This week in our considerations of the selection on Learning Management Systems, we were offered a scenario and instructed to provide one comprehensive question to guide the outcome, and to estimate the number of weeks it would take to create an online course. The provided scenario outlined Benoît’s predicament: a short timeframe to modify his familiar face-to-face Business English course into a wholly online offering, with a choice between Blackboard Learn and Moodle.
The scenario provides enough details for students of ETEC565A to create defendable positions, but is vague enough that any number of questions could possibly be used to guide Benoît’s decision. The important activity here is picking just one. For me, I think the primary and most comprehensive question to ask would be, how would Benoît adapt his teaching style to fit his style as an educator and the valued outcomes of the course.
What was interesting to me is that when I started writing my response to this scenario, I chose Blackboard Learn for Benoît’s goals. Before fully deciding on my one guiding question, I had created a full narrative: Does Benoît trust his colleagues? How did they form their decisions? What are the characteristics of his student group, including cultural expectations? Is Business English a topic that could benefit from the affordances Moodle is well known for, that might be more difficult to provide with the structure and design Blackboard Learn? While the two LMSs’ are similar, they do offer some important differences – both outlined in the scenario, and as covered by our weekly readings and previous knowledge.
After I was finished, I stopped to consider the previous readings in ETEC565A. I decided I had veered off-track in my thinking process – If this were a real-world scenario, Benoît would need to make a quicker decision and utilize his toolkit at hand to provide a solution ready for next semester. The ETEC565A course expectation to provide one question and choose either one or the other LMS for Benoît doesn’t fit well with my question, because Benoît’s choice would depend on if he valued the social-constructivist affordances of Moodle over the structure on Blackboard Learn. I made an assumption of desire to provide the value-added resources that Moodle has been lauded for along Benoît’s desire to provide opportunities congruent with Chickering & Gamson’s (1987) Seven Principles of Good Practice along with the NETs framework. This tipped the scale in Moodle’s favour, resulting in a re-write of my discussion.
The fact that I first supported on LMS and then switched wholesale to another helped affirm my conceptualization that there is no one correct answer for this activity. I found the cognitive dissonance of my writing process to be an enjoyable challenge, especially as I have never created a Moodle course before the following weeks of ETEC565A will help determine how feasible my proposed timeline for Benoît would be. I have also never taken a Business English course, although I could imagine writing one in my capacity as an ESL teacher. I am also intimately familiar with short deadlines – In sum, trust in Benoît’s capacity to complete this project, and make an excellent offering through Moodle!
References
Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Availble online at http://www.lonestar.edu/multimedia/SevenPrinciples.pdf
National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers. Retrieved January 21 2014, from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm
