Tonight I dipped my toe in the waters of Moodle, following the step-by-step instructions on the ETEC565a eLearning Toolkit Wiki to create a welcome page, a forum, and a forum response. I found my first experience to be lukewarm – it was not overly labour intensive, but it was not entirely intuitive either. The interface is text-heavy and somewhat dreary looking – my ESL students might describe it as pas beau. I can understand my the concerns of my artistically-inclined classmate Bobbi-Lynn about the visual-excitement potential of Moodle. On the other hand, it is lightweight and quick to load; which is not always the case with UBC’s Connect interface.
Moodle is pretty much what I expected: a WYSIWYG editor, and lots of options via drop-down boxes. I had one moment of regret when I accidentally closed a tab and lost my work (where is the auto-save?!) and one moment of surprise when I submitted a forum response and saw that as a respondent, I had 30 minutes in which to edit my submission (I wish that was a feature of the Connect LMS!). I’m sure with some experience, navigating through Moodle will become quicker, and as I practice and my course site takes shape, the process will not seem so forced.
I’m not entirely sure that my content choice in my original flight plan suits the ETEC565a course objectives. At this point in time I am thinking of narrowing my scope rather than changing my content choice. Because I will be designing a course from scratch and without ever having taught this course material before, I believe the work ahead of me will be significant. With that said, as I was cooking dinner tonight I realized how much easier it would be to create a course based on, for example, the benefits and practice of a low-carbohydrate diet; a topic which I have almost ten years of personal experience and teaching experience. The topic of nutrition seems like it would lend itself much more easily to a novice course designer such as myself; but because this is my final MET course I have a strong desire to finish with a directed purpose and fan the flames of my career ambition. I will be discussing my thoughts and options with my professor.
Glad to see you’ve jumped into to Moodle!
But…you’re not creating an entire course—at least not for ETEC565A. You’re creating two modules of a course: a general information module and one that’s more focused on course content. 🙂
Thank you for the reminder/clarification, John, even three weeks in I still seem to be getting a handle on the course requirements and expectations. I may still need to refine my flight plan, I saw in the Connect shell that you plan to provide feedback later this week so perhaps I will wait for that opportunity to chat.