Moodle Site

My Moodle Course site can be accessed here:
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=190

Moodle Reflection can be read in this attachment: Moodle Self review and reflection, or as posted, below:

The LMS course site requirements include:

• Splash page with a graphic user interface (GUI) – there it is!

• Two (or more) complete learning modules (module shells or placeholder pages not acceptable) largely based on HTML pages
I created 4 topics tabs, as the content of my Moodle site was not conducive to weekly format.

-> Topic 1 is a short Lab safety Module that students could complete in a single session. I have limited access to this session’s activities to expire by November 1.
-> Topic 2 contains Chemistry 12 content related to the Ministry of Education prescribed learning outcomes for the Reaction Kinetics topic of the course. These are complete review resources to help students understand all of the course content.
-> Topic 3 contains complete Chemistry 12 content for the second half of Reaction Kinetics. In this topic there is an assignment open for submission on November 30 and due on December 2.
-> Topic 4 is the Module Wrap-up: Self-Assessment Topic and it contains the Self-Assessment quiz available to students starting Dec. 3 and closes on Dec. 10.

• One (or more) module programmed for selective release
As stated above, the weekly tab format was not suitable for my content, as we typically meet with students either 2 or 3 times a week – for 75 minutes at a time. Some weeks there is more time to complete Module content and other weeks there is less. Therefore, I approached the selective release requirement in a different way than is possible if I could have used the weekly tabs format.
-> Topic 1 – access to this session expires November 1

-> Topic 3 – assignment available for submission only between Nov. 30 –Dec. 2 to encourage students to work through the content in Topics 2 and 3 first
-> Topic 4 – Module Wrap-up is only made available to students on Dec. 3 and closes on Dec. 10.

• Two general discussion forum topics
I have two General forums entitled:
-> Chemistry Class News (This is the place where you will find Course announcements and reminders of issues that came up in class) and
-> Chemistry Discussion Here (An open forum for chatting about any Chemistry related concerns)

• One group discussion forum for (at least) 2 groups (they need not be populated)
I have two Learning forums entitled:
-> Lab Safety Avatar (where students will post the image and name of their Avatar) and
-> Reaction Kinetics Review Forum (where students will discuss difficult concepts in Topics 2 and 3 and the Topic 4 review quiz)
Both of my Learning Forums have Visible Groups created.

• My reflection upon the experience completing this assignment:

How labour intensive was the process?
• Creating this LMS site was labour intensive, indeed. Looking back to the Quiz assignment, I am so grateful that this was separated from the overall site in terms of due date as well as in terms of grading. At the time, I thought that the Quiz would be my toughest endeavour, and that loading the content onto the site would take no time at all. I was surprised at how long it took to tweak the settings on the overall site, as well as on each individual lesson, assignment, text page, etc.

What worked well?
• Using the Moodle help pages worked really well, most times. The Toolkit was my original ‘go to’ spot for starting out and figuring out how to set things up as I went along.
• The discussion forums on Vista were great, as they allowed us to voice our issues and trouble shoot for one another.
• Perhaps having briefly seen Moodle editing in a previous course helped to remove some of the fear. But I realized in these last 3 months that I had barely scratched the surface with my previous exposure to Moodle. Although this was a far more involved task, the end result is a completely usable product.

What was challenging?
• For some page creations in Moodle, HTML coding was not very cooperative and took a lot of time to clean up.
• Also, creating lessons was ridiculously hard for me. I viewed so many help videos, read many help pages. I can see that this is a very steep and LONG learning curve, and will take time and commitment to become proficient at all the features available in Moodle.
• It did seem like I was trying to re-invent the wheel sometimes, and I caught myself thinking – I have a .docx of the lesson right here. I would photocopy this sheet and hand it out, rather than spending all these hours to get this to work for a 15 minute activity. Again this comes down to assessing the effectiveness of a Digital Learning Object (DLO) for an educational activity. It is important, as an educator, to remain cognizant of the value that technology can bring to your instruction – and also to realize when we are just using technology in a “bells and whistles” manner.

What surprised you?
• I was able to create a Splash page with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Not even that – but I managed to have my Splash page have ONLY GUI and not accompanying text, so I was pretty proud of that.
• The first time I had tried Moodle (in a previous course group project), I had a preponderance of attached files that downloaded. I was surprised how far outside this box I was able to go with my modules. I didn’t expect to figure out so many different ways to use the space.
• I had my page set to topics format initially. Farther along in the editing process, I found that collapsed topics was visually superior to seeing all the content when you first landed on the home page. However, this caused my images to be lost in my topics label, so I had to go back to expanded topics format.
• I was surprised at how easily you could link back to the home page or to other pages to create some sort of relevance and flow across pages.
• Creating groups was interesting. I felt that I was failing at this task, as there were no students to choose from (from the current section of this course), to populate my groups. I can see though, that this feature will be extremely useful in a secondary school classroom as you could easily form groups of students and change them up whenever you liked, for different tasks.