Reflecting back on creating my Moodle site, I notice that I completed quite a bit of Assignment #5 back in February. In order to create the quiz for Assignment #3, I felt I needed to create all the necessary supporting material. It was simply part of my process rather than a premeditated effort.
As I explored Moodle’s affordances I went ahead and starting creating discussion forums and activities in Module 2 that would students would complete prior to doing the quiz. Module 2 includes a page on required readings, a wiki for chapter vocabulary, link to notes in Google Doc, a discussion forum entitled “Finding Our Way”, a choice activity for students to indicate an area of research and finally the chapter quiz. I set Module 3 as a selective release dependent on the students successfully complete the Chapter 10 quiz and conditional upon achieving a score of over 60%.
There are several discussion forums in my LMS course site. The “News Forum is where the instructor will post announcements for students regarding the course and assignments. The “General Course Questions” forum is where students may post inquiries pertaining to the course that they are seeking general clarification on. This is to facilitate a collaborative learning environment in a digital space. As I already mentioned, there is a discussion form in Module 2 and in Module 4 there is a group specific discussion forum.
The most challenging portion of this assignment proved to be customization the splash page. I had spent a good deal of time experimenting with different themes and eventually settled on the Sky High theme. I spent hours playing around with setting and looking up solutions online to figure out how to improve the look and feel of my home page. I finally reached out to my Google+ community for advice. Once again a former classmate came to my rescue. We had a Google Hangout, did a screen share and she walked me through the process. Remarkably, it was not as difficult as I originally thought but I had missed a key button and didn’t think to use the ‘insert table’ option to organize my navigational components. In the end I was able to successfully incorporate personal and creative commons images in to my splash page and link the navigational components both within the course and externally.
All in all, this was an extremely valuable learning experience. I feel more confident that I can create pages for an online course and I have a much better idea of the time it takes to undertake such a venture, even when you already have course materials. There are so many settings and customizations available that time quickly slips away as you explore design elements. This has been one of the most valuable experiences in the MET programs thus far.