My course site is available at Teaching Pronunciation

In this assignment, we are required to create a Moodle course site with the following components:

• A significant component of your score on this assignment relates to the calibre of your web design (including level sophistication, overall look and feel ,and how user-friendly the site is).
• Splash page with a customized GUIwith at least four (4) navigational components
• Two (or more) complete learning modules (module shells or placeholder pages not acceptable), largely based on HTML pages
• One (or more) module programmed for selective release
• Two general discussion forum topics
• One additional group discussion forum for (at least) 2 groups (must set up groups; they need not be populated

I had experience creating a Moodle course site as a group project in a previous MET course. At that time, I didn’t know how to do the splash page with a customized GUI (graphic user interface) navigational component. As this is a requirement for this course I had to learn how to do it, and it turned out easier than I had expected. The difficult part of this assignment is creating the external html pages outside Moodle. In a previous course I created the pages inside Moodle therefore I didn’t know where to start with this requirement. Fortunately, the discussion in our Moodle Queries brought my attention to NVU, an open source web authoring software. I downloaded Nvu and used it to create the content html pages for my course. After creating the html files, I downloaded them into my Moodle private file and later on loaded the files to my Moodle course.

While trying to create a webpage in NVU , I came across a free website creation called Weebly. I was thinking about creating my lessons in Weebly and then link it to my course in Moodle, but doing that would not fulfill the course requirements. However, if I am going to create the Moodle course for my future use, I will definitely consider this option because Weebly produces such a nice, professional looking web page with less effort. Instead of time spent on figuring how to use technology, I can use the time to select the content for the course. Also, after this course, I want to work further on developing more professional-looking HTML pages, there was still a lot for me to learn if I want to develop HTML pages from scratch and making them look professional.

I am planning to create a seven week course on teaching pronunciation and at the moment I have already created four weeks of lessons; Week One: Introduction to Pronunciation, Week Two: Sounds of English, Week Three; Words, and Week Four: Sentence Stress and Rhythm. In a real situation, each week I will release a new lesson to students in a logical order from Week One to Week Seven. However, for the purpose of this assignment I would like Week Two and Week Three to be assessed, not Week One. Week One is just a starting point where students get to know each other and get warmed up to the latest ideas of teaching pronunciation. I have set the later weeks to be released at a later date. However, students can see that the following weeks module topic, and the release date, but can’t access the contents or do the activity. This selective release feature fits well with the nature of my course as students need to build their knowledge from the previous ones, and I also want all students to move along from beginning to end at the same pace. Releasing the module this way also helps make the navigation of the site easier and the site looks cleaner.

This week’s readings: ‘Evaluate Media Characteristics’ by George Seimens and ‘Using the Sections Framework to Evaluate Flash Media’ by Boyes, Dowie, and Rumzan help guide me when planning the activities for each module. I keep in mind that it is most important that any media selection must support learning outcomes. Looking at the activities that I have created I feel that they are not quite meeting the nature of my course as of yet. This is a teaching pronunciation course; I should have integrated more audio activity for students to practice pronunciation. However, I am planning to integrate multimedia tools like Voicethread, and Voxopop in the week 5, 6, and 7 of my course. These multimedia tools will allow me to set up my own page where students can record their voices. I can use these tools for pronunciation practice or as a discussion board. In the first four weeks, we were focusing on the rules of pronunciation so the activities I provided fit well with these early weeks of the course.

After consulting the help feature within Moodle, I discovered the different aspects of the Group Mode feature. I learned that the group mode could be enabling at two different levels: at the Course Level where Groups apply to the entire course, and at the Activity Level where groups can be applied to selected activities. If the course is set to “force group mode” then the setting for each activity is ignored. As some of my weekly module’s activities have large group discussions and some have small group discussions, I set up the groups at Activity Level to enable small group discussion in selected activities.
I found this constructivist approach of learning, being self-directed, drawing from my experiences, discussing the learning with peers, receiving guidance from the instructor when I got struck, to be an invaluable and effective learning experience. I feel a sense of achievement and believe I have found my niche of learning and have some idea which direction to move forward. I found this assignment and this course to be very worthwhile and it will definitely benefit my future goal of wanting to be an online course designer and instructor.

References

Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Boyes, B. Dowie, S. & Rumzan, I. Using the SECTIONS Framework to Evaluate Flash Media. http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php/view=article&id=55

Siemens, George. (2003). Evaluating Media Characteristics. Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Originally Presented at AMTEC 2002 with Stephen Yurkiw. http:// www.elearnspace.org/Articles/ mediacharacteristics.html.