Category: Campus

The beginning of the “new” eXtension brings with it two major changes to the use of eXtension’s Moodle site, campus.extension.org. One change is that only faculty from eXtension premium member institutions may teach courses on this site. Fortunately, more than 90% of the courses on Campus were already being taught by faculty from institutions that became premium members. We are currently working individually with Campus teachers from non-premium member institutions to identify alternatives for their courses, a process expected to be complete by June 1, 2015.

The second major change is one that should be good news to any premium member institution wishing to charge fees for their courses. Effective January 1, 2015, the eXtension overhead charge for anyone using eXtension’s Paypal online payment system has dropped to 5% net of credit card and transaction fees. This is a significant reduction from the 25% of gross fees that had been implemented in the past. This reduction only applies to fee-based Moodle Courses. Along with this reduction in indirect costs, steps have been taken to streamline the process of transferring those funds to teachers’ home institutions. Details, along with a request form, are included at create.extension.org/node/3180.

Finally, a little fun Campus trivia as we begin this year.
• 587 total courses; 332 open for enrollment
• 32,825 active login accounts
• 53,464 test questions
• 52,713 certificates issued
• 4,193 resource objects
• 1,690 Paypal registrations
• 359 course teachers
• 170 serving other roles

As always, if you have questions about Campus, please direct them to campushelp@extension.org.

eXtension’s online course system, campus.extension.org, continues to grow in both course numbers and participation. There are currently 306 courses available for enrollment, with another 327 either being developed or used for training or testing. These courses are being taught by 489 Extension faculty representing 47 states or agencies. Since January 1, 2014, some 11,470 new users have registered on the site, and 17,850 certificates of completion have been issued.

Aside from the overall statistics, there appears to be interest by faculty from many institutions in offering courses related to some of Extension’s traditional subjects. Faculty from 17 institutions are offering courses related to 4H & youth development, faculty from 11 institutions are addressing some aspect of human nutrition, and 9 institutions are using Campus for master gardener education. Horses, however, is the topic with the highest number of courses, with 22 courses currently available for enrollment, and another 27 being developed. Most of these horse courses are sponsored by the eXtension Horse Community of Practice.

Over the past year, the following “top ten list” of courses generated the greatest amount of activity. While “activity” in Moodle is akin to “hits” on a website, it is also very reflective of the amount of engagement people have with the course and the depth of the course experience. Clicking on these course titles displays the course description and teachers of each course, along with a link to enroll in the courses if desired. Congratulations to the teachers of these “top ten” courses.

• Co-Parenting for Successful Kids
• Nebraska Livestock Quality Assurance
• Introduction to Small Scale Commercial Greenhouse Production
• Roscoe Collegiate ISD Veterinary Science
• Quality Counts
• Montana $aves $cavenger Hunt
• Alabama Private Applicator Training Course
• eXtension Alliance for Better Child Care Activities Database
• Nevada Pesticide Applicator Safety Training
• 2013 North Dakota Master Gardener Core

While the Moodle technology used at Campus continues to evolve and improve, it is more exciting to see the ways Extension faculty are finding to use an online course system like Moodle. Some of these courses above have been described in past issues of the eXtension Update. However, one of the courses, Roscoe Collegiate ISD Veterinary Science, will be part of a future eXtension Update article describing an effort by Dr. Floron Faries, Extension Veterinarian with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, to prepare students for possible careers as veterinary assistants using a train-the-trainer approach. This approach greatly leverages Extension’s limited resources, such as Extension veterinarians, to reach a much broader audience, while equipping the external trainers with the same tools used by Extension.

University of Georgia Extension is now planning to use Campus for much of its foundation trainings. Under the leadership of prior eXtension Be, Grow, Create award winner Dr. Todd Hurt, it has opened up three such courses on Weeds of the Southeast, Insects of the Southeast, and Plant Diseases and Disorders of the Southeast. Targeted to the professional development of county Extension faculty, these courses feature picture galleries of various specimens, and then a flash card game for individuals to test their knowledge. This is followed by a quiz, and depending on satisfactory performance on the quiz, a certificate of achievement. Those completing these courses will be able to submit them to their professional development tracking system. Georgia Extension plans to expand these offerings significantly as other topics are identified and content developed.

There are many more similar examples that could be shared, but simply browsing through the available courses at Campus should give one a good overview of the topics and approaches being used by Extension educators. Finally, to learn more about Campus and how it can be used, please check out the quick reference guides at http://create.extension.org/node/94857, particularly the Campus Fact Sheet located there. And, as we always end our various communications, if you have any questions or requests, please address them to campushelp@extension.org.

Have you considered issuing digital badges to your Extension learners? In case you are wondering what digital badges are, how they get issued, and how they can be used, then you might be interested in reading about Mozilla’s Open Badges project described at http://openbadges.org/about/. The portability of badges, the embedded learning experience details that are contained within each badge, and the ability of the badge earner to display badges in applications such as e-portfolios, blog sites and websites make them much more useful than simple paper-formatted certificates.

If the possibility of using badges to recognize the achievements of your Extension learners interests you, then you might consider the use of eXtension’s Moodle site, campus.extension.org. The current version of Moodle offered to Extension educators by eXtension allows teachers to issue digital badges that are compliant with the Mozilla Open Badges standard. In creating badges in Moodle, a teacher initially provides a complete description of what the badge is for, who it is that is issuing the badge, the contact information for the issuer, and an expiration date, if any. At the course level, the teacher can then establish the criteria for issuing the badge. That criteria can be automated based on successful completion of a set of activities or a full course, or the teacher can manually issue the badge. At the site level, a badge can be issued based on completion of a set of courses. All this information–the description, issuer, contact information, expiration date, and all criteria–becomes embedded in the badge file which is issued to the learner.

For more information on how Moodle has implemented Open Badges, see http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Badges. If you would like to explore options for offering digital badges through eXtension’s online campus, send an email to campushelp@extension.org.

Judging horses competitively provides youth and college students with the opportunity to gain life skills such as decision making, organizing thoughts, objective evaluation and public speaking. Developing the ability to judge horses well requires practice before the competitions. Although it is ideal to practice judging live animals, opportunities to judge quality horses in person can be difficult to secure, depending on location, cost and availability. Judging horses via video is a great alternative to help supplement the learning experience of youth and adults.

To help horse judging team coaches and judging team members, Teri Antilley turned to eXtension in 2011 for assistance in distributing the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Online Horse Judging videos and handouts. They are now available through a monthly and a yearly subscription on campus.extension.org. Since then, the videos have served as a valuable resource for 4-H, FFA and collegiate horse judging teams in Texas and many other states. More than 320 teams have purchased access to these courses.

The courses contain more than 100 horse judging videos and presentations. New videos are added as they become available. Background information, score sheets/placing cards and practice videos are included in the course. There are introductory videos, 2-horse videos (for less experienced judgers), and 4-horse videos (for more experienced judgers). Official placings and cuts are included, as are critiques of the class and/or reasons. Some classes also include penalty videos (e.g., reining). Classes in the course include halter, western pleasure, western horsemanship, hunter under saddle, hunt seat equitation, reining, western riding and trail.

For more information about these online courses, contact Teri Antilley at tjantilley@ag.tamu.edu. For information about how Moodle might contribute to your educational efforts, contact the eXtension Campus help desk at campushelp@extension.org.

Songs, rhymes, finger plays, stories, and other learning activities are a key component of high-quality childcare and learning programs. The challenge is finding hands-on activities that are appropriate for infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children. The eXtension Alliance for Better Child Care Community of Practice (CoP) made sharing activities with child care providers a priority, and is adding an assortment of activities online through Moodle’s database feature on campus.extension.org.

The child care CoP uses Moodle databases to house two libraries of activities for child care providers. The databases are linked from extension.org.

•Finger plays and Songs for Child Care is a set of songs, rhymes, poems, and finger play activities that can be used to encourage language and motor skills.
•Story Stretching Ideas for Child Care is a collection of story-stretching activities that expand on themes in popular children’s books with simple activities that teach key skills in math and science, reading readiness, music and movement, and many other areas.

Visitors can browse activities to see what catches their eye, search for specific activities by age group or skills learned, and download pdf files of individual activities. Resources in these databases have been viewed more than 106,000 times in the past year. More than 6,000 people have visited the databases.

The CoP members are now developing an interactive database of children’s books, which will allow visitors to share comments about specific books and ideas for using them. Visitors will be able to suggest new books for the database. This book database, developed to support childcare providers through the Military Families Learning Network, will be released to the public this fall.

For information about how Moodle might contribute to your educational efforts, contact the eXtension Campus help desk at campushelp@extension.org. You may also contact Diane Bales at The University of Georgia Cooperative Extension (dbales@uga.edu) for more information about the activities databases.

Over the past four months, Update articles have highlighted a few of the courses available in Moodle through campus.extension.org campus.extension.org, eXtension’s online course system. Karen Hall explained how Campus has contributed to training Master Gardeners in South Carolina. The next month Cynthia Strasheim and Maureen Burson told of seeking eXtension’s help to put a course online for Nebraska parents who are divorcing, seeking custody modification or never married and seeking custody. Then there was the article describing how Carol Hampton, Laura Sant and Joey Peutz, Idaho Extension educators, partnered with Extension educators in other states to provide food safety and food preservation education to more than 430 people through Preserve@Home. Last month’s article explained how Nevada’s Cooperative Extension employees as well as all employees of Nevada’s higher-education institutions now have online access to required trainings because Vicki Jones, a University of Nevada Cooperative Extension employee, wanted easier access for county employees.

Future issues of eXtension Update will highlight more courses, but this issue looks at campus.extension.org broadly.

Since Campus was launched in 2007, some 32,500 people have created user accounts, with 10,600 of those in just the past 12 months. And this does not include countless “guest” access to many of the courses. Registered users have garnered over 21,000 certificates of completion from the courses in which they enrolled. At present, about 425 Extension educators from over 40 institutions have created 490 courses, 236 of which are available for enrollment. The others are either under development, or have been taken offline because of obsolescence or because the teachers are awaiting a new class cohort. Fifty-six of these courses have been created in past five months, so interest in and excitement about using this platform remains high.

Campus continues to evolve and grow in features and capabilities, making its use even more appealing for Extension education. The underlying software is Moodle, the world’s leading open-source course management system. Some recent changes to this system include:
• A simpler front page using a predominant search box and clickable category buttons to direct users to the courses they are seeking.
• A course community hub (mooch.extension.org) through which course teachers can share and/or advertise their courses more widely, including an RSS feed and linking to Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media platforms.
• A greater set of tools to make courses more interesting and engaging such as conditional access requirements, activity completion criteria, chat rooms, forums, assignments, video, glossaries, tests, databases, and certificates.
• Ability to use repositories such as YouTube, Flickr, Dropbox, and Box for course content.

And, coming soon in an upgrade of Moodle is the ability to issue badges to recognize specific learning achievement, or to guide the learning process.

If you have questions about how you can gain access and begin using it for your own educational efforts, send an email to moodlehelp@extension.org.