Well, I’ve just finished following the introductory moodle activity as outlined in the moodle toolkit wiki page. I’m accustomed to setting up pages and discussion forums in WebCT CE, which is fairly quick and simple. Setting up the discussion forum in moodle did take more work than I’m used to, but I think that’s partly because of what I’m used to and also because of the number of setting options available in moodle. (Flipping back and forth between the moodle course and the wiki to ensure I followed the instructions to the letter was also time consuming and likely more labour intensive than it would be to create a forum on my own.)
The one feature that was new to me, so far, was the grading option in the forum. This option does open up some possibilities for assessment, but I would want to really think about how and why I would grade individual posts, and whether all, some or even any posts ought to be graded in this way. Why isn’t there a checkbox option for students and faculty to indicate that they have read a posting? This could be a useful measuring tool too.
I also have some trepidation about the layout of the discussion forum, but I won’t really be able to judge its effectiveness until there are more postings to read. Things seem to be okay for two postings, but will moodle afford a good organization of several thousand messages?
I find it interesting too, that moodle automatically set up my course shell for a 10-week organization. Such defaults might restrict less adventurous (digitally) faculty who are trying to create online courses.
Cheers,
David