One of my goals is to become an online teacher and so the thought of experimenting with Moodle was very appealing to me. Having never worked with Moodle or any LMS to create a course I was excited to learn that we would have a Moodle Live session where we would be introduced to the program before we started to work on building our LMS sites and quiz. However, there were issues with the Live session and many people including myself were not able to view what our instructor was demonstrating.
I was struggling to figure out some of the basic course building features in Moodle and also how to add navigational components to my splash page. I decided that I would have to take charge of my own learning and so I ventured into Youtube to view as many Moodle tutorials as I could. I found the below tutorials very helpful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtHPUh_BaxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ih0d-pEI_s&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWOp1oq-TvI&feature=related
Additionally, I found the E-learning Toolkit kit and the moodle.org support forum helpful. After many hours of reading and viewing tutorials; building my Moodle site started to make a lot more sense. As outlined by Anderson (2008) online learning should allow for interaction between, students, teachers and content. I found it easy to add various assignments, discussion forum, wikis, chats, quizzes and embed video in Moodle. I really enjoyed this activity and found that Moodle provided an excellent 21st century medium to facilitate online learning. As described by Connolly and Stansfield (2006) online education is becoming a “collaborative learning environment based much more on the constructivist epistemology, promoting reflective practice through tools like blogs, [and] wikis.” (p.52). I think Moodle is an excellent option for any teacher who is interested in creating an online collaborative learning community.
Below is the link to my Planning 10 Moodle site. I created 4 modules including Graduation Program, Education and Careers, Finance and Health. One of the features I really liked in Moodle was that you could restrict access to an assignment or module so that as the course progressed the assignments opened up. Additionally, I liked the feature that in order for the students complete the various discussions you could set a minimum numbers of posts that they needed to make.
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=386
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a Theory of Online Learning. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University. Accessed online 3 March 2009 http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Connolly, T., Stansfield, M. (2006) Using Interactive Technologies in Teaching an
Online Information Systems Course. Informing Science and IT Education Joint Conference.
Retrieved November 6, 2012 from: http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2006/ProcConT158.pdf