Reflection on the creation of my Moodle site.
Click here to view my Moodle site.
As this was my first attempt at creating a full module-based course on Moodle, I certainly had some learning to do. I will break this reflection in to what I liked about this experience and what I found frustrating.
First, the frustrations. Perhaps the most annoying part of creating anything on Moodle is the tedious amount of time it takes to move new components around on the page. After saving each piece or clicking to move a component it always sends you to the top of the page forcing you to scroll down through the other components to where you had left off. Surely this can be more intuitive to know that you more than likely want to move the component to the same module you are currently working in. Secondly, I did not like the fact that you could only hide individual components versus a whole module. Apparently, this is being worked on for the next edition, but for the time being it was time consuming. Moreover, I found the wiki application to be underwhelming, mainly because it did not have a discussion tab. Finally, I found boxes around the main modules to be irritating and slow to move around and many of them to be unnecessary.
On to the positives. I really like that you can do testing right in the Moodle site. The questions are relatively easy to create and allow for excellent feedback opportunities. Furthermore, I found the ability to conduct threaded forums a major improvement from the blog system I have in my current LMS. I liked the ability to have a box with an RSS feed, which I filled with “This Day in History”. I also liked that it was relatively easy to create groups in many of the applications. This certainly lends itself to collaborative work. Finally, I liked that it allowed for HTML to embed just about anything from the net. Again, this is an improvement from my current LMS, which acts more like a CMS as it currently stores files rather than embed them.
All in all, it was a great, albeit time -consuming, experience to learn about Moodle.