‘COULD BE EASIER TO OPERATE’ MANAGING AND RESPONDING TO MOODLE FEEDBACK BRET BRINKMAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA

Policies LMS feature request Governance Resources Campus need Ease of use Opening Pandora’s Suggestion Box

Ideal Real LMS Development and Planning Unlimited ResourcesLimited resources Total Campus involvement in decision-making Few decision-makers and vocal minority More tools or features = easier to use Additional tools may add additional complexity

Ad-hoc Help requests Feedback submission forms Surveys Sources of feedback Increased volume of requests Increased campus involvement

Avenues of change Site configuration & administration settings Plug-ins Moodle updates / roadmap Custom development

Example of received request: Editing Icons “It would be a great boon if [edit icon] eyes are larger and more visible - and even in a color besides pale grey…such as red”

Example of received request: Assignment Grading Interface “On the assignment grading interface the ‘filter’ box is now at the BOTTOM, after the long list of all students. EACH TIME I have to scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to find and change the setting. What a drag.”

Request received Faculty and Students Internal Develop- ment Programming Staff Moodle tracker and forums Moodle Community Future release Evaluation process Support Staff Decision-making

UCSB Campus LMS Survey Data (October 2015; 565 respondents) Areas needing improvement: Mobile access: 45% Theme / design: 38% Gradebook: 35% Communication tools: 28% File upload or file management: 25% Learning activities: 13% Overall Satisfaction (out of 10): Instructors: 6.9 Students: 7.5

UCSB Campus LMS Survey: Ease of Use and Design ‘Could be easier to operate.’ ‘It's gotten A LOT better since I first used GauchoSpace, but I still find most of the interface to be clunky and far from intuitive.’ “I also wish it looked a bit cleaner - there's a lot of menus filling up my window all the time.” ‘The mobile site makes it inconvenient to access grades on long pages.’ ‘A great place to start would be to make it a little more pleasant to look at…clean and less chunky’

‘Gradebook is improving, but still has a long way to go.’ ‘Setting up the gradebook is confusing and cumbersome.’ ‘The gradebook is an absolute nightmare.’ UCSB Campus LMS Survey: Gradebook and Learning Tools ‘I think a wider range of questions types for quizzes and the Lesson tool could be very useful.’ ‘Activity grading interface is awful, way too much useless whitespace, very hard to comment, needs lots of scrolling.’

One big change: new theme Summer 2016