New Year, New MOLE

A new academic year and a new virtual learning environment has arrived at the university.  Although our project to implement a new VLE has been going for almost two years, this year marks the first year that our old system is retired and everyone uses our new VLE, MOLE 2 (My Online Learning Environment).  It’s based on Blackboard Learn 9 and although it went live to half the university last year, this point marks its arrival across the whole of the institution.  MOLE 2 is the culmination of 2 years of review, consultation, collaboration, piloting, developing, training and implementation - and lots of hard work!

I thought it might be interesting to share some of the facts and stats behind what’s been involved in changing our virtual learning environment:

Starting with our first pilot in the Library and the School of Clinical Dentistry in October 2010, we have...

    •    Migrated approximately 2700 courses from MOLE to MOLE 2
    •    Created approximately 1100 new courses
    •    Created 115 organisations
    •    Developed 6 different training courses (from face-to-face group sessions to webinars)
    •    Held 152 training courses
    •    Trained over 1000 staff and students
    •    Held consultation meetings with more than 40 departments
    •    Answered more than 7500 support calls

We’ve also created documentation, knowledge base articles, screencasts and more to support our 27,724 users.  Our support resources can be found on a dedicated website and we’ll be developing these further as we respond to users’ needs and the opportunities which MOLE 2 is giving us.

So, while the project to implement MOLE 2 may be winding down (and a big thanks to all involved in this huge task) - it’s going to be exciting to see what our brilliant staff and students do with it and where it takes learning and teaching at the University!