The Moodle site I created is a four week program called “Looking Beyond the Books: Learning Strategies For Students Entering University”. This program is designed for students with learning differences who have chosen to pursue their education further by attending university. I had some specific goals in mind when developing this course.
First, I wanted to look at the four major educational activities that are presented in university: studying, reading, test-taking and assignments. My plan was to develop strategies to help students gain a better understanding of how to tackle these activities throughout their educational career. Each of the course modules consists of three units that break-up each activity into sections that are more easily managed by students with learning differences. For instance, the Study Strategies module starts off by helping students discover how they learn best, and provides them with strategies that will help them take useful notes in class and stay organized. The first two modules in the Moodle site are complete, and the second two modules, with the exception of the quiz in the Test Taking Strategies module, are just placeholders demonstrating where the course is going. Module 1 and Module 2 (hidden for selective release) should be assessed.
Second, I wanted to create activities that would give students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with a Learning Management System (LMS) as it is highly likely that they will come across some type of LMS at their university. I designed the program to provide students with plenty of opportunities to interact with their peers on the discussion boards, as it provides students with the chance to get comfortable expressing their ideas and opinions. In selecting the topics for each of the discussion boards, it wasn’t my intention to make the material too challenging, as it wasn’t the point of the activities. The idea is that the program would guide the students towards a constructivist approach to learning, by encouraging them to work together to find answers. For some students who learn differently, reaching out and asking questions or stating their opinion is extremely challenging as they don’t want to appear deficient in some way or have their classmates realize that they learn differently from everybody else. It was because of this that I felt it was important to have a lot of relatively simple topics for discussion, to give the students plenty of practice and hopefully some confidence in interacting with their peers. In addition, splitting some of the discussion boards into smaller groups at the beginning of the week and then opening up the board to everyone at the end of the week also decreases the chance that students will feel overwhelmed by trying to keep up with the discussion boards.
I also felt it was important to keep the site layout minimalistic, with the majority of the visual formatting being done with CSS instead of using graphical elements so that the students could easily copy and paste the content into reading software such as Kurzweil.
In registering for this program, students are aware that their classmates also have some type of learning difficulty. This gives students the opportunity to share and discuss their personal experiences in a safe environment, which is something that most of the students may not have had the chance to experience before. The short story on the welcome page showing one student’s educational experiences was the perfect forum for students to introduce themselves and share any similar experiences that they may have had. For typical developing adolescents transferring into university, this story may seem a little young, but for students with learning difficulties it’s a story that they can relate to as many of them most likely went through similar experiences through their educational career.