Muddling in Moodle

This has been a great hands-on and self-directed learning experience for me working with Moodle. This has not been my first experience touching a learning management system (LMS). I came into this course with some limited Moodle experience from co-designing and partially developing a course with three Colleagues in ETEC 510 one year ago. Based on this previous experience, I came into this assignment with several lessons learned behind me including: design the course first before the development begins, start early as time could become an issue in the end, keep it simple and consistent and don’t try to change the world with your course.

The one precious resource I found in this assignment that needed to be carefully managed was time. Time to design the course, time to muddle around in Moodle to figure it out, time to find or create the content, time to create the course, time to trouble shoot when things go wrong or don’t go at all and time to review, test and revise. Like anything new, there is plenty of efficiency gained through doing a task more than once. So the first module took the longest and the last module took the least amount of time. This could also be applied to designing and developing a second course. So if I was to do this again before forgetting much of what I have learned, then it should go much quicker and smoother.

My biggest challenges were learning the technical aspects of Moodle and finding/developing the content. Both came together in the end, but not without some rework and frustration. This all leads one to work on the edge or outside of one’s comfort zone, which is good according to Lev Vygotsky. Vygostsky (Wikipedia) defined this as the zone of proximal development. I spent a lot of time in this zone, thus this assignment allowed me to develop new knowledge, skills and abilities.

For me this assignment validated something I already knew, designing and developing a course in an LMS takes a lot of time and technical skills to do it right. Some of the skills include: subject matter expertise, instructional design, multimedia expertise, writing and editing. There is a question we do need to ask ourselves before taking on such a task however: is it all worth it to develop a course in an LMS for a blended or on-line delivery. A tough question to answer and each situation would be different and that is where Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework should be used as a guide.

For an Instructor or Teacher to take on this task alone is a lot to ask for, however some will do it because of the challenge it offers and the benefits they will realize from its completion. I believe if I could have one resource to help me design and develop a course, I would ask for a multimedia developer to look after all of the HTML coding and uploading. In turn this would free up my efforts to focus on the design of the course and the development of the content.

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

Wikipedia (n.d.) Zone of Proximal development  Retreived March 30, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

Eportfolio assignment #3: Moodle course site

Between now and the last week of the course you must complete the overall component requirements for your Moodle site. These are in addition to any requirements for any other assignments.

You are expected to manage your own time to complete this assignment. However bear in mind these are not tasks that take a few minutes: several hours of work will be required to buildi these requirements—in addition the time required to learn how to do them. Which means you will best be served by starting soon.

We have purposefully (for constructivist reasons) not included instructions on how to configure these requirements. We also know from our own experiences that educational technologists must be able to learn new technologies in a largely self-directed manner. But the eLearning Toolkit is often a great place to start!

Requirements

You must build a Moodle online course site with the following components:

• Overall quality of work, as per the overall standards listed above. A significant component of your score on this assignment relates to the calibre of your web design (including level sophistication, overall look and feel ,and how user-friendly the site is).
• Splash page with a customized GUI with at least four (4) navigational components
• Two (or more) complete learning modules (module shells or placeholder pages not acceptable), largely based on HTML pages
• One (or more) module programmed for selective release
• Two general discussion forum topics
• One additional group discussion forum for (at least) 2 groups (must set up groups; they need not be populated)
• A reflection upon your experience completing this assignment posted in the Course Site page of your e-portfolio

Note: some of these requirements are straightforward–others more challenging. The more challenging ones require both technical competencies and critical analysis of system functionality versus educational design requirements. Learning modules populated with a preponderance of attached files that download (i.e. pdfs, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations) rather than(html pages that load within the LMS are not acceptable.