Creating a Moodle course was an exciting but frustrating experience. I really enjoyed being able to play around with Moodle and see what affordances it offered for my context, however it was extremely slow and pages seemed to take forever to load. Overall though, from this initial experience, it is clear that Moodle is a powerful tool that can be used in multiple ways to deliver different content.
The course I wanted to develop is one I plan on implementing in my school. I am the principal of a BC Offshore school in China. This provides multiple challenges as my students are learning in a completely new education system that is very different to the one they are accustomed. The biggest challenge is that all of my students are English Language Learners and as a result as they are learning content heavy courses like Chemistry or Physics while also learning the English language. The biggest frustration my staff faces is in supporting students’ vocabulary acquisition. Currently we have a vocabulary course that goes from Grade 10 to Grade 12, in which we try to prepare students for both the academic language they will encounter in university but also the social language they will need to successfully make the transition from living in China to living in Canada. These vocabulary classes generate a lot of paper and a lot of marking. Other than the environmental concerns, this also raises the logistical challenges of handing out, collecting, and marking over 400 pieces of paper a day. This is one of the prime reasons that I wanted to develop a vocabulary course for Moodle.
The course I designed allows students to select the words that interest them and then to proceed through each lesson at the pace they desire. Each week they must finish one lesson, however when they finish the four sections that make up a lesson is up to them.
I tried to make the course as simple as possible. I didn’t want students to have to take a lot of time determining how to navigate the site. I plan to implement the course in a blended learning environment, however Chinese teachers with minimal technical experience will moderate the course, so I wanted to find a fool proof way for the course to operate. I decided to limit the home page to four navigational icons: the lessons, the forums, the course overview, and the wiki. From here the students should be able to easily navigate to where they need to be without much confusion. The Chinese teachers also, with minimal assistance, should be able to grasp the basics of the site and provide any assistance students require. The lesson page for example provides links to all of the learning modules and students can select which lesson they want to take with ease.
To ensure that students do know how to navigate the course I have built the first lesson around a course introduction. This lesson will provide the students with experience with everything that they need to complete. Since we had to create a module that was selectively released I decided that I would require all of my students to have to meet a certain grade requirement on this introductory lesson before progressing further. This was easy to do and ensures that students will not fall through the cracks in understanding how the course works.
Most of the tasks we had to finish for this project were fairly simple to accomplish. Creating the wiki, discussion forums, and even the lessons simply involved clicking a button and than adding in appropriate text. Of the three, lessons were the most complex because they provided much more optionality than the wiki and the forums. I really liked that the lessons were self-contained and that you could provide multiple pathways for how each student finished a lesson. I also liked that lessons were contained within a single page so students were not required to navigate back and forth to the home page. I was not a fan however, of the questions available in this iteration of Moodle. I played around with matching questions and short answer questions but since Moodle does not allow for multiple questions on the same page I decided against using them. Instead I mainly focused on essay questions as these were straightforward and did what I required of them.
As I said creating forums was very easy to accomplish. I also really liked the ability to restrict access to forums. To make it easier to mark and keep track of what students are doing I wanted my site to be as uncluttered as possible, and this allowed the forums to only appear when the need to. I also found that developing grouped activities and forums, though a little confusing because the course was not populated; was overall an easy task to accomplish.
I am a little concerned that the way I designed my site was not what was desired from this assignment. In the past, the assignments I have submitted have not always been done in the typical fashion; instead I have done things how I want to do them so as to further what I have wanted to accomplish with this course. Using lessons, instead of pages seemed more appropriate for the learning environment I want for my students. If I ultimately lose marks because of it I have no complaints as I got a lot from the experience and now I have the start of something I can actually use in my school.