Moodle.. The first time I hear about this thing was at this course. Actually, when I read the assignments of this course I was afraid. My previous courses didn’t require such huge thing. I thought that working with LMS is something for specialist, but now I am proud of what I did. I know that I will find my work after few weeks so ordinary and needs improvement, however, I am very happy now. I practiced many theoretical information that I have learned and read a lot about it.
The first challenge in this assignment was to choose the course field. First of all, I am not a teacher, I wanted to choose something new, challengeable and relates to my culture. Google is always the best guide. I searched and searched then I remembered the “1001 inventions” project. It’s really a unique, creative and modern project and I don’t think that most of my colleagues heard about it. In addition, it has science activities for teenagers and teacher’s pack. It’s available for free online. It is the base of my course. I chose the title “Inventions” for my course. I set up an eight week course (I don’t know if there are such long courses or it has to be longer). The first week is for introduction, the last for reflections and 6 weeks for topics. I chose inventions that interest teenagers and can be taught online. I used my imagination in creating a creative atmosphere.
After that, I had to work on the learning objectives, methodology, course schedule, assignments. I found it very hard to write the learning objectives and to describe the methodology I am going to follow, they need some improvement and I will be so grateful to anyone help me in developing them.
The greatest challenge was working with Moodle. I watched several tutorial videos on YouTube then I started working. Sometimes, I felt like a child playing in a sand box and I remembered the ETEC 565A introduction. Other times, I found myself struggling with Moodle settings just like my toddler touching the iPad screen trying to play his game and doesn’t know the exact icon to touch. I tried and tried till my course looked as what it is now.
One of the things that annoyed me was the Moodle server. I had to restart the browser several times during my work. In addition, the editing bar appeared sometimes and other times it disappeared. I had to use my very old html knowledge, thanks god, it helped me a little. I also had some problems with uploading a file feature, it didn’t work at all, so I had to paste my work from the word processor to moodle page and reformat it, which required more time.
In addition, I used the navigation arrows between the pages for a while, then I don’t know what happened, they disappeared.
Finally, I hope you enjoy my moodle course and send me your feedback, they will inspire me a lot.