Photo by Shawn Kimball
For a while now, I’ve been perusing the e-Learning Toolkit, particularly the Moodle information. There is a lot of information to digest there! My past experience with Moodle was in a group. Fortunately for our group, we had a Moodle expert who set everything up, allowing us to add the content. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t learn too many of the mechanics of Moodle and so I have steep learning curve. Aesthetics are important to me and for this reason, I don’t like Moodle! Being confronted with bits and pieces all over a page is somewhat overwhelming. After reading, and most certainly procrastinating, I decided to take the plunge and follow the activity given in the e-Learning Toolkit to get my Moodle bearings. I found it somewhat frustrating because the instructions didn’t seem to match what was on my screen. I finally figured out that “setting up the page” had already been done and I needed to skip down farther. I managed to figure out the icebreaker activity without a problem, except to say that the instructions were either a little incomplete or the version I was using didn’t have the same titles in some areas.
My next step was to do some perusing of documents to figure out how to get going. I did quite a bit of jumping around from document to document, but again I found the intense amount of step-by-step instructions somewhat daunting. I’m the “forget the instructions and just try to make the thing” kind of person. However, as I clicked around in Moodle, I realized that this approach was really not going to work for me. After some more digging, I found a helpful video with step-by-step instructions for setting up what I think is a splash page. By following along with the video and pausing as needed, I was able to create a demo. (I’m grateful to all those people out there who like to upload helpful instructional videos!) Unfortunately, at that point I ran out of time. The “play” session was enough though, to give me some confidence going forward. I’m a Moodler, sort of.
Yay!