Completing my course in Moodle has been quite a journey for me.  Before this class I never thought of myself as technologically savvy in the least.  I had, in the past, figured out how to make a movie and upload it to youtube, how to create a blog, how to build a website (okay, it was one of those free sites that doesn’t require HTML knowledge).  The point is, I was brave enough to experiment.

This exercise taught me that I don’t give myself credit for my abilities.  I do have good problem solving skills, and that helped me work through the various requirements for my Moodle course.  The exercise helped build my confidence in my ability to learn how to use unfamiliar technologies.

Throughout this course my concept of what a LMS is changed significantly.  The two articles that we were assigned to read at the beginning of the course laid down a great foundation on which I would work.  Throughout this project, I kept assessing whether my site was student-centered.  Is this content reflecting my own knowledge, or is it allowing students space to build theirs? I kept asking myself.  It was a struggle for me to keep my overviews, for instance, short.  I initially felt that I had to write everything that students needed to know about music in the Baroque era, for instance.  However, I could write as much as I wanted, but students would retain very little, if any of the “important” information.  It would be best if students learned the information by working though assignments.  This would be best done in a community-centered learning environment.

To create such an event, I incorporated a wiki.  I have only used wikis twice as a student, and never required it of my students, simply because I wasn’t sure how to go about it, neither did I understand the pedagogical merits of such an assignment.  Wikis, I learned in this class, are a wonderful way of supporting a community-centered environment because students would contribute to the pot of knowledge, and would have to negotiate with each other the ingredients that would be most relevant.  It’s also a great way of helping students clarifying their understanding of a topic or issue.

History has traditionally been taught as a solo discipline, although the reality of historical research is that it is a social practice!  Students typically engage in private research, reading and writing about topics that interest them, rarely if ever, collaborating with their peers, or even soliciting ideas from them.  This community- and student-centeredness challenges this traditional practice to one that is more in keeping with the practice of history.  To that end I introduced social, collaborative research.  Using diigo.com, a social bookmarking website, I required my students to contribute links that they’d come across during their studies in Music history.  Students are not required to merely post the links, however, they are to write brief descriptions of the site to help their peers quickly assess whether a site was relevant to their needs.  I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome of this assignment once my course goes live.

So how has my concept of a LMS evolved during these past 13 weeks?  I have moved from a static, teacher-centered concept of a LMS, were the site serves as a repository, a place to park course materials, to an active, live, dynamic, collaborative learning space.

This course has really advanced my thinking about technology.  The possibilities are endless because there are so many programs “out there” and there are new ones appearing almost daily.  The next major software that’s emerged is Google+.  This course has gotten me very interested in exploring new software and given me the confidence, too.  I have started exploring Google+.  I like the feature that keeps track of websites that contains content that’s interesting to me.  I look forward to exploring and experiencing how this social software will transform education.

I learned that technology isn’t all that scary.  Sometimes it requires trial and error.  One has to allow oneself time and space to do this work.  I found that I couldn’t do things in a hurry.   Many times I did stuff on the Moodle website that just didn’t work, like embed videos in the discussion forums.  The videos showed up in the edit view, but in student/non-editing view they were not visible.  Embedded videos showed up consistently in other pages, such as the webpage feature and the quizzes.  Perhaps it’s one of Moodle’s quirks.  I never did overcome the challenge of uploading files from Nvu to Moodle.  That is something I will further explore post ETEC 565.  I will invest in Dreamweaver, however.

The module we did on assessment was particularly helpful to me.  My flight path indicated that I wanted to explore ways assess students in ways consistent with 21^st-century learning.  I had grown quite dissatisfied with the traditional methods of assessing students’ understanding of history.  No wonder students hate history!

I learned during that module, that you didn’t have to entirely throw away the traditional methods, but you don’t have to rely on them, either.  I utilized assessment criteria such as concept maps, wikis, discussions, and group projects.  However, to ensure that students were actually reading their text book (a major issue at my college in all departments), and to help them learn the material, I found that Moodle’s quiz function was quite helpful.  I endeavored to create quizzes for each topic, a time-consuming task, but one I think will help advance learning.  Not only does it provide “time on task” as discussed in Chickering and Gamson (1987), but it provides students with much needed immediate feedback.

Working on the Moodle site was an engaging activity for me.  I will continue working on the site after this class because I have two more modules to add.  I will probably change some of the assignments around.  I have in the first module, for instance, the wiki assignment.  In hindsight that’s probably not a good place for that assignment as none of my students would have had experience creating knowledge in such a public forum.  Students at my college tend to be consumers rather than producers of knowledge.  My course will certainly change that, but one has to lead the students gently through the process.  Shoving them into the knowledge-building pool will only make them drown.

I look forward to completing designing this course and designing other courses, too.  There is so much other software that I’d like to explore.  I have utilized quite a bit of different software in my Moodle course, and I suspect that I will remove some of these and substitute others from time to time.  I would like, for instance, to add blogging.  I would also like to encourage students to use programs that I’m just learning to use, like Storify.com.  The possibilities are endless, but one really must choose the technologies that they would like to use with great care.  ETEC 565, I feel, has provided me with the tools to make reasonable choices for my students.