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My Moodle Intro Module Reflection
I am designing my Moodle as a standalone online course that aims to give students a brief introduction to some important periods in Modern Korean history. More specifically from 1910 to around 1990. The course is designed to run for 12 weeks divided into 4 major units of study. In the first week students are required to introduce themselves to the class through the use of an app or website called Thinglink. Also students will be required to take a quiz at the end of week one to gauge their pre knowledge of the upcoming unit (not really but I have to explain a test that is on material not covered yet right?). Chickering & Gamson (1987 as cited in Gibbs & Simpson, 2005 ) claimed that ‘Knowing what you know and don’t know focuses learning” In getting started, students need help in assessing existing knowledge and competence (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005 ). This pretest quiz will also help me as an instructor to assess the students’ current knowledge, so the lesson can be adapted to meet students’ levels and needs.
I found this a challenging task at first because of the fact that I was used to a more user friendly platforms like weebly or wordpress when designing a site. I also ask a friend of mine for advice which turned out to be a mistake because this friend was a web designer and gave me advice that was very much outside my comfort zone skill wise. What I found is that Moodle forced me to be creative when trying to make the site look and act like I wanted it to. To be fair the final product is not visually what I wanted it to look like but I think that I made a site that bridged the gap between working well and looking good. I still think that Moodle needs to focus more on making the making of sites easier so that educators can focus on the content more when setting up their LMS.
The communication used in this course will be comprised of weekly discussions with peers on a chosen topic, communication with the teacher through message board and email and social media through hashtags (mostly twitter). Moodle is a very robust and simple system that allows for the teacher to make communication simple and at the same time effective. Since I am new at making an LMS on moodle I chose to keep it very simple to avoid any issues.
In terms of assessment strategies, Moodle allows for a wide range of assessment strategies and tools. The quiz module includes the following response types: fill-ins, multiple-choice, multi-choice (more than one answer can be selected), true-false, matching, and short answer (exact matching). All types are supported with automatic feedback and scoring. The essay module allows open-ended questions with built-in comment boxes for instructors to provide feedback. All of these assessment types can be time restricted and password protected, and can be set to allow for limited or multiple attempts.
In my pretest quiz, I have created 3 multiple choice, 3 matching, and 2 short answer questions that will be graded immediately and 2 essay questions that will require manual marking after the fact. The benefit of the questions that will be grade immediately is that they will give students instant feedback so that they may assess their own learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005) Each question has immediate feedback such as “You did not get it right this time, try again later” or “You almost got it right” and when students answer the question correctly there is feedback to compliment students such as “Great job” and there is an explanation explaining why that answer is correct. It is important, where possible, to include targeted feedback to help the students learn from their answers. As the final 2 essay questions would be manually graded later, I think it is important that I remind students in a general feedback box that they should not panic if their scores are lower than they expected. Maintaining motivation, was the most important and influential issue for new students in their first assignment of the course (Gibbs & Simpson, 2002). To discourage them before they really understand the ebb and flow of the course would be major misstep.
Creating quizzes manually in the Moodle was not as difficult as I had anticipated. The help sections offered on www.moodle.org were very informative and came in handy. Creating the questions was not difficult but it was hard to sometimes find material that fit the type of question. I would think that most questions in a course based on history would be either of the essay, matching and multiple choice. I think that once I started adding more and more questions this process would become easier and the questions in my question bank would grow in quantity and quality.
As this online course is for adult learners, the assessments will be focused on students’ participation, self assessment, weekly reflection, final presentation as a culminating activity, and peer review. I find that peer review is very useful for giving and receiving feedback. Besides helping spot errors and improving the other’s students work, Gibbs & Simpson (2005) stated that the real value may lie in students internalizing the standards expected so that they can supervise themselves and improve the quality of their own assignments prior to submitting them.
Creating quizzes requires a great deal of work in setting up and testing, especially the first time it is implemented. However, online quizzes have great advantages for rapid and automatic scoring and grading. Students that take online quizzes with computer-based feedback score much better on exams than stronger students that don’t (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). No matter whether online quizzes are for the purpose of formative or summative assessment, they can be very effective in engaging students in their learning, therefore they are a good part of a successful teaching strategy.
In closing, I think that I learned a lot from this assignment and I think that it taught me a great lesson on how to face struggle with an attitude of “how can I solve this problem” as opposed to allowing frustration on not getting things perfect.
References
Building a Moodle Quiz. (n.d.). Retrieved July 2, 2015, from https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Building_Quiz
Cole, J. & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Using_Moodle_book
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf