My ETEC565A e-portfolio

I chose to focus my Moodle site on two modules:  Peer Leaders in training and Billing.  Recently, we had a spike in interest for people to become peer leaders and although we had informal conversations with people about the program, it was not enough information for people to understand our mandate, policies and procedures so I thought that this was a good opportunity to solidify information.  I also chose Billing because this section in our program is lacking and thought that having to dissect it in an LMS will help identify some gaps and generate ideas.

I have never used Moodle, let alone create a course site so this was a challenging experience.  As I mentioned in my Synthesis, my relationship with Moodle didn’t get off to a good start.  When I initially started poking around, I found it pretty intuitive and straight forward, but then I tried to get fancy and allow for classmates to enroll into my class.  Then everything went sideways: I could no longer access anything on my site and every button I pressed led me to an error message saying that I can’t enroll in this course!  I posted in the course discussion forum about my woes to see if anyone else could help me; asked questions in Moodle.org that no one ended up answering; watched videos and poured over the Moodle help.  It wasn’t until the instructor intervened that I was able to access my site.

Despite my frustrations initially, I enjoyed getting to know Moodle.  Once I got the hang of it, the site was easier to maneuver than I expected.  A couple of things that tripped me up a little bit was the language within Moodle help, the site and the course. I had to do a bit of digging to understand the meaning “selective release” and the help function had directions for different versions.  Perhaps it had something to do with how our MET Moodle site was set up.

I was surprised at how convenient it was to add activities, quizzes or forums.  The boxes around the modules was a good visual to show me what was going to be in that topic.  Having an effective course discussion model made me reflect on the importance of the discussion description that would frame the entire forum.  It was harder than I expected and I think instructor engagement along with the framework could shape the forum effectively.

Overall, I appreciated how the course scaffolded my learning and how the activities flowed into the Moodle site, although I wasn’t able to figure out how post my Peer Network videoscribe without making the video searchable on YouTube.  At the beginning of this course, I was curious about learning Moodle but by the end of the course, with prospects of potentially being able to incorporate Moodle into my workplace has made this experience all the more rewarding.