Oct

5

My First Moodle Experience

Posted by: | October 5, 2010 | 2 Comments

Last week I decided to take a stab at working with Moodle for the first time in my life. Although I would like to say that the experience was mainly positive, a feeling of frustration in working with Moodle would be a more accurate description. In the next few paragraphs I will comment on my experience with using Moodle and describe some of the challenges and surprises that I encountered along the way.

My initial impression with working with Moodle was a feeling of confusion, awkwardness and lacking inspiration. Although a little harsh, I do have my reasons for these observations. For example, as I went through the activity I found adding content to the Moodle site to be somewhat confusing as I was constantly searching for buttons and menus, at times guessing in order to complete the task. I can contribute some of this to my inexperience with using Moodle, which is to be expected with learning any new piece of software. However, after an hour of using the LMS, I didn’t feel any more comfortable than when I first started. This is seriously disconcerting to me for two reasons: One being that if an experienced computer user is having difficulty, how would someone with little experience be able to create an online course using Moodle?  Secondly, I am concerned that I will struggle to create my own course with Moodle.

In addition, I also found the graphical user interface (GUI) to be rather bland and completely void of any inspiration. The GUI really didn’t speak to me or provide the inspiration that some software GUI’s do. Maybe that is not the intention of the GUI but I am one of those people that are greatly affected by the GUI of software. For example, one of the reasons why I enjoy using Cubase audio software so much is because of the way it looks and feels. In my opinion, a graphical user interface can greatly affect the way you interact with the software, even affecting content that you create. Hopefully I will be able to get around the “look” of the software and focus more on learning the functions and features.

Even though I found fault with Moodle, there were some positives that I can take away from the experience. Firstly, I thought that Moodle was fairly fast and responsive. For example, I didn’t experience any lag when I added text. Secondly, Moodle, from what I could tell, seemed to have a lot of features and options to create a successful online learning environment.

I believe that my biggest challenge that I face with using Moodle is the appeal of the interface and finding my way around. Having to create our own course using Moodle will be a great challenge but, nevertheless, I look forward to learning the system and creating an excellent Moodle site.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. John Egan on October 6, 2010 7:28 am

    Nice reflection Joey. I’m curious: did your browser load the WYSIWYG editor in Moodle? It seems to load in some browsers and not others.

    Try a different browser or two and see if that makes Moodle happier.

    I agree with the esthetics, by the way. Moodle is…bleh.

  2. ctr manipulation bot on January 13, 2023 3:32 am

    ctr manipulation bot

    My First Moodle Experience : My ETEC565 e-portfolio

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