Moodle Experience

Before I started my reflection, I decided to see where I started from and what my learning goals were so I looked back at my Flight Path. My goal was to use Moodle as my LMS to offer an alternative way to deliver the Graduation Transitions 12 (GT 12) curriculum to students in the Mission Public School District than they are currently offering the course. Additionally, I hoped that I would develop a better understand how I can make the course more interactive as well as offering more room for student collaboration using Moodle.

In terms of meeting my goals, I would say that I have a great head start on developing the GT12 course in Moodle; I completed three of the five units in the course but due to time constraints, I didn’t finish the last two units. I estimate that I will need an additional 5 hours of development time to achieve my goal, based on my experience in setting up the other three units. I did come away with acquiring a better understanding on how to make the course more interactive using discussion forums and groups in Moodle but I failed to tie my Moodle site into Social Software sites such as Facebook and YouTube. I underestimated the time required to complete the course requirement tasks for ETEC 565A and more time would be needed to fully use Moodle in collaboration with a social network (Facebook, YouTube) to raise the level of interaction to an appropriate level so that the quality is conducive to positive learning environment for the students.

A learning goal that I did accomplish that I didn’t predict from the onset was using
JavaScript to create dropdown menus. I wanted at add just more than a links on my GUI Splash Page and figured dropdown menus was something new I could try and set out to learn how to do it. A minor setback was learning that each new dropdown menu has to be named separately in HTML or none of the JavaScript will work (i.e. down1, down2, etc). This created some hassle for me but after troubleshooting with the help of Google, I managed to accomplish my unforeseen goal and am glad I tried out the process.

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