Tag: WebCT

Categories
Assignment Reflection

Moodling

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
Reflection

Setting up a Moodle Quiz…ugh

My colleague, John Koetsier, recently described setting up a quiz in Moodle as “trained monkey work”…very apt, except that the trained monkeys would probably want to pawn it off to a bunch of macaques.

Setting up my quiz in Moodle has been the most tedious task I’ve undertaken for ETEC 565 thus far, and one I don’t relish doing again (although I’ve got one to set up in WebCT CE 4.1 at work next week). It was probably a mistake on my part to start off with the embedded question (Cloze) style assessment. My first thought was that a fill-in-the blanks kind of question would be useful, but the fact that such questions require special coding in Moodle and that the related Moodle Help documentation is rather skimpy made this question very frustrating to set up.

One of our requirements was to embed an image in at least one question. My inclination was to do this in a matching-type question – provide an image and match terminology or a description. This would add variety to the quiz and take into account different learning styles, although accessibility to visually-impaired students becomes an issue. Well, first of all, I couldn’t embed the images into the question fields – I had to put them into the question description area. Alignment wasn’t working, so I set up a table and labelled things to coordinate with the question fields. Then, in preview mode, the table showed up, but without the images. As it turned out, I had to fiddle with the html created by Moodle, linking in the resources stored by Moodle. I shouldn’t have to do this. Many instructors won’t know how to fix the html and will end up complaining to the trained monkeys about outsourcing to the macaques.

Probably the biggest part of the learning curve for me was having to detail everything, anticipating how I would respond to student answers, how students might answer correctly and how they might answer incorrectly. When I’m grading a paper-based test, I’ve got all those correct/incorrect algorithms stored in my subconscious, ready to interpret and assess a student’s answer. On occasion, I’ll get a correct answer that I hadn’t anticipated – an online, automated quiz isn’t necessarily prepared for this. Fortunately, there is the opportunity in Moodle (not in WebCT CE 4.1) to review and override automated grades. In my view, though, reviewing and overriding marks is probably more work than manual grading (on paper OR online).

David

Categories
Reflection

fiddling in moodle

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

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