This was my first Moodle and my first online course development experience. Therefore, obviously I had a lot to learn on many fronts.

I found Moodle overall relatively easy to use, the interface intuitive and help pages/tutorials/forums were always near at hand. However, on a couple of occasions when it came to specific assignment settings/requirements I found it difficult to figure out how exactly to implement these. One minor irritation I found in Moodle was the fact there are quite a few new/improved/different features available in the latest version that were not available in UBC installation. Some of these would have been great additions and worthwhile to test drive as well. In saying that there were still many other features in 1.9 that I did not have the opportunity to investigate or use either; it is a very comprehensive and evolving product.

Additional to the Moodle environment as a side tool I used wix.com to generate a splash page for the course. This was after John had highlighted the importance of making this more complex than just a basic html page. I decided to experiment a bit and try to embed a flash artefact for my course splash page. The wix.com interface was also easy to use. They provide numerous templates that can be quickly modified to ones needs. Honestly, I was really surprised at the ease of making this as I am aware of the time and effort it takes to actually generate something like this from scratch.

Not being a teacher I was really unsure what learning materials to generate or add to the course. I was daunted by what I thought would be the hardest part of this assignment. Luckily there was a plethora of resources in many formats freely available under CC license on the Scratch and ScratchEd websites. I based most of my course activities and tutorials on resources I found these sites. However, it did take me longer than I imagined reviewing and selecting the appropriate resources to include.

When developing my Moodle course it really helped that I have been a student in a couple of MET online courses. It helped to have a bit of a starting point as far as design and tools to include. To ensure authenticity in my assignment I decided to create a course for a Scratch module, something I know I am going to be teaching in a month or so. Keeping this in mind I tried to make the course easy to reuse or extend. I also consciously tried to ensure the design was clean and simple – removing as much clutter from the interfaces as I could without losing ease of navigation. To add variety and interest I included multiple types of media where possible, these were mainly text, images and videos/animations. For example for the tutorials I was able to include both video and text based instructions. Throughout the course I really focused on incorporating activities involving student collaboration. Nearly all activities require students to work in groups of 2-3. Aside from learning the course materials I wanted to foster a collaborative working environment for the students.

Overall this assignment really allowed me to gain a greater idea of the time and skills required for creating an online course/module in Moodle or any other similar LMS.

One last unrelated note/reflection, I was really glad to be back in North America to finish this assignment. Sadly the internet connection (and power supply) in West Africa was too unstable and unreliable to make developing online materials easy. I would not recommend anyone tries to create an online course in this environment.