Reflection on the building of a Moodle course site:

Building a course site in Moodle, was not generally a difficult task, but it was a laborious and somewhat frustrating one.  While that statement may sound negative, I mean it in a neutral tone.  More specifically, I should say that completing design tasks in Moodle tended to be time consuming, and less straight-forward than conceptually seems necessary; but with more time than I thought necessary and some creative solutions, I was able to complete the task without significant difficulty.

One of the more time consuming aspects of designing in Moodle was maintaining navigability.  URLs were often needed for buttons and links, and it was necessary to either copy the link before navigating to the edit screen where it was needed, or open multiple browser windows.  I tended to do the latter, but the slow refresh time of pages, frequently meant that I was waiting for a page to load just so I could click on an option and wait for another page load.

Another challenge that I came across was a lack of appropriate options for truly online learning.  It was difficult to maintain the learning in the online space with out referencing what would otherwise be a given as a handout in a face-2-face setting or navigate between design elements smoothly.  Frequently, I wanted to incorporate the affordances provided by lessons, databases and forums within a single structure, but found I was constrained to hyperlinking between them.  This resulting in the feeling that I was either creating an awkward version of something that would be better suited for face-to-face, or required Moodle modules that are not available on the UBC Moodle servers.

The greatest challenge I came across was in programming a GUI without an open file repository where I could reference files as needed.  To create my splash-page GUI, I was required to create the menu buttons as images in the WYSIWYG editor and use the advanced features to add alternate images for mouseover and mouseout.  After this, I used the HTML editor to hyperlink those images to hidden items.  This task felt somewhat trivial in that the links that I recreated as buttons were already present as links to activities on the splash page; however, overall visual effect is much greater.  Knowing how to do this process now, it is worthwhile repeating in future Moodle design, so as to improve the visual aesthetics of Moodle, something that it tends to lack, in-general.

After completing this learning activity, there are a few changes to the way I would create future pages, or complete the units in this one.  I think it will be necessary to allocate more time than I did for these tasks, as a learning activity.  I would also dedicate more time to visual improvements.  Moodle does not seem to be very visually stimulating, and I might strive to include more graphics and icons than are the default in Moodle. On a related note, I would prefer my units of study to be separate from each other and not viewable sequentially.  Viewing peers’ sites, I know this is possible, but I did not determine if there is a feature I am unfamiliar with, or if it is a result of a difference choice in themes.  Regardless, I found their sites to be less visually distracting than my own is.