Staff and Student Adoption

We are currently preparing for the next stage of our Moodle pilot: putting the system into full production for the next intake of 1st year BA Technical and Production Arts students. The BA TPA course is a highly practical course, training students in various technical theatre and theatre design disciplines. In the first term of the first year students undertake classroom, lecture and workshop based sessions in all disciplines, to provide a general grounding before beginning their practical production work. The next stage of our Moodle pilot is to create Moodle Courses for each of these first term subjects to provide online resources to support the students learning in these areas.

Since this pilot is being used with a fresh intake of students, we will not be trying to teach new methods to existing students, which we hope will make the student adoption of the pilot a good deal easier. Although our existing and previous students have generally shown an aptitude for IT and computer work, possibly due to the technical nature of the subjects taught.

Initially, we had more concerns about staff adoption, as some of the disciplines we teach do not have a strong reliance on computer skills, and we were worried that some staff might be daunted by a VLE. However, I recently passed a quick questionnaire around the department staff (around 20 tutors) to gauge their familiarity and comfort with computers and it seems this may not be a great concern at all.

The questionnaire included a series of 10 point Likert scales to measure each tutors level of comfort with using computers in general, and their level of familiarity with specific computer uses: Word Processing; Email and Web Browsing; Spreadsheets; Databases; CAD & Computer Graphics; Web Programming (HTML, PHP, etc); and Application Programming (C/C++, Java, etc).

The average response to the general level of comfort with computers scale was 7.8, with no tutor giving a response below 5 and over a third giving a response of 10. 82% of tutors gave a response of 7 or greater to the familiarity with email and Web Browsing scale (average response was 8.6). 18% of tutors gave a response of 7 or greater to their familiarity with Web Programming (HTML, PHP) scale, the average response was 3.

Given this level of familiarity with computing and IT amongst the department staff, I hope that using a VLE should not cause any great difficulty to anyone. At the beginning of term I would like to give similar questionnaire to the incoming 1st year students before they begin using the VLE, hopefully to gain an idea of the minimum level of IT skill required to make use of such a system.

The staff questionnaire also took measure of the amount of time that tutors currently spend on computer work, which I would like to repeat at the end of this next stage of the Moodle pilot, to try to gauge the impact that working with a VLE will have on tutor's workloads. Currently tutors estimate an average of 38% of the working week over the summer period is spent of computer work.