Getting Started with Moodle
Never having used Moodle as a student or teacher before has made my latest ETEC 565A assignment an interesting and valuable learning experience. In many ways, I believed my inexperience in using the learning management system was actually going to helped me, as I was about to be create a course for a Grade 7 English class who, like me, was made up of students who had never used this technology before. Because I knew that their experiences exploring Moodle would be much like my own, I paid close attention to the process I used when trying to familiarize myself with the system. Through my learning process, and a little metacognition, I tried to create a unit on poetry that not only engaged my learners, but also gave them the necessary information and support to navigate through the world of Moodle.
Logging on to Moodle and seeing nothing but a blank slate was a bit daunting. Like many of those who are forced to use new technology, I took quite a bit of time at the beginning just clicking around and seeing what the software had to offer. Once I got a bit of a feel for the system, I realized you could lose yourself quite easily in this place by just looking around here and there, and trying this and that, so like most people I paid a visit to the all-knowing entity, Google. A quick search brought me to a vast list of information to get me started. As an online student who has used the LMS, Blackboard Learn, for several courses, I knew what I liked to see when I began a course on a foreign system; that was a visually inviting homepage with obvious links to information that would get me started right away. Hoping that my preferences were similar to those of most people, that is where I began. I started my course construction process by reading some good articles on Moodle course design by Janetta Garton, Kristina Hollis, and Christopher Pappas. The articles gave me valuable insight on how to create a functional, practical, and aesthetically pleasing learning environment in Moodle.
Garton got the process rolling, by giving me a quick tutorial on the ABCs of online lesson design (Garton, 2012). She outlined some important characteristics that a good user interface should have, such as clarity, familiarity, consistency, aesthetics, efficiency, and forgiveness. Many of my design choices took into account her suggestions. I used books to organize the different lessons in my unit to add consistency to the learning environment and to give the learners a sense of familiarity. In the Introductory Information book, I provided helpful information to support my students and provide clear, concise directions on how to navigate through Moodle and use its tools. Efficiency and forgiveness, for the most part, are built into the Moodle interface by allowing students to click icons to bring them to new pages, folders, and activities, and by allowing them to return to previous pages by simply hitting the back button on their internet browser.
Once I had decided upon my interface’s appearance and organization, I turned my attention to to the development of content and learning activities for my poetry unit. The content I wished to include in my online poetry was relatively easy, as I have taught poetry in face-to-face classrooms often enough, and had a good idea of the the learning objectives that I wanted to cover, and in what order. However, I was looking for some guidance in developing learning activities that would engage my learners in an online environment. Kristina Hollis’ blog post, Moodle Course Design: What is Best Practice, pointed me in the right direction by suggesting that teachers should move away from just dumping information into folders and providing links to other relevant websites (2013). Instead, she advised instructors to make use of Moodle’s social and collaborative tools to create an interactive and reflective learning environment, where students can connect with one another and their teacher to share ideas and build upon their knowledge within a community of learning. This type of design coincides with learning theories that are beginning to reemerge in the field of education, such as Vygotsky’s social constructivism, and Bruner’s discovery learning, which focus on using cooperation and communication to make learning more meaningful and interesting. So in addition to providing students with information about different figures of speech, sound devices, and styles of poetry in my lessons, I incorporated collaborative activities, such as forums and chat rooms. These virtual tools would allow students to interact with one another online, so they could build on the ideas they were learning about in the various lessons. It is my hope that these tools will create a more enticing learning environment and give my students opportunities to motivate and push one another.
The final task I needed to accomplish in this assignment was to bring all the parts together; to provide a uniform product that flowed, and had all the components for effective online learning. Christopher Pappas’ assisted me with this final endeavor by supplying me with an excellent checklist of criteria he believed was needed to create a wholly functional and complete e-learning course (2014). His list was quite comprehensive, and covered a wide range of categories such as course content, assessments, content creation, graphics and fonts, multimedia, accessibility, navigation, and technical issues. His checklist was a great reflective tool, as its extensivity allowed me to critique my design on many levels. It allowed me to see what areas of my online course I needed to improve upon. Most notably, I found my tool lacked in areas of multimedia and course design. As a result, I made a few modifications to improve my unit. First, I deleted my home page graphic and inserted a Youtube video by Wilkie Martin giving a rendition of his poem Rebel Spirit. This, I thought, would give my students a more interactive feel to the course and provide a real-world example of what we were trying to work towards. Then I modified the course syllabus slightly to include videos that would provide audio and video support for my students to navigate through Moodle more easily. Finally, I reformatted some of the titles of my book’s chapters so that they were all consistent, giving my online unit a more uniform and professional look.
In the end, I feel as though I have created a product that I can be proud of. It is not to say there is no room for improvement; I am still new to the LMS world and have much to learn. But this is only the first step, and with more opportunities to improve and learn to come, I am confident it will evolve into a learning tool that will benefit my Grade 7 students.
References
Garton, J. (2012). Designing aesthetically pleasing Moodle courses. Open Source. Retrieved from http://opensource.com/education/12/1/designing-aesthetically-pleasing-moodle-courses
Hollis, K. (2013). Moodle course design: what is best practice. Teaching and Technology. Retrieved from http://kristinahollis.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/moodle-course-design-what-is-best-practice/
Pappas, C. (2014). The ultimate e-learning course design checklist. E-learning Industry. Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/the-ultimate-elearning-course-design-checklist