Dan Leighton was waxing lyrical about the benefits of elearning this morning at a Moodle event for schools near Cambridge. He finds it particularly useful for seeing when his pupils have uploaded assignments.

He demonstrated a neat use of Jing to record his voice and his mouse clicks while producing feedback for students on spreadsheet assignments. He also uses video recordings of himself and finds this quicker and more effective than producing written feedback where the lack of a tone of voice can lead to misunderstandings.

What is impressive is that Leighton has rolled out Moodle at Cottonham Village College with hundreds of students at virtually no additional cost to his institution. Using a cheap hosting service like the one I use for this blog to run Moodle, he believes he has engaged his students much more by using elearning and attributes their achievement of significantly enhanced results primarily to the use of Moodle.

Extensive use of video is now using up the college’s bandwidth limit and they’re examining different hosting options but Leighton recommends this lightweight option for any institution wishing to carry out piloting of Moodle.