My Moodle Course site can be accessed here: http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=271
Introduction
For this Moodle assignment, I created a Lesson Study course and community loosely based on my own teaching methods in similar F2F Lesson Study courses. To define Lesson Study, it is the professional development method of slowing down the teaching process in order to analyze it and look for ways to increase student learning through planning, research, observation and discussion. Obviously, this translates into a great many discussion forums, collaborative wiki spaces, searchable glossary entries, and workshops where collaborators can view each other’s work and give feedback. Although I did not set up any synchronous communication spaces such as chat rooms, I assume that informal meeting in these spaces will occur within “buddy” pairs, as naturally occurred during my Moodle collaboration project in ETEC 510. In addition to group specific asynchronous tools mentioned above, I created general question forums, Q & A glossary archives, people databases, news (announcement) forums, and surveys. Each activity and exercise is based on creating community or analyzing situations with the goal of creating thoughtful revision and reflection.
While creating my Moodle course, I attempted to implement the philosophies from the course readings of Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model and Chickering’s principles into its development.
Students
I ensured that the Moodle platform was an appropriate platform for the student’s demographics and learning styles. In this case, Moodle offers the necessary affordance of meeting online in an asynchronous course structure for students that have limited time and ability to meet face to face. In addition, the technology enables them to share classroom practices through video recorded lessons that can be viewed on demand and analyzed at one’s convenience.
Ease of Use
For accessibility, I created a form in Moodle database to assess collaborators competence in video media and basic technology skills, including their access to media equipment, computers, internet and software programs. This analysis enables the facilitator to implement a specialized training module for certain participants.
Cost
I also considered the cost drivers for the Moodle course, including server and administrative costs, development time and supplementary hardware and software. Although the district can supply most of the server and administrative services as part of an existing program, development time and supplementary resources would have to be supplied by myself and my fellow collaborators. For the supplementary resources, most collaborators will have access to the necessary hardware and software through their school. In addition, I have collegues that are also driving the development of this course and community that will share in the workload to create the course site.
Teaching and Learning
The structure of the technology provides a framework for communication and collaboration (wikis, forums, workshops, and glossaries) that creates the kind of learning required by this collaborative course and community.
Interactivity
Related to teaching and learning are Moodle’s interactivity features that provide essential feedback that allows learners to actively construct meaning with their peers. These affordances are also consistent with Chickering’s (1996) principles about the most effective ways to use technology by encouraging:
- collaborator and facilitator contact,
- cooperation between students,
- active and interactive learning,
- and prompt feedback.
Organizational
Through the process of creating this Moodle, I have developed a powerhouse of skills in effectively implementing a Moodle course making this technology a practical choice. In addition, our school district has a server devoted to Moodle courses and the administrative services to make this technology feasible.
Novelty
Within this framework, the Moodle platform provides students with a welcome relief from meeting face to face. Through the computer, students interact on an equal footing, without physical cues, status or external factors affecting their perspective on their fellow collaborators.
Speed
Certain aspects of this technology were time consuming to implement, including quizzes and databases. Options and features tended to have complex configurations and affordances but, once familiar, were easy to set up. Overall, Moodle’s activities were relatively user friendly and easy to modify.
Splash page with customized GUI with at least (4) navigational components
In retrospect, I wish that I had made a plan for my splash page before I started creating my site. My first attempt was full of GUIs and linked text that was loosely organized in modules. Luckily, John gave me so insightful feedback….it was too busy! And although, he may not have recognized it then, it was pretty unorganized and disjointed. After reviewing peers Moodle sites and similar online sites, I developed a two tiered organization system. First, I created a general navigational tool in the course banner that links participants to common activities such as the questions and news forums, the people database, archives, etc. In addition to the course activity buttons, I added module navigational bars on the left side of Moodle splash page that allowed collaborators to easily access the exercises in each activity without rereading the activity page.
Two general discussion forum topics
Using the group mode setting, “no groups”, I was able to create two general discussion forums accessible to all participants. This setting option proved to be important in separating forums into groups (each separate group forum accessible by drop down menu). Additional options included allowing group forums to be visible to other groups without contributor status. I tested these options by adding myself to a group and testing the ability to view, add posts or reply to group or general discussion forums as both a non-member and a member. All of these affordances become important when wanting to offer various courses activities to various classes or groups.
Module programmed for selective release
When I first read about the selective release criteria, I interpreted the words “selective release” to refer to the timed programmed release of a module, similar to our ETEC 565 course. After researching Moodle’s affordances from various sources including Moodle’s own website, I determined that Moodle’s timed release capabilities are limited. Although some activities like quizzes can be released by pre-programmed times, most activities and resources do not have this option. Although not programmed, Moodle modules can be manually released through three different methods:
- the eye on the right side of the module hides the topic;
- the box on the right side of the module hides all other topics except the chosen topic and the summary;
- and within the settings option the number of weeks or topics shown can be selected.
Although these are perfectly viable options to selectively release topics, they do not fit my definition of “programmed selective release of module”. This led me to find the affordance to program selective release of all activities and resources based on groupings. This required me to set up Groups, one for Math and one for Physics collaborators. These groups, once added to a grouping in the Group setting’s options, could be exclusively selected for access to activities and resources. Although a granular process to programming selective release of a module, this method completely hides all programed activities to students outside of the programmed grouping. Although I have added a visible navigational bar on the splash page to activities in the programmed selective release module, these activities can’t be accessed by non-group members. Throughout this process, I tested each affordance by adding myself to each group, in turn, to confirm the options and views of different group’s members.
After rereading the posts in the Moodle discussion forum, I thought of another way to selectively release the modules. By creating a label with the title of the module and created links to the activities for the module, you can selectively release the label while putting Moodle’s links to these activities in a later topic which can be hidden using settings option of number of topics/weeks shown. Although I already kind of did this, I overkilled or doubled up the process by making each activity selective release to the Math group.
One additional group discussion forum for 2 groups set up in Moodle
This criterion presented a small challenge to my group setting’s knowledge. At first, I thought I could set the forum settings to “visible groups” mode, but this only allowed groups to view, not contribute to other group’s posts. Unfortunately, a forum can’t be exclusive to and shared by two separate groups, therefore I needed to create a combined grouping of the physics and math groups. Once the grouping was created, I had to set the forum available to “group members only”, the grouping to “Math and Physics group” and group mode to “no groups” to allow both groups to contribute to the same forum. In order to test this process, I added myself as a member to each group, in turn, and tested the posting and reply options.
How labor intensive was the process?
Surprisingly, I found this process to be much more labor intensive than the previous Moodle course that I created in ETEC 510. The last time I created in Moodle, I spent less time configuring the activities and more time constructing the materials in the course. Within this course, I discovered Moodle’s activities have many more options and intricacies than I had previously known. Some of the things I learned about Moodle included the Glossary’s automated linking of key words to keywords in Moodle’s activities, the grouping option for restricting access to activities based on membership status, the pre-programmed surveys, the HTML text boxes on the splash page, the many uses for glossaries and databases, etc.
What was challenging?
The most challenging part of this assignment was the programmed selective release module, mainly because the wording left room for interpretation making it constructivist in nature. Through many discussions in forum, I finally decided that my definition of selective release was a granular release of all module activities and resources to a specific grouping. In the forum, everyone did not agree with my assessment and John, the master facilitator, even questioned my conclusion. In true constructivist nature, these challenges to my logic created deeper thinking and further cemented my understanding of this process and belief in my decision.
What surprised me?
Although I had heard that Moodle could be temperamental, I didn’t experience this phenomenon until this course. Sometimes HTML code within the Moodle site would corrupt with the smallest adjustments or even just by opening the code. Although this was frustrating, I learned to cut and paste the original code in Word so that code could be utilized without having to be recreated.
What worked well?
As I’m at the end of my journey, just putting the final editing touches in my web and splash pages, I am recognizing how far my HTML and Moodle skills have developed. No longer leaning upon Dreamweaver and Moodle’s HTML tools, I am finding it easier and quicker to wade directly into the code and make the necessary adjustments.
Conclusion
Although this process was challenging, surprising and labor intensive, I learned a lot about Moodle and what it could accomplish. I believe I have started making a course that will be able to create a Lesson Study environment for teachers in our district and beyond to practice professional development in an authentic and real-life manner.
References:
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever, American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2). Retrieved July 30, 2011 from http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm.