It was interesting watching my introductory unit come into clearer and clearer focus as the weekend approached – sort of like one of those first person perspectives in movies when a character awakens to a group of onlookers. All of the notes and information spread across thin TextEdit windows which I use in my workflow to keyboard and view an open page clutter the bottom of the screen while the open tabs from above get narrower as I continue to open more. What I am trying to say is that a lot of parts had to be collected in the whole of the final product. The ride was intense.
One of the difficulties that I experienced was the difference between the edit screen, the logged-out screen and the screen from the perspective of a guest login. It became obvious to me from the outset that working from the authoring side of Moodle was not always a straight-forward process. The unit headings of my schedule page looked fine with my login, but on the guest login they were crushed into the right column. Lots of times, adding tools was counter-intuitive, and involved checking YouTube for complex work-around to seemingly simple processes. For example, I was surprised to learn that there was no simple way to link different elements within the course. The solution finally worked for me was to copy-paste the URL of the page as I would for an external site (super clunky).
The opposite was also true: what I expected to be complicated turned out to be simple. The large navigational gear buttons that I have at the top of the first section were accomplished very quicky by linking the graphics placed in a table. Unfortunately I was unable to hide the original feature icons without also disabling the link.
The documentation stage a big part of the clarifying process for me. Articulating a rationale for the online delivery of the course, describing decisions on the site’s visual design and explaining how my choice of tools connect to the unit objectives forced me to re-think my reasoning. In some cases I felt confident and justified in my design decisions, and in others I had go back into the site and tweak details. One of my last edits was to change the wording on my objectives. This is the iterative process. Documenting decisions was a good way to activate that process .