Well here it is. Phew!
BCSA Facilitator Training Moodle Site
Thinking back, I believe that I had a fairly accurate view of what to expect when building an LMS course site. Of course, I was hoping that I would find that it was much easier than I expected but that wasn’t to be the case. One of the greatest lessons I learned involved being able to assess the amount of time it would take to put together resources, especially when the technology is new to me. Especially in a work context that is very fresh onto the social software or 2.0 scene, I expect that this practical experience will have some solid value as we move forward to expand our presence online.
In the end, this was a very challenging, exhausting and time consuming black hole of an assignment but I have to say that I really feel empowered after completing the Moodle site and all of the components. I feel a real sense of accomplishment and I truly feel like I have a solid tool belt of practical skills that I can now take with me into my work context including: building lessons, graphic user interfaces, assessment tools, multi-media activities, building websites & wikis and many more social software programs. What I know for sure is that no matter what task lies ahead, I’ve learned that I am much more resourceful and curious about this topic than I would have imagine. As I look back over my blog postings I see someone that for the first time really embraced this subject matter (one that I found extremely intimdating in the past) and forgot what I didn’t know and started asking those that did. I really got over my fear and bias of working with people in this online medium and I think that new found resourcefulness and fearlessness will serve me well in the future.
That said, this site didn’t get built without its complications. Even though I wanted to smash my computer sometimes, it really wasn’t my computer’s fault… it was Moodle’s. Maybe it was because I ended up spending so many hours in front of the computer at a time and my brain turned mushy but either way I had so much trouble with the “Using Moodle” document and the “Moodle for this Page” resources on site that at times I really wanted to throw in the towel. It seemed to be the way the instructions were written. I found myself re-reading a 3 line paragraph 6 times and then going back to the internet to try and search Moodle functions because I still couldn’t figure it out. At first I thought it was just me, but as we progressed through the modules and e-Learning tool kit I realized that the majority of the tools we were using were not that difficult to understand and implement. To be fair, building a complete interactive online course may have been a heavier task than many of these social software programs provide but I still feel like Moodle has a long way to go in order to make the system more intuitive and user friendly overall.
Everything said and done, I would like to thank everyone in the course for all of your support and feedback over the last few months and just say how much you all really changed my mind about eLearning.
Thank you and good luck!
Erin