A Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) online course site Introductory Module.
A significant component of your score on this assignment relates to the calibre of your web design (including level sophistication, overall look and feel, and how user-friendly the site is).
As well, your introductory module will be assessed for:
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- Introductory activity: an interactive task where students and instructor get to know one another;
- Information pages: at least 3 substantive HTML pages of content;
- Structure: to what extent is the module logical and organized?
- Content: to what extent does it provide the sort of information students need early in a course?
- A reflection upon your experience completing this assignment posted in the in the Intro Module page of your ePortfolio;
- Be sure to cite relevant literature to support your decisions.
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Well, it’s interesting to try and develop an introduction in a somewhat new tool. I had used Moodle many many years ago and from what I can tell, it hasn’t really changed! Not sure if that is good or bad. I have had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of developing online courses before. I primarily used Dreamweaver and the Adobe CS Suite and pretty much created these from scratch. This also is a few years now as well. That’s certainly an advantage for Moodle in that there are some stock content templates that can be used such as page, forums, etc. However, as I’m sure many know, there are other tools these days that I would say are more user friendly and provide more content templates. I find Moodle a little clunky but similar to any software…the more you use this, the better you become at using it.
As I haven’t done this for some time, I now remember just how time consuming doing this work can be. Setting up a project plan, create pages, forums, etc, adding the content, editing the content, doing a Q&A to ensure all works the way it should…takes a lot of time and…if you’re doing this all yourself!
Also, I remember based on feedback for other online learning materials I’ve developed how the consistency of look and feel is so important. Users acclimatize quickly to site layout and expect navigation, etc. to be similar from page to page. This should be the case as the focus is not on the layout of the pages but the content on the pages. Users should not have to relearn how to navigate as they work through the site.
I always found that project planning worked for completion of these types of projects. Timeline with tasks and resources helped to defined what needed to be done (tasks) and who was going to do them (resources). I have led these types of development projects in the past where others have done the ‘creating’ work but many times the only resource was me!
As I was not aware of this before, using a reference from a learning perspective is so beneficial (Chickering & Ehrmann, 1996) . Most of my previous projects, because they were done in the evil corporate world, were time driven and educational value was somewhat disregarded by superiors and/or project sponsors.
An interesting experience again to do this and get back in the saddle of course design/development via software for an online environment! Looking forward…as much as anyone can look forward to an assignment…to doing more work in Moodle later in the course.
References:
Chickering, A. W. & Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6.