Course Site

Developing a course in Moodle proved to be a memorable learning experience for me in several ways.  I do have experience in working in another LMS called Angel (recently gobbled up by Blackboard), as well as the elearning authoring tools Adobe Captivate and Lectora. Moodle, though, is different which is the root of both its popularity, and frustration for developers.

I decided to develop a course in an area of interest for me: Social Media in the Workplace

I began this project with unbounded enthusiasm toward Moodle. Philosophically I am completely behind the open source and open education movement.  Moodle has always appeared to be in the centre of all things positive in online education.  It is essentially the last real competitor to Blackboard representing a non-commercial alternative to institutional course management.  The experience forced me to look at Moodle from a Developer’s point of view, and from this perspective I do have some misgivings.  I still believe that is is an easy system to develop in, but it is difficult to develop in a way that will have a seamless, friendly, user interface and navigation.

I opened access to this course to all students.  Idealy, I would like to make it public content, and will likely do so.  I set the Creative Commons license to Attribution-ShareAlike. Reason being that I would like all to use it with proper attribution but exclude it from people using it for free to make profit.  Although I do work in the corporate learning arena, I believe education should be freely distributed and shared in this same way.

This was the first major roadblock for me.  I initially thought of creating a separate “launch” page but was unable to find a way to do this within Moodle. I then surveyed my classmates’ courses and realized a top section with a GUI would fulfill the requirements. After getting some ideas through course mail with classmate Chris McKenzie, I created a “label” to hold the course image and module images. I created the course image in Adobe Photoshop by inserting separate social media icons on a wave to represent the idea that social media is now crashing on us uncontrollably. I also decided to place module icons linked to the modules in this section as a quick navigation route directly to the course content. A common student complaint we dealt with while working at a college was that students would often get lost sifting through support documentation and not immediately find the nuts and bolts of the course. I believe students should be able to find the most important content very easily.

Icons Flickr credit: webtreats

Wave Image Flickr credit: aldask

Module icons Flickr credit: webtreats

I created three modules within Dreamweaver elearning templates and uploaded the html files.  In my opinion this partially solves the clumsy Moodle navigation as the student can easily advance through the pages.  Also, should I choose, I now have the source files to use for my final MET portfolio. I decided to set the module content to open in a separate window to create a tangible division between the moodle home base used for forums and assessment, and the modules which are navigated differently. With the way I developed the course the modules seem to flow in a self-contained interface separate from Moodle.

I ran into one problem building content in Dreamweaver that I was unable to solve.  When previewing in Internet Explorer I noticed that my sidebars were dropping down out of position.  I googled around for a solution and tried a few different suggested lines of code but still couldn’t get it to look right.  As a result, I set the browser requirement to Chrome/Firefox.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use Dreamweaver, I struggle with the use of templates.  I believe that corporate learning suffers from the rapid elearning approach that throws content into unimaginative, highly structured pages.  They look good, function well, and are generally easy to use, but I feel it impinges on creative and innovative learning design. I think formatted elearning templates serve a purpose but it is only a small part of a quality corporate learning program. As a cost saving measure most companies create one structured company template for elearning, and throw all content into that format.  This method produces content that looks like a quality product but does not necessarily  create inspiring learning moments for the user.

The Moodle Forums offer a lot of features and are straightforward to set up.  I created a forum activity at the end of each module with one discussion split into two groups.  This function gives the instructor some room to be innovative in design.  I set up this discussion for two groups of students to discuss two similar tools for social bookmarking but allowed students to read the other discussion threads.

This was the last pickle for me.  In a former life, when working in Angel (an LMS), we could set content for selective release automatically.  I anticipated finding this option in the settings. When I could not find it, I turned to the Moodle documentation and discussion forums and discovered that this function does not exist (moodle.org).  Thankfully Sheila Hancock started a discussion thread on this and I could see that many of my classmates settled on manually hiding a module.  Because I also have a path to the module content in the top section, I unlinked Module three until the start date for that module.

This was a very important exercise for me.  The topic of LMS selection is an ongoing discussion at colleges, universities, and larger corporations and government organizations.  It has broadened my knowledge of Moodle as well as Dreamweaver. The hands on approach to ETEC 565 complements the program otherwise heavy in academic papers.  In order to engage in rhetoric about the the use of technology in education it is important to have experience in the technical aspects – and I now feel I will be more well rounded in my perspective of LMS and educational technologies in general.

moodle.org (2010).  Using Moodle: Selective Release. [Discussion post]. Retrieved from moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=147564