This week I finally had a chance to dive into the toolkit and start working through the exercises there. I’ve chosen to do my work this term in WebCT. I chose this, rather than the more popular Moodle, for a couple of reasons. First, I took ETEC 510 (Design of Technology-Supported Learning Environments) last semester and had a chance to develop a course in Moodle. I think it is important to stretch as many muscles as we can in the program, so I decided to try a different LMS this time around. The second reason is that much of the work I do will be developing tools for the commercial LMS platforms. At the moment, it appears that the big textbook companies (mine included) are unwilling to do much work within open-source LMSs, because we are unable to pincode, and therefore protect, our content.
I found the comparison exercise surprisingly difficult. I thought it would be a fairly straightforward exercise in pulling information off the Moodle site and the Blackboard site. Clearly Blackboard isn’t putting much corporate muscle behind WebCT Vista these days, however, as it was virtually impossible to find any information about Vista. I’m curious to know how everyone else has made on on this activity.
Working on setting up my course in WebCT/Vista was quite fun. Because I’ve got exposure to the system as a student, I found it easier to work with out of the gate, compared to my experience last semester with Moodle. Moodle ‘looked’ different and therefore I spent quite a lot of time hunting around, entering things and getting unexpected results, and so on. As I worked through the list, it occurred to me that – had I done this before we met Benoit – I would likely have upped my time estimate. I got stuck in a few places, but never for more than a few minutes. In reality, the biggest headache was toggling back and forth between the instructions in the course shell and my sandbox. Trying to go paperless meant I kept losing my place! I found myself concentrating too hard on where I was in the list and what I needed to look for rather than just poking around and tossing a few things up. That will be the next step.
All in all, a pretty good experience!
Laura
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