Suggestions for Benoît

Benoît surely has a difficult task ahead of him. He needs to make a decision, that not only needs to suit him and his abilities, but must also be able to fit his teaching style. Benoît’s background and motivation is going to be very important in making this decision. A big part of the choice is going to be how comfortable he is in using an LMS system to achieve his goals.

His experience is limited, he used WebCT to disseminate notes, which is a very simplistic use or the platform. He has also coded a website but again this is not very challenging and doesn’t necessarily apply to LMS.

Having support will be very important for him, however it doesn’t necessarily need to come from the help desk, which is slow anyway. Lots of people in his faculty are using Moodle over WebCT despite its lack of support. It would be key for Benoît to ask his colleagues about their choice, reasoning, and decision. Particularly he should find colleagues from similar backgrounds with little experience and really discuss how they are adapting and if they might be willing to help him should the need arise.

He needs to make this decision carefully it should be about understanding enough about the system to be able to use it to achieve what he wants in teaching so that the system itself doesn’t dictate the way he teaches. After talking with colleagues it would be helpful for him to try each system and get a feel for them before making his final decision.
Q: After discussing and sampling both systems, which one do you feel more comfortable with/ excited by?

This question is important because regardless of his decision, he is going to have to spend a significant amount of time learning to use it, creating a course on it and he will need to have a passion for what he is doing to motivate himself to finish.

Benoît has said that he could spend an five hours a week working on the course to go live the next semester. I really don’t feel able to say if this is enough without knowing more details. How long is left until the next semester? Is he simply going to be transferring existing materials? Or developing new parts to the course? How was his course organized before? Test based courses would be easier to transfer. How quickly does he adapt to using new technology? Is he good at working productively or does he become distracted? I think he needs to start transferring the course, being sure to ask these question, and see how long it takes him to accomplish the first couple of units, then a progress check could be used to see if he is on track for finishing in the set time.