idea can be utilized in education where teachers and students can co-participate in active dialogue in higher education. For active participation and communication of learners in an activity, some tool mediation will play an important role for flow of ideas (Vygotsky, 1978). Computer as a mediation tool will provide great benefits for communication and participation for teachers and students in the academic environment. Various researchers and academicians have explored the computer supported activity in sharing the experience and knowledge in social environment (Mwanza, 2001; Sweeney & Baggo, 2004). According to Bruner (1966 quoted in Hymas, 1974), computing network facilitates learning for constructing knowledge by students. Computer supported teaching tool provides interaction via text, chat, audio or video real time communication (Stuckey & Barab quoted in Andrews & Haythornthwaite, 2007). It also provides contributions of students, in collaborative learning and exchange of ideas with peers (Koschmann et al., 1996). Collaborative learning moves the learning process beyond the classroom boundary (Abel, 2009). Collaborative learning environment facilitates teachers and students, who are geographically situated on or off campus via online discussion, face to face lectures and other blended learning modes (Kazmer, 2007). For structuring the collaboration in online mode, technological aspects become very much important. Digital tools will support the technological perspective in designing the online collaborative learning environment. TEACHING-LEARNING THEORY PEDAGOGY Teaching learning theory pedagogy provides the theoretical foundation of collaborative learning environment. Two learning theories: Social Constructivist and Connectivism have been discussed in this section to have a better understanding of the pedagogy needs. Social Constructivism Theory Social constructivist theory approaches the development of a learner in social context. According to Russian psychologist Vyotsky (Chaiklin, 2003), children needs support and help from teachers in learning situations. His idea of ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ (ZPD) provides learning in socially mediated activity. The ZPD is built around the idea of working for teachers and students in collaboration. This allows teachers to provide assistance and gain valuable insights about how understanding might be extended. On the other hand, students are engaged in working while sharing background information and participate in the collaborative activities. The learners construct their own knowledge while negotiating the meaning with other participants (Maddux et al., 1997; Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). Social constructivism theory places more emphasis on students rather than instructors. The process of engagement during collaboration enables the students to rethink, refine for their performance to make it more effective. The instructor is responsible to facilitate the student in learning process. Learning activities should be designed by instructors, so that the students can easily grasp and exercise their current knowledge. This will assist in construction of knowledge (Crawford, 1996; Doolittle & Hicks, 2003). 36
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On the similar constructivist paradigm, Lave & Wenger (1991) proposed the idea of legitimate peripheral participation with a focus on social learning process. His idea of learning, places individual as active participants in the practices of social communities (Wenger, 1998). From these perspectives, learners are apprenticed into ‘communities of practice’ which embody certain beliefs and behaviours (Dougiamas & Taylor, 2003). These ideas of social mediation of learning can be extended to social group and applied to the development of intelligence, expertise in academic disciplines, and metacognitive skills, and to the formation of identity (Vyotsky, 1978). Connectivism Theory Connectivism learning theory was proposed by Siemens for the digital age environment (Siemens, 2005). Siemens recognized the impact of technology on society, where people communicate and learn with each other. Connectivism provides a premise and framework that are very useful for understanding collaborative environment in online learning process (Siemens, 2005). Learning in the digital age is no longer dependent on individual knowledge acquisition, storage, and retrieval; rather, it relies on the connected learning that occurs through interaction with various sources of knowledge (including the Internet and learning management systems) and participation in communities of common interest, social networks, and group tasks. In Connectivism, learning is a process that occurs based upon a variety of continuously shifting elements (Baraka, 2012). There is a lot of information in the connected network that changes rapidly, hence only vital information should be filtered at an individual level. The new information can change thinking, so that future decisions are based on the latest information. Connectivism presents itself as a pedagogical approach that affords learners the ability to connect to each other via social networking or collaboration tools. Siemens believed that in connectivism, we need to rely on network of people to store, access and retrieve knowledge and motivate its use (Siemens, 2005). Learning is viewed as multi-faceted and particular tasks define “which approach to learning is most appropriate to the learner?” From this perspective, learning consists of retrieving information from self, others, and machines, collaborating to create knowledge, and applying information to current contexts (Baraka, 2012). Hence, Siemens learning theory is about individuals connecting with each other and with technology. Effective learners are those who can cope with complexity, contradictions, and large quantities of information, who seek out various sources of knowledge, and who can create and sustain learning communities and networks. In online learning environment interaction and dialogue among learners is required to construct knowledge (Baraka, 2012). Collaboration and interaction among the students during learning process leads to better knowledge exchange and effective learner participation, which further enhances the instructional outcome (Lehtinen et al., 1999). Collaborative learning assists in constructing knowledge or solving problems with active participation of students with coordinated efforts (Salmons, 2008). Knowledge construction, solving problems with negotiation will lead to higher order thinking skills in student. The students can freely interact with their peers with discussion, collaboration, negotiation and feedback (Darling-Hammond et al., 2003). The students gain rich knowledge through shared goals and shared exploration in collaborative environment. The above theories conclude that collaborative model is a learner-centered model. The construction of knowledge is facilitated by social interaction of learner. In collaborative environment, the learner resolves the social problems facilitated by integrated process of experience incorporated by feedback procedure (Lewin, 1946). The information feedback provides the basis of goal directed action to the learners.
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LMS SUPPORTING COLLABORATIVE AND CONVENIENT ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Learning Management system is a software package used to administer one or more courses to one or more learners (Gallagher, 2007). It is a web based system that allows learners to authenticate themselves, register for courses, complete courses and take assessments. LMS is designed for teachers to meet pedagogical goals to deliver the content to students (Machado & Tao, 2007). It is considered as a means to improve the efficiency of teaching and to control and regulate teaching (Coates et al., 2005). The ideal LMS should be able to centralize and automate the administration, support standard and portability, deliver content rapidly, consolidate training initiatives on a scalable web based platform, personalize content and reuse knowledge (Ellis, 2009). Learning Management systems are available in both the proprietary and open source mode. By keeping technology affordances factor in mind, various researchers argued for acceptance of open source products in academics (Cole, 2005; Anaraki, 2006; Steel & Levy, 2009; Al-Ajlan, 2012). Open source software enables integrated learning environment for teachers and administration to serve the needs of universities and colleges (van Rooij, 2009). An open source product allows development or manipulation in source code to fulfil the demands of desired system by academics environment. Moodle and Sakai are the open source learning management systems (LMS), which are very popular among academics (Monarch Media, 2010). The total number of registered sites of Moodle LMS is 63,013 in 222 countries and it is used by 78,075,704 users across the world (Moodle.org- Moodle Statistics, 2015). Moodle supports more than 120 languages that assist users to localise their Moodle site (Dougiamas, 2015). Moodle LMS is very much popular among learner community as its pedagogical approach is based on social constructionist pedagogy (Philosophy – MoodleDocs, 2015) and is able to penetrate in higher education. Moodle platform is based on sound pedagogical principles to help educators to create effective online learning environment (Kozaris, 2010). Moodle is the most user-friendly and flexible free open-source courseware product, available all over the world (Al-Ajlan, 2012). A study conducted by Cole (2007) shows that Moodle is the best learning management system for learning framework in higher education as it has strong documentation, administration and security support with IMS/SCORM (Information Management System / Shareable Content Object Reference Model) standards. Moodle can work with wide range of database systems and assists in installing, administering and using the LMS (Steel & Levy, 2009). According to eLearning Guild research, Moodle is ranked as the top LMS product among 100 professionally –developed LMS products (Davis et al., 2009). Moodle provides tools to assess user level of engagement and learning status (Mazza et al., 2012). Instructors can evaluate the activity execution by individual student and points to improve the learning areas. The teachers can create structured and organised lesson plans while making slides, providing text documents, web links, links to simulation of labs (Komninou et al., 2012). Moodle LMS facilitates the different stakeholders in many ways. The administrator manages the Moodle site once it has been installed by authentication to new users. Managing user accounts, enrolment for users to course, roles and permissions to students, teachers and other users, security and backup of the course material and additional references are the main activities carried out by the administrators (Managing a Moodle site – MoodleDocs, 2015). The administrators create courses, update existing courses, assign courses to users and update existing users in Moodle learning management system. Today, the education becomes independent of time and space (Gao, 2015). Students need the flexibility to work at a time that best works for them without bothering their fellow classmates, and also have convenience of working at their own pace (Ragupathi, 2013). This leads to a search of technical infrastructure that gives convenience in learning, independent of time and space. Cloud computing offers a good computing solution for such environment. Cloud and distributed computing break the accessibility and technical infrastructure limitations (Baraka, 2012). Cloud computing, defined as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service 38
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provider interaction” is one of the major drivers of change in education (Conde et al., 2013). The cloud computing technology provides flexible infrastructure with enormous storage on demand services via internet in a reliable and efficient manner. Cloud computing allows to efficiently manage upgrades and maintenance, backups, disaster recovery and failover functions (Zaharescu, 2012). This may increase reliability by serving current needs by increasing and decreasing the capacity of the computing resources. Cloud computing reduces the investment on purchasing the hardware, software and software licenses by providing services on rental basis (Pocatilu et al., 2010). Cloud computing applications have mobility feature that can be accessed through internet on any PC, laptop, tablet, smartphones or mobile device. Mobility feature of cloud computing gives new opportunity for education since it provides more chances for students to personalize their collaborative learning process, enhance the social interactions, learn more effectively and more autonomously, and collaborate with other peers and teachers at anytime, anywhere basis, inside and outside the formal collaborative learning context (Caballe et al., 2010). Cloud computing usage in learning environment facilitates technology affordance with economic survival in academics. Various studies have shown the cloud computing infrastructure benefits to the educational institutions. Learning Management system (LMS) deployed on cloud computing infrastructure can achieve greater benefits from cloud computing (DespotovicZrakic et al., 2013) by accessing the system from any location and at any device in an affordable way. The learning platform in cloud computing is virtual learning environment to track e- learning courses and activities created by instructors (Al-Zoube, 2009). Cloud-based learning management system supports the teachers and students to design the new interesting educational activities to enhance teaching–learning experience and also provides a single point to access and manage student record and course content to the administrators (Al-Zoube, 2009). Moodle has been designed using sound pedagogical principles to help educators create effective online learning communities (Anaraki, 2006). Moodle based on cloud computing provides tools to instructors, administrators to monitor and engage students in online courses. According to Cole (2005), Moodle is a virtual learning environment that lets teachers provide and share documents, assignments, quizzes, forums, chats etc. with students in an easy-to-learn and user-friendly interface. Moodle LMS is highly efficient with its compatibility and extendibility features with third party systems and plug-ins (Anarki, 2006). It supports customization, creation and development of courses for learning extension to engage students with instructional learning material at any place and at any time in virtual learning environment. Moodle learning management system based on cloud computing technology will play a vital role in professional education. COLLABORATIVE AND CONVENIENT ONLINE LEARNING USING CLOUD: BASED MOODLE LMS Cloud computing based Moodle LMS follows the socio-constructivist theory and supports the collaborative and convenient learning environment for individual and collective learning through interactive learning activities. Instructors can motivate students for collaborative learning in team and group work. Online discussions and forums are present in moodle learning management system (Bailye, 2013) to support the same. The instructors can access the forums to check the active participation of the learners, while the administrator can take report of all listed comments in a site or course. Instructors can create repositories of e-book and supplementary notes for extra reading material that can benefit the student’s knowledge and administrator can schedule course backups. The administrator can generate the course overview report on most active courses and most participatory courses over a certain period of time (Course overview report – MoodleDocs, 2015). The instructors can track the progress graph of the learner by examining participation in different learning activities of open source Moodle LMS. The log of course activity can be generated by Moodle administration in accordance with teaching and participation level. In teaching level, the action performed by teacher that affects students learning can be recorded, whereas, in participating level, the event or action 39
International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies Volume 11 • Issue 1 • January-March 2016
performed by users reflecting their learning experience can be generated as reports (Site-wide reports – MoodleDocs, 2015). Figure 1 illustrates a consolidated view of teacher, students and administrator engagement with Moodle LMS. The instructors can use the extension and compatibility features of cloud based Moodle LMS to track the progress of students. Moodle can incorporate various plug-ins, such as: students’ performance analyzer tools, instructor and student monitoring tool, modules with support of plug-ins and extension from third party tools. Moodle has built in learning analytics tools and extension tools for helping in analyzing the performance of students. Various higher order thinking plug-ins modules are helpful for teachers that inculcate critical thinking in students and resolve complex problems by granular simulations. Moodle plug-ins and extension tools help teachers to analyze students learning track and also provides a scope of improvement. Student’s Performance Analyzer Tools in Moodle The student’s assessment and performance tools are very much important to assess the learning behaviour in online learning environment. Student’s behaviour with learning activities can be mapped by determining their participation, contributions to forums, discussion, creativity and innovation in product development, sharing and support in group activities. Instructors should be provided with new assessment strategies and tools for better understanding of online collaborative students activities. The cloud based Moodle LMS integrates certain module that is in–built and used as extension modules in learning management system. Learning analytics tools such as workshop and survey module are in-built tool of Moodle LMS, whereas LAe-R and Moclog are developed and can be integrated as an extension tool in Moodle LMS for assisting and facilitating instructors to judge student performance, strengths and weakness in cloud –based collaborative and convenient learning environment. Moodle Built-In Learning Analytics Tool Moodle LMS built in learning analytics tools help the teachers to assess student learning in online environment. The two modules, (a) Survey Module and (b) Workshop Module assist in student assessment. Teachers can analyze and evaluate the student performance based on reports and assignments.
Figure 1. Student, teacher and administrator engagement with the Moodle LMS
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International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies Volume 11 • Issue 1 • January-March 2016
Survey Module Survey module supports the instructors in analysing online classes using COLLES (Constructivist on Line Learning Environment Survey) and ATTLS (Attitudes to Thinking and Learning survey) tools (Dougiamas, 2015). The tools assist in assessing and stimulating learning in online environment. The online survey generates reports and graphs that can be downloaded in comma separated value (csv) format. Instructors can use this data to analyse about the students learning interest in the class and get reflection on their own teaching. Workshop Module Workshop module is a peer assessment activity module benefits for teachers and students. Workshop activity is a self, peer and teacher learning evaluation tool in Moodle LMS. Workshop module encourages independence and responsibility of student with the workshop activity (Workshop module - MoodleDocs, 2015). It supports the task evaluation criteria and students submit the assignment work. Students (not only teachers) formally assess each other work to provide feedback. In grading evaluation phase, the peer grades are reviewed for accuracy and consistency. Moodle Learning Analytics Tool as an Extension Various tools are designed and developed that can be integrated with Moodle to analyze learning analytics. Learning Analytics Enhanced Rubrics (LAe-R) and MOCLog are present tools that facilitate teachers to analyze student performance based on their online collaborative activities in the system. These tools are used as an extension to Moodle LMS. Learning Analytics Enhanced Rubric: LAe-R To analyze student performance and interaction in the activities of the system, instructors can deploy new learning analytics tool LAe-R (Learning Analytics Enhanced Rubric) as Moodle plug-in (Dimopoulos et al., 2013). This tool supports the modern learning pedagogical structure for computer supported collaborative problem solving and enquiry learning methods. LAe-R is an upgraded version of current existing rubric plug-ins. The LAe-R encompass learners interaction, collaboration, social connections, use of learning resources such as websites, forums and grades of assignments. The tool supports the instructors in analyzing the effectiveness of the online course design for quality improvements and assessing student performance on the basis of online data collection analysis. The LAe-R tool is an advanced grading method helps instructors to analyze key skills and competencies level of students in a Moodle Learning Management System. Learning analytics enhanced rubrics helps to evaluate the skills, knowledge and learning abilities of the students. To evaluate the performance levels, the data is collected and processed according to specified criteria to produce learning analytics in Moodle database tables. The criteria can measure, deduce and consolidate student interaction and their learning path with online course in Moodle learning environment. To analyze the student performance respective to ‘collaboration’ criteria, the LAe-R tool visualizes and analyse chat messages and interaction in forum posts. To analyse the study behaviour of student, this tool analyzes the use of specified learning resources, course material and websites. Assessments of given indicators helps the teacher to evaluate the student performance in qualitative and quantitative mode that leads to attain educational goals. Due to the advanced customization and assessment feature, the tool can be highly accepted by educators. MOCLog MOCLog tool is based on didactical theory with physical data or log files by analysis of contents on online courses by teachers. Deeper analysis of student behaviour in learning is done by teachers by checking the status of online activities using information on log data. The online tool MOCLog is beneficial for analyzing log data of students on the Moodle LMS (Mazza et al., 2012). The MOCLog is used in the analysis and monitoring of student’s data in online courses to achieve quality learning 41
International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies Volume 11 • Issue 1 • January-March 2016
in higher education. The MOCLog system can be useful for deeper understanding of student progress towards educational goals. The MOCLog system support teacher and administrators for monitoring online activities. The all stakeholders of Moodle system have different aspects and use cases to monitor the activities. Administrators compile reports, identify usage trends and analyze individual courses with individual coaching to supports eLearning strategy. Administrators identify the activities working status by selection of parameters to find root cause. They can analyze the course access by teachers; forum usage by teachers posted messages, resources usage by teachers. Teachers needs to analyze the use the online course access, resources and assignment uploaded by the students and usage of forum for interaction with other students and peers. Students use the LMS monitoring for assignment feedbacks, information about resources visit and attempt to quizzes. The MOCLog model can be used in different use cases to identify which information is extracted and visualized from a Moodle LMS. Students and teachers use-cases could be used to monitor collaboration among students; interaction of students and teacher or; knowledge testing that can be achieved by extracting and visualized by observing chat, forum posts, feedback assignment, quiz submission in the time. By looking the usecase, MOCLog system offer novelties by configuring course domain, date and time period, roles, user groups and profiles. The MOCLog system fulfils the goals of effectiveness by task completion, efficiency and satisfaction to achieve learning goals. Instructor and Students Monitoring Tool: MonSys The MonSys tool is created on teacher-student relation model. The teacher can create better relationship with student by helping in solving problems and doubts and providing feedback for the academic work done (Emerenciano et al., 2001). Moodle LMS provides activities with collaborative team participation and monitoring students and teachers participation. To promote improvements in learning monitoring is an essential task. Systematic observation is required for progress of activities to improve student performance and to make task for teachers. The MonSys –Monitoring System of tutors and students (Franca et al., 2012) tool analyze the students and teacher activities for the online course in Moodle LMS and extract useful information from the database. The MonSys supports administrators to monitor student and tutor access to courses and activities in Moodle LMS to generate information. It measures the performance of students and tutor activities by tracking and monitoring course, grades, student access and tutor access. The MonSys system in moodle presents the summary of course access, number of students, course start date, status and closure date etc. The system allows to view the summary of courses to get average number of course access; view the students’ grades; tutors and students access in the discipline. It offers the Tab Tutor to list the name of tutors who did not rate at least one of the activities of students in the Moodle class and tab student to list students who did not access the online course from specified days. The system incorporates user module to list the names and logins of users of Moodle; alerts module to send alerts to students who not attend the online course for a specific period of time and setting module to set parameters of MonSys. Higher Order Thinking Plug-ins in Moodle Teachers can integrate certain plug-ins in Moodle LMS to develop higher order skills in students. They can introduce realistic problems through simulation or game on computer based learning environment (Martens, 2004) that will assist for intrinsic motivation towards learning in students. Understanding of learning material is required for increase motivation of students in relation with e-learning environment (Martens, 2004). Instructors can create simulative activities in Moodle that encourages students to implement knowledge skills. Beaver: Competitive Questions Repository Beaver program in Moodle is implemented by the group of teachers to improve problem solving skills in students (Kotzer & Elran, 2012). The group of teachers can post competitive questions to clear basics of a particular subject. The individual student can participate in the program to solve out 42
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the question. The beaver repository facilitates the teachers to create online question bank that will support students to stay and practice in competitive examination. By deploying beaver, teachers can significantly attain the objectives towards learning. Granular: Simulation and Activities Embedded interactive multimedia content in courses is highly important for understanding the fundamentals clearly. Teachers can use it to ensure high quality learning outcomes. For effective knowledge construction, MOT-Tec (Kotzer & Elran, 2012) module can be implemented in Moodle LMS to stress for higher order thinking skills with list of activities. MOT Tec integrates learning activities with computerized applications, short videos, simulations, educational games on selected topics. The instructors are free to add or change the content accordingly. Learning can happen in enjoyable way through enquiry as well as discovery. The learning task in the quiz form is placed on the top and granular simulations are present in the bottom. The students respond the interactive simulations and show the interest in learning activities. Students will gain higher ordered thinking skills by actively engaging in interactive applications. The instructors are benefitted by making students understand the complex activities by reducing in granular module. By applying MOT TEC instructors can use technical interesting tools to enhance learning process in classroom. It will benefit students to gain good grades in exams. Moodle Extension with Third Party Tools Moodle facilitates third party tools to rich and leverage learning environment. The instructors are free to plug-ins the familiar external learning tool to facilitate the students in various learning activity. GLUE and LTI are the good examples of third party tools that facilitate the instructors. GLUE Moodle LMS allows teachers to broaden the online array of tools to enact learning activities in online learning environment to promote collaborative activities using new technologies. It provides centralization of external tools and resources to facilitate designs and ideas for group activities. GLUE and GLUE!-PS (Alario-Hoyos et al., 2012) enables third party tools for sharing and reuse of learning designs that reduce the burden of instructors to create complex activities structure for a group. Instructors are free to use familiar external tools such as Google Documents, DabbleBoard and WebCollage or any latest tool. GLUE and GLUE!-PS is a three –tier service –oriented, loosely coupled architecture enables automatic deployment of learning designs by multiple authoring tool in Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. LTI: Learning Tools Interoperability Moodle LMS supports teachers or instructors with interoperability feature with remote tools and contents. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) tool (Henrick, 2012) facilitates the interaction between the third party provider system and the LMS, by LTI provider and LTI consumer. LTI is a set of integration interfaces that enables talk between two systems in a common protocol. It facilitates instructors to configure the connection to the external tool as a link within the Moodle course area. The developer of the tool just implements the LTI standard and need to provide the connection details to those who need to integrate it. LTI provider reveals the url and secret keys to access the resources. There are number of tools exists that provides IMS LTI compliance. Wordpress, MediaWiki, Music flight, ChemVantage and Web-PA are few sites that follow IMS LTI compliance. The external tool and LTI plugins extends its support in Moodle for real course sharing and collaboration across multiple learning management system.
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Plagiarism Check Tools Online judge system assists for grade submission, compile, execute and test against pre-data values for judging its validity and correctness. Online judge can be used in programming contests to judge programming skills and can be used in Moodle courses (Kurnia et al., 2001). Moodle plugins for online judge assignment plagiarism and assignment on Github for compiling different programming related computer science subjects (Zhigang et al., 2012), supports 40 programming languages where students can upload programming of data structure, compilers, algorithms and operating systems. Moodle online judge evaluates the grades of the submitted assignment. The files uploaded are passed to online judge library and passed through different test cases. When file passes the test cases the grade is added to the final grades. To detect the similarity of programs MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) plagiarism plugins can used. Various programming languages are supported in MOSS plagiarism to highlight the cheated code in the assignment. Various feature used in MOSS are confirmation, support to various documents, history and multi –configures. The MOSS displays the list of reference for comparison of the cheated contents in the assignment. The teacher confirms the students, if assignment is copied from the reference by clicking the confirmation button. The notification is sent through the Moodle Message System to the students. MOSS supports pdf, docx, doc, rtf and odt files. MOSS stores files for long period for future access and supports multi formats of files to be uploaded. Github assignment allows to store and host graduation projects in Github. Github repositories assist students and faculties to stay updated and helpful for course projects. Teachers track projects without leaving Moodle. All the plugins are highly efficient and freely available, published under GPL License. These tools reduce the burden, overhead and precious time of instructors and administrators to check the plagiarism one by one, instead it saves the time and worriness of detecting cheated contents. Moodle provides various integration of plug-ins in Moodle LMS useful for administrative perspective. It provides different services such as authentication, enrolment, reports and other specific plug-ins to facilitate administrators. Authentication It provides tools to manage users by providing integration with authenticating services. Various authentication systems such as Drupal services, Google, Facebook, GitHub, LinkedIn, Windows Live account provides Single Sign-on services where user does not need to create new accounts in Moodle (Moodle plugins directory- Category- Authentication, 2015). LenAuth plugins provides OAuth authorization via social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo. The manual accounts in Moodle can be restricted by list of IP addresses to authenticate users by installing authentication plugins restricted by IP. Enrolment The Moodle enrolment plugins provides integration of academy management information system (MIS) in LMS. This plug-ins will focus on growth of students learning. ZiLink plugins (Moodle plugins directory- ZiLink - Teacher Enrolment, 2015) will automatically create and maintain courses, enrolment on data present in MIS of college. ZiLink enrolments are maintained with updates of MIS. Administrators can create parent account based on the MIS information. Administrators is authorize to extend ZiLink blocks with Moodle LMS by including room booking, timetable, school photographs, report writer, student appointment and guardian scheduler. Zi Link facilitates room booking feature support for booking alternative spaces for teaching that are displayed on timetables. Guardian scheduler facilitates students and parent appointments. Teachers can create reports of students that are displayed on guardian view to view by the parents.
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Reports Administrators use admin reports to see the activities in sites and course reports to collect information about various course activities (Moodle plugins directory- Category- Reports, 2015). Ad-hoc database queries reports allows administrators to run reports on ad-hoc database queries. Ad-hoc reports are generated in the form of csv (comma separated value) file. Reports can be generated in various forms and sizes according to requirements by administrators. Administrators can generate reports based on dates, id number, group wise, workflow report, overview statistics, engagement analytics, forum graph, and export component grade from rubrics, report _roster, daily usage report, and course –awards reports. Different types of grader report can be taken by administrators. The reports can be export in the form of pdf or xls document (Moodle plugins directory- Category- Grade reports, 2015). These reports will assist to have the insights of each activities or components in Moodle LMS. Admin Tools Advanced Plug-ins Admin tools are the advanced plugins for site administrators such as log storage, inactive user cleanup, edit roles by capability, capability explorer and merge user accounts (Moodle plugins directoryCategory- Admin tools, 2015). The inactive user cleanup plugins removes the inactive user accounts. Initially the administrator sends the notification mail to the user for accessing the accounts to make it activate. In the next step: if user does not access it, then the cron job process cleanup the accounts from the list of LMS. Capability explorer tool is a complementary tool of check system permissions in the Moodle LMS. The capability explorer provides the insight of user capability within the context to be granted. The admin tool will provide two user accounts to merge into one user account. The activity and records from one user is merged to second user that gives effect of done everything both users have ever done in LMS. CONCLUSION Integration of digital tools in education has a significant impact on the teaching-learning process. Cloud Computing based platforms and applications support the learning communities with extended benefits to instructors and administrators to sustain in the rapid changing-learning environment. Cloudbased Moodle LMS provides accessibility and flexibility in terms of place and time and facilitates usage of multiple devices at reduced cost. This further supports the convenience and collaboration to students, teacher and administrators. Integration and compatibility features of Moodle LMS provide benefits of reusing the components or programs as a third party tool, which further reduces the burden of teachers to recreate the existing modules. Cloud computing based LMS supports teachers, administrators and students to coordinate with each other maintaining the interactivity throughout the learning process. They can easily collaborate on a shared project and access the progress of it with reduced time, cost and efforts. Cloud based Moodle LMS will not only benefit the teachers to make students understand complex problems by embedding granular simulation activities, but will also facilitate a higher control via modules like plagiarism check and Learning Analytics. Certainly, the cloud-based Moodle LMS supports a collaborative and convenient environment to facilitate long term gain and momentum in the new wave of higher education.
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Vikas Kumar received an MSc in Electronics from Kurukshetra University, Haryana, India. This was followed by an MSc in Computer Science and a PhD from the same university. Along with the two books, he has more than 100 research papers to his credit in various national and international conferences and journals. His areas of interest include Cloud Computing, ICT for Development and Electronic Communication. Deepika Sharma has been associated with the teaching field for 9 years. She has taught various IT courses in post-graduation and graduation classes. She has a deep passion in cloud computing technology and has been working as a trainer of cloud computing technology for the last few years.
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