Jun 19 2011
Moodle is the Monster hiding in my closet!
Viewing the Vista platform as a course creator was very interesting..Since I am already used to the “look and feel” of a commercial product (D2L in my case) I felt much more at home on the Vista site than I do with Moodle. Like Sian, I find the Vista site very intuitive, while the Moodle site baffles me. It is so easy to switch between student and teacher in Vista, and yes, I could just keep switching the edit mode back and forth in Moodle, but it seems less friendly to me – I know that you get what you pay for, but the Moodle site has the feel of the early days of shareware – and I would have thought that being around for so many years, there would have been a more professional look to it. I know I am sticking my neck out here, in a sea of Moodle fans in my course, but that’s where I am right now. Maybe after I conquer this monster, I will feel differently….
In fact, I am getting more stressed as the days go by, especially as I see some of the products of my colleagues as they seem to whiz through their modules. I found the Wimba session very very helpful – the Moodle tutorials – not so much. So perhaps now that I have installed our licenced Dreamweaver on my computer, and I try to refresh my memory on how to use it, I will feel better. My panic time will come when I have to upload the zipped files into Moodle…a step that I needed a bit more information from the Wimba session, but since I could only view the archive, I will need to investigate this step much more from other sources.
It’s a steep pitch getting started with Moodle–sometimes morese for folks used to another LMS environment…it was for me! But once you’ve got a more intuitive sense of things it’ll be easier. And you’ll be able to migrate to a third or fourth LMS really easily.
It’s kind of like learning multiple romance languages: the more you learn, the more you develop a sense of their common roots.