the actor-network theory and moodle in an high

THE ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND MOODLE IN AN HIGH SCHOOL COMMUNITY - A STRATEGICAL TOOL AND A LIFE-LONG LEARNING APPROACH

ABSTRACT Since last year, a new LMS platform – Moodle – is available at ISCAC. All the implementation process, the meetings, teachers training, courses available were, at the very beginning, very difficult to implement. After a year, the balance can be considered as positive: now there are new challenges to Moodle and it’s considered strategically for an important group of students in a life-long learning perspective. However, the obstacles almost dictated that the project would never be more than a paper version. This paper is a reflection about all the difficulties, challenges, changes’ acceptance in a large learning community and the way that these drawbacks usually conduce to no succeeded projects.

KEYWORDS Education, Learning Communities, Life-long Learning, Moodle.

1. INTRODUCTION ISCAC, Institute of Accounting and Administration Coimbra, is a high school with 2800 students and 107 teachers. As many high schools in Portugal, its number of regular students is decreasing. That means that schools like ISCAC need to conquer new groups of students by offering innovative solutions and courses. There is now a decrementing cycle also in what concerns to organization resources. ISCAC is dealing, as the majority of high Portuguese schools, with many financing problems, many of them that could have been predicted and solved before their huge impact. There is also a lack of self-confidence, motivation, strategy, projects enrolment. To redefine the ISCAC route, teachers must take the challenge to reinvent school options, motivate themselves and other teachers, to improve school image to conquer new students. In this context, an LMS platform, Moodle, emerged to discover new challenges and groups of students that can invert this decrementing tendency, implement a real life-long learning project, define new specific and strategical courses at ISCAC context. This paper is a reflection exercise about Moodle implementation, ANT theory, collaborative cycle and life-long learning as opportunities for school.

2. ISCAC CONTEXT AND MOODLE PROJECT EVOLUTION The reference school in this situation, ISCAC, didn’t have any platform to manage the communication between students and teachers or to support their courses. The e-U (electronic-University, a Portuguese government project to make networks – intranet and Internet accesses - and contents available for any university user, at any Portuguese university or Politechinc, as a user community or as guest) was been implemented but only for wi-fi access to Internet. There was no organization policy to Intranet or sites to keep courses information available for students. Some teachers kept their own Web Pages at ISCAC site but the updates weren’t directly available: there was a web manager responsible for all these tasks and the process was not immediate. If students could not be at presence classes, they usually asked teachers to send them the contents by mail: as there were courses with more than one hundred students, this was a very hard task for teachers. Students complained that, usually, they didn’t get any answers to their mails; teachers felt that they were overwhelmed with mail replies.

2.1 Moodle – an overview Moodle was the reference LMS Platform to implement at ISCAC. This is an open source software and, besides this is a new LMS (it’s and Australian Project in development since 1999), it puts together a significant community: Portuguese Moodle Community - http://web.educom.pt/moodlept/ and International Community - www.moodle.org ) as two distinct examples. Figure 1 compares the exponential grow considering two reference dates and Total known sites all over the world : December 2006 (the end of the first semester) and July 2007 (the end of the second semester). Registered sites, Courses, Users and Forum posts had a 30% improvement. Teachers grown less: only 17%. There are 186 countries registered (169 were registered in December 2006). Portugal had 581 registered Moodle servers (December 2006) and now it has 1084, an 85% grown in a 6 months period. It means that Portugal belongs to the top 4 countries considering this value and besides school population. Countries like Germany (834 -Dec. 06, 1232 now, 48% grown), Spain (1460 -Dec. 06, 2147 now, 48% grown), and United Kingdom (1549 -Dec. 06, 2052 now, 32% grown). Data for countries like Australia (611, 822 now, 35% grown), Brazil (874, 1459 now, 67% grown) and United States of America (3913, 5595 now, 43% grown) are also important because there are very active learning communities.

December 2006

July 2007

Figure 1. Moodle sites and other relevant data in December 2006 and July 2007.

2.2 Moodle – a new project at ISCAC Management and Informatics students developed a project, in scope of Informatics Project course, fourth grade, to study a set of e-learning platforms. They concluded that Moodle could be an interesting option to ISCAC and the main reasons were: free, simple to manage, with no significant technological exigencies and supported and tested by a significant user’s community all over the world (Sousa et al, 2006). Despite that, this study missed social aspects evaluation. For Moodle implementation could be succeeded there must be: 1) a motivated teacher’s team, free to spend a significant amount of their time to learn who to manage a Moodle course, create the courses, correcting and updating the contents, answering to students and, furthermore, a teacher community mainly from non ICT areas (ICT teachers represent less than 10% of teachers ISCAC community) almost permanently connected to Moodle; 2) no executive board doubts: privacy (who manages the platform) of contents, costs for school, information available and teachers training should be addressed; 3) students with enough ICT domain to interact with platform. One of the students from the initial group was available to implement and to study the Moodle impact on ISCAC community for a year. That option could be interesting because school didn’t have any free resources to do the implementation and helpdesk and this student had a former experience in other e-learning unit belonging to other Portuguese University, was a full time worker so, training in other organization in a full time approach was no option for her, and this project was, at the beginning, interesting for the 2 factions. The work group was, at the beginning, constituted by two teachers and this student, but meanwhile, one of the teachers didn’t have an active function. So, the group was a student and her supervisor. At the beginning there were no defined stages: the team considered that Moodle advantages will be so evident, the outcomes could be so interesting and with no costs associated, that only prepared this positive speech and the technical answers. An authorization from the school executive board was mandatory to begin the process. However, nothing will be like the team taught: the meetings with executive board were difficult. The technical issues were not the main problem but the access to files, ISCAC teachers training and who will be responsible for it, the (non) outcomes for reprography (who assures all courses material replication and represents also an income for school), the non motivated teachers and the lack of digital literacy (teachers were not motivated and demonstrated that they were no curious about Moodle or any other changes). The team didn’t realize the importance of this sentence (Roque, 2003), “on intervention perspective, related to socio-technical approaches, the intervention context is now view as a social system with technical components” and not the opposite. Moreover, it’s important to reflect also about the social context at ISCAC, as Sawyer and Rosenbaum (Sawyer, Rosenbaum, 2000) defined it generally “the ICT usage and development it’s significant and influences the way people use the information and the technology, and has consequences to the work, organizations and relationships”. So, after the Moodle Project acceptance from the executive board, with no enthusiasm and almost no positive perspectives, the team decided to implement a strategy to the Moodle success at ISCAC: 1) Moodle Presentation for ISCAC teachers Community: an invitation to the local Press and a article published in a regional journal could be important for teachers to considered that this was a specific goal do conquer; 2) Define the first courses to start on first project semester: the ICT ones – Informatics Applications I (evolving all the 5 ISCAC degree courses – Management and Informatics, Accounting and Auditing, Gestão de Empresas, Contabilidade e Gestão Pública e Solicitadoria e Administração) and the main ICT courses on Management and Informatics (the first ten courses: Computer Architecture, Algorithms and Programming I and Algorithms and Programming, Algorithms and Data Structures, Information Systems and Information Systems I, Databases II, Informatics Project I, Operating Systems and Object Oriented Programming Languages).The team expected a good impact form those courses: teachers were expected to ask for Moodle information; students were expected to have a good adaptation. 3) Beginning of 2nd semester: two training courses during 3 hours and two levels: basic (first week) and medium (second week); teachers were expected to participate at theses sessions. The main goal was to offer teachers the basic skills to work with Moodle: design a Moodle course, answer to forums and individual messages, list the participants, manage the hidden contents, activity definition, grades and feedback to students. The other aimed objective was to make clear that there were no excuses to be Moodle-excluded even if a teacher considered himself info-excluded.

4) Newsletter feedback: an article was predicted to be published at ISCAC-newsletter to feedback Moodle results until the first half of 2nd semester; 5) Questionnaire submission: a questionnaire will be required to students and teacher to evaluate their satisfaction rate with Moodle and its services.

2.3 The ANT Theory and Moodle at ISCAC Despite the fact that the main goal of the team was putting the puzzle together and try to convert ISCAC community in a Moodle Community, we realized that the defined approach was based mainly in “human” actors than in technical actors. The basis to “reconnect” the school in a stronger community could be a virtual learning community, and, beyond that, a network: nor only a technical network but also a relationships network where teachers that were ICT experts will help the others. By reviewing all the last five topics, we became conscientious that we can expect more Moodle effects that the outcomes directly related with the topics and we introduced new items. As (Roque 2003) the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) was born and developed in the scope of sociotechnical, science and technology studies, by analysing the historical routes of their developments and recognizing the social and technical dimensions of those developments. This theory has been applied on several scientific areas, mainly on sociological studies, as the explanation construction for human interaction aspects and their relation with science and technology. The ANT can be an instrument to explain how IS projects can evolve: IS is considered as an infrastructure component aligned actor-network resistant to changes. Lamb et al 2004 refer, in the context of their studies about Social Informatics and Socio-Technical Networks, that “Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) combines the broad-scale thinking of the SST tradition with new conceptualizations that raise technologies (such as computers and networks) to an equal status with human actors. This perspective explores the intricate interrelationships that develop between people and the technologies they employ to interact with other individuals, organizations and institutions within complex, interconnected networks (Walsham, 1997)”. (Callon, 1986) defines that ANT has four different moments: problematization, interessment, enrollmnet e mobilization and (Figueiredo and Pais, 2006) included these moments in the construction of learning contexts and collaborative cycles. We considerer that ISCAC Moodleization process (process to create faithful Moodle ISCAC users) can be translated to these 4 evolutive stages: 1) problematization: ISCAC needed an e-learning platform to support communication with students, the work submission, the file repository, the grades and the feedback to students. There was no further platform besides the web site. Moodle was studied by a group of students and could be an option with many advantages. The Moodle project presentation to executive board was the first step. The working group and the first courses to the Moodle project were defined. The tasks for the workgroup elements were distributed. The main goals to achieve were established: a minimum of 20 registered teachers and 25 registered courses until the 30.06.2007. The focus was on teacher’s community: it was important to reach this group because they are the responsibles for creating the and managing the courses to students. We always felt that, if the students could have the opportunity to access to Moodle, they will be faithful users; 2) Interessment: The moment to share the project with the community was the presentation to ISCA teachers. Teachers will be the vehicle to reach the students. However, this last group was never been the focus of the problematization as we saw before. The real motivations to believe that Moodle has good advantages at ISCAC School will be emphasized. The drawbacks also. Beginning with ICT teachers was the simplest because they don’t needed any training. To make a specific session to train the teachers interested in creating their courses will be a possibility. It’s very important for teachers that they feel they can be part of the solution. However, the working group was conscientious that the interessment moment will last for sometime for many teachers and that couldn’t be considered as a failure to the project: each teacher was free to chose when he will feel ready to start. The teachers-actors motivation was important but their enrolment could be at any time; 3) Enrollment: some ISCAC teachers, besides the ICT ones will answer to Moodle challenge. Some non-ICT courses will be created but we realized that maybe the courses won’t work because

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teachers will feel difficult to understand Moodle and they are not used to ask for help. The real involved teachers can start their work in this moment. The results they achieve will be replicated to other students and teachers: students will ask for more courses; teachers will realize that Moodle was not difficult to operate; Mobilization: this moment will be at the end of first semester. The students from the Moodle courses will have forums of doubts, their grades online and feedback to their work. They will pressure other teachers to make their materials available for next semester; teachers will feel that this could be a good opportunity to start, because a new semester will start. They will ask for involved teachers and workgroup for help and training. This will be also the moment for the 2 training sessions (basic and intermediate grades).

The cycle will be repeated and now the actors aren’t in the same stage they were for the first time: 5) problematization: who are the teachers that still out of Moodle? Do they teach courses alone? How can this problem be solved? There is a new problematization were the initial group of teachers is now reduced to keep only the ones who didn’t start; 6) Interessment: The moment to share the results from the last year can be a good opportunity to awake remain community interest. A new training opportunity can be addressed if teachers feel comfortable with that; 7) Mobilization: after the number of regular courses could be achieved, new challenges can be defined. We will count with teachers to define new opportunities and challenges for Moodle at ISCAC: expand the Moodle to other courses and projects. Martins (Martins, 2007) studied the ANT theory in his work about “Effective Group Collaboration for Blended-Learning” and translated it using a picture to describe the collaborative cycle addressing ANT theory as in Figure 2. The proceedings at ISCAC community can also be translated using that picture.

Figure 2. Collaborative cycle and ANT theory moments (Martins,2007)

After all these stages and collaboration cycle repetition, we realize that Moodle can have new challenges and the opportunity must not be lost: all the collaborative and team projects, especially the international ones, the specialization accounting course and other specialization and/or postgraduate studies, “over-23” students in a context of life-long learning (since they are full workers), formularies or other bureaucratic elements for teachers to answer can be “Moodlezided”.

3. MOODLE PROJECT RESULTS Moodle project implementation was constructed considering 5 distinct stages the 4 repeating moments of collaborative cycle. Let’s check the results: 1) Problematization - the problem was well addressed but the numbers defined as 30.06.2007 goals’ were exceeded. At the end of 1st semester 26 teachers and 21 courses were registered and in 30.06.2007, 61 teachers, 1800 users and 81 courses available. The objectives were widely superadded. The focus on teachers was also correct: the numbers prove that: there were no special sessions for students and they registered very quickly; 2) interessment: The moment to share the project with the community was the presentation to ISCA and it was relatively well succeeded: there were less than 25% of teachers community and very few registered in that moment. Some o did registered, created courses without activity. Moreover, others, non ICT teachers (4 teachers) defined their courses and worked on with their colleges and students. They were also very useful to disseminate Moodle as a very advantageous platform to ISCAC and that had a later impact on ISCAC teachers’ community. That created a positive motivation but despite that the impact only produced effects at the beginning of second semester. 3) Enrollment: some ISCAC teachers, besides the ICT ones answered to Moodle challenge as we predicted. Only 4 non-ICT teachers created active courses during the 1st semester. 4) Mobilization: by the end of first semester, teachers realized that Moodle was a reality and they needed to start or they will be excluded. They felt their students’ pressure. There were 15 teachers on each training session. In those sessions, there were many courses created for second semester. By now, there are new courses at Moodle for Leonardo da Vinci Project (8 students in 4 different countries and 4 supervisor teachers), for “Over 23”preparation to exams to access ISCAC. In this last courses we felt that Moodle is realy adequate, so this Mobilization moment is still in. These students need special answers since they are, majority, working students, with families and young kids and they don’t have time to be in all presence classes. They need to get in touch with school but they have not enough time to do it. The “Over 23 years” group – is a special period of admittance to school that was responsible for 70 new students in 2006 and 100 expected in 2007 – is formed by working students who need special answers from school in what concerns to classes and available materials; Technical Specialization Courses for students with 12.º grade, mainly working students that, as the “Over 23“ group, left school early and need to get a certification from their work. Moodle and b-learning can be important to these groups. However, all students can see advantages in Moodle. But, to get here, a long journey was traced.

4. MOODLE AT ISCAC IN A LIFE-LONG LEARNING CONTEXT Moodle project was “problematized” to implement an LMS platform to become an Intranet/Courses WebPages replacement or complement. However, Moodle can go much further: as the “over 23” students were attending courses at ISCAC to preparatory access examination and 2 of those courses where available at Moodle, these students had a very positive opinion about ISCAC in general and Moodle particularly; postgraduate studies will be real at ISCAC for next year (2007/2008). Those students, usually working students, older than the ones who attend regular courses, and integrated in organizations, won’t have time to be in all presence sessions: Moodle can be a good complement for these students as they can receive, from teachers, the feedback they won’t have any other way. Inside: ISCAC will become more motivated around the effects of this virtual community. Outside: ISCAC image will be strengthened since the care about students and the feedback they will receive is considered by them as a very positive advantage when they are deciding witch will be the school they chose for a “partner for life”.

5. CONCLUSION Moodle project was proposed in a difficult but opportune context: the school needed an LMS platform, Moodle was already studied by students, whom evaluated it as the most adequate LMS platform at ISCAC context, teachers need to be motivated to motivate their students, the community context was almost lost and Moodle can re-invented it now as a collaborative and virtual community. Despite the obstacles to Moodle implementation at the beginning, a strategy, following the ANT and collaborative cycle, was defined, and exceed all the best goals initially traced. Now, new challenges are expected to Moodle, so there will be 4 new ANT moments to address other problems, and Moodle became so important for school that is almost impossible to disconnect it. Would Moodle and this enthusiastic community sustainable? That’s the question form now on.

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