The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity – First authoring /preparing tests for my students, attempting to do so in a way that actually evaluates their learning instead of sticks them with a bunch of surprise “Remember when I mentioned that in class?” questions…always difficult. Then realizing as I was grading said tests that while essay/open-ended questions may be useful to evaluate understanding of concepts, they also take a really long time to mark! Same thing with essays, which I really don’t know why I had my students turn in during the final week of classes either. Ah well, live and learn – next semester will be different, and hopefully, at least partially based in Moodle.
So now that I’ve finished all my work and submitted all my grades and emailed all my students to give them a breakdown of their final mark, I have to stop and think for a second, “Wouldn’t all this have been easier if I didn’t have to do all this by hand?” The fact that I have to copy and paste the grading breakdown from my Excel spreadsheet and email it to my students is the first sign that I’m either: a) not using the tools at my disposal properly, or b) I need some new tools!! I think it’s the latter, and as per my LMS proposal, I’ll be using Moodle next semester to help me, and hopefully reduce some of the workload…once I do all the work to get the site up and running of course!
So now that I’m done with my semester here, I’m ready to get down and dirty creating my Moodle site. So far I’ve already drawn some inspiration from my colleagues regarding the visual layout, but I need to spend some time considering exactly which components of my currently 100% face-to-face course would be more effectively presented online, and then, exactly how to maximize that effectiveness.
Wish me luck~