Setting the stage for many of the themes you’ll witness throughout the year (and quite possibly beyond), the Moodle Association of Japan (MAJ) celebrated its tenth national MoodleMoot in Tokyo’s Musashi University, kicking off the year’s season of dedicated Moodle events.
Characteristically vanguardist, the Moot showed recent advances in third-party integrations, the possibilities of Moodle connecting to hardware, particularly Virtual and Augmented Reality tech, and ways in which the nation’s EdTech field addresses system-wide implementations. Japan shows how gadgets and interactivity are not to be feared but embraced, especially if the marriage starts in the classroom.
Here are some some of the highlights, as reported on social media. Check even more at our #MootJP18 Twitter Moment.
Day one — Wednesday, February 21st
Workshops for newbies and experts detailing specific Moodle features (access restriction) or whole new Moodle avenues (MoodleCloud) kicked off day one. Veteran lecturers included Moodle HQ’s David Mudrák and MAJ’s (and MUA’s) Professor Hideto Harashima.
Happy to see #moodle teachers effectively using the Grouping feature for what it has been designed #mootjp18
— David Mudrák (@mudrd8mz) February 22, 2018
#mootjp18 David Mudrak presents his keynote speech at MoodleMoot Japan 2018. pic.twitter.com/3au4yoZu48
— Hideto D. Harashima (@Stersan) February 22, 2018
Day two — Thursday, February 22nd
The bulk of the Moot’s innovative presentations featured interesting integrations with popular EdTech that side of the Indian Ocean.
Examples included video app Kaltura, the Jupyter Notebook for learning programming, the EnglishCentral portal, the Logstore xAPI standard, messaging app LINE’s chatbots, and EdTech darling Quizlet.
Wow – the presenter has turned Excel into an impressive app for transferring data from Quizlet into #Moodle GIFT format! #mootjp18
— Christian Thompson (@tokyoedtech) February 22, 2018
In the afternoon, an in-depth look at Moodle core activities and plugins completed the session. Justin Hunt’s PoodLL got some of the highest marks.
Wow – @poodllguy has really improved #Poodll for #Moodle – lots of great enhancements! #mootjp18
— Christian Thompson (@tokyoedtech) February 22, 2018
It was great to meet @poodllguy at #mootjp18 and see all the useful features that Poodll provides. Well done! #moodle pic.twitter.com/Js1MTMr3o9
— David Mudrák (@mudrd8mz) February 23, 2018
Other topics included:
- The Moodle Glossary
- Learning Locker
- Essay Auto-grading
- Academic credit standardization
- Speed reading
- The ReactForum plugin
- The Moodle Forum’s Interface and Report Block
- Don Hinkelman’s Sharing Cart
- Moodle for writing skills course
- Flipped classroom
- Live versus recorded video for Moodle Rubrics
- The Moodle Database
The day ended with MAJ’s general meeting and a casual networking reception at night.
Day three — Friday, February 23rd
The event concluded with more talks, covering:
- The GIFT syntax for Quiz question creation
- Automatic speech scoring
- TOEIC Preparation
- FileMaker Pro
- Blended Learning
- The International Virtual Exchange Project
- ChemJax
- STEM teaching
- Conference organization tools
#mootjp18 pic.twitter.com/moG4Ov7iHz
— yasuto0306 (@yasuto0306) February 23, 2018
But perhaps the day’s most popular intervention was the keynote by Kumamoto University’s Katsuaki Suzuki and his instructional design talk, a lesson in “experience, intuition and courage.”
基調講演その2: Instructional Design and Moodle、鈴木克明教授（熊本大学）
KKD（経験と勘と度胸）からIDへ#mootjp18 pic.twitter.com/fHMKGJFSZN
— T.Shirai（ほぼ個人）もたまに呟く (@tatsuva) February 22, 2018
Before closing, the “Best Moodle Innovation Awards Ceremony” was held.
会場の担当をしてくださった武蔵大、家政大の皆さん、ありがとうございました。#mootjp18 pic.twitter.com/tKt8hc3Ujb
— yasuto0306 (@yasuto0306) February 23, 2018
会場の担当をしてくださった武蔵大、家政大の皆さん、ありがとうございました。#mootjp18 pic.twitter.com/tKt8hc3Ujb
— yasuto0306 (@yasuto0306) February 23, 2018
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