This week I have really been “playing” with my Moodle site. I found it incredibly easy to set up simple pages and links. I also played with making labels for many of the resources created. In terms of initial set up, to get a course up and running, to provide basic information to students, Moodle is very efficient. However, I then tried creating a few activities for my sample Moodle site. I created a wiki, in which students can edit and collaboratively add information to. This again was quite easy to set up. The problems arose when I tried to incorporate my first lesson. After watching a short YouTube video on how to create lessons, I decided to give it a shot. The branch set up and page set up was quite time consuming and took me many tries to get it set up right. Once I had that set up , I had to create my questions pages. The multiple choice, and true or false pages were quite easy to set up but very time consuming. If I had to set up a whole unit for a science of math class the time to create would not be worth the rewards. I also tried to include a short answer style question. This was beyond painful, the “code” needed to be input for the answers, to allow for various responses, is a whole course in itself. I cannot see myself using this feature of Moodle, as I would probably stick to multiple choice style questions. I did like the ability of Moodle to self grade and allow for teacher feedback after each section is complete..
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I’ve just sent out an announcement for folks to explore WebCT Vista as well (details in the course site). What you describe is one of the things I find particularly distressing about Moodle. However I am disadvantaged, since I’ve never worked in a Moodle-rich context. Paradoxically there aren’t m/any Moodle experts here at UBC…even affiliated with the MET.