This is not the first time I’ve created a course in an LMS. As part of my job, I do all this nitty-gritty for our new online courses in WebCT. Whilst taking this course, I completed one on the “Greek and Latin Roots of English” and am starting on a course on “Women as Visual Artists”. Thankfully, the content is the responsibility of experts in the respective fields. Several MET courses ago, I also collaborated on the creation of a course module in WebCT Vista.
So, while this wasn’t as much of a “how-to” learning experience for me, it gave me the opportunity to compare the platforms. In most ways, Moodle is more advanced and user friendly than WebCT (Vista and earlier). However, I found the lack of control over organizational pages, the hierarchical “breadcrumb” trail (why, oh why does it not track where you’ve been? back-clicking from a forum to a list of all fora is counter intuitive and less than useful), discussion forum layout, and vague explanations of tools and terminology to be frustrating.
My personal preference would be not to choose Moodle as an LMS platform if the resources were available for another, more polished and logical LMS. Nonetheless, I do know now that I’m just as capable of creating a course in Moodle as in any other LMS. I’d like to spend some decent sandbox time in D2L, Blackboard 9 and others now.
Incidentally, today I came across (via Twitter) a course delivered entirely using Wetpaint. Have a look at Alec Couros’ EDST 499K web site at http://edst499k.wetpaint.com/. I’m impressed.
David
Categories:
