The MET program for me has been a mixed bag. I have found great joy in a lot of the courses I have taken but I have also encountered great frustration and disappointment.  Without a doubt online learning has great potential, unfortunately the technology has not developed to execute this potential to it’s fullest yet. This was ultimately my conclusion from using Moodle as well. Moodle provides a very nice structure to work within but the options to customize are severely limited and end up feeling more like surface paint, than changes to the core functionality. Due to the lack of substantial options, I felt that no matter what choices I made I the course was resulting in the same affordances.

The course I decided to make for my Moodle is an online vocabulary class. Teaching in China, vocabulary is one of our student’s biggest weaknesses and a major focus on getting them ready for post-secondary education in China. There are many criteria necessary for an effective language acquisition course; extensive input and output of the language, focus on both meaning and form, but perhaps the most important is that instruction needs to account for individual learner differences. (Ellis, 2005) I really wanted to make this a focus for my Moodle course, but unfortunately none of the layouts supported this goal. Instead I had to find a work around that changed the orientation of the Moodle and allowed for a more open course view. The result was a central page from which students are able to control their learning experience. There are clear goals for them to meet each week, and each goal can be posted on the homepage, but the way they go about meeting these goals, specifically the vocabulary they want to engage with each week, is their choice.  There are still some bugs that need to be worked out with the grading of the lessons and how a final grade is compiled for individual students, but for the most part the modifications were successful.

The main content posted on the Moodle so far is the course overview. My intended audience is ESL learners so I did not want to bog the students down in a lot of text. I also wanted to give strong visual cues to indicate exactly where information was located. I felt like Moodle supported this, though there were some minor bugs when I would copy and paste html into the compiler. One of my biggest frustrations was creating links to other pages. Often I would create the link but when I went to test it the link would no longer work. I am not sure why this was, but it happened numerous times. I would paste in the link and then click save, yet when I came back the next day the link was broken.

Overall this experience was satisfying. I really enjoyed building and playing around with the Moodle but I was frustrated by its inability to do what I wanted it to do. I am not sure if this was a result of our limited administrative capabilities or if it is a structural problem for all iterations of Moodle. This being one of my last MET courses I have read a lot of material on how to ideally implement technology in the classroom and e-learning, unfortunately the more I experience the more I come to the conclusion that the tools we have available are not yet sophisticated enough to achieve ideal implementation.

References

Ellis, R. (2005). Principles of Instructed Language Learning, System 33(2), 209-224