So I have finally finished building my complete LMS course site, and man are my fingers tired!
Producing an LMS online course site in Moodle is a challenge in itself, but when tasked with producing our pages outside of Moodle and importing them, it became a monumental task. I would never have completed my site without watching the Wimba live sessions recordings or without the help of my colleagues, whose generosity with their knowledge and willingness to ask the same questions I was looking for answers to led me through the dark, befuddling wilderness that is Moodle.
Initially, I intended to mount a companion site to the Communication English course I currently teach in Seoul. It was slow going, and I found myself struggling to come up with content short of hacking off parts from the textbook and refashioning them for online learning purposes. So, after much deliberation, I took a different tack and scrapped my original pages altogether, and focused instead on producing a new, two-module course on the difference between studying a foreign language for accuracy and studying for fluency. This topic, I found, was more interesting to me, and will be more relevant to my students, who have enough textbook-centered work to do as it is.
Creating my course site was not without its problems, however. If one were to look into my files folder, they would see dozens of duplicate files, and a slew of completely unused ones. It took me several attempts before finally getting my workflow down, but once I did, I felt like I was unstoppable (this too, proved to be false. I hit my fair share of glitches along the way towards completing my site).
Meeting the specific requirements of the site proved to be perplexing to say the least. The function of the groups and group forum activities is not very clearly laid out in Moodle, from what I could tell. In the end, I have arranged my activities to be performed in groups, but without those groups being populated, have not been able to test their effectiveness.
Likewise, the “module programmed for selective release” caused quite the hubbub in the discussion forums, but so far as I can tell, simply by hiding the module until I select for it to be released would satisfy the requirement. At first this seemed like the easy way out, so I explored the other possibilities for programming selective release. Because all of the options I am able to come up with involve some sort of action on my part after the end of the first module and prior to the second, it stands to reason that hiding the module and then revealing it at the appropriate time is not only the simplest solution, but more importantly it is the most effective solution.
I am pleased with how my course site has evolved, and proud of the final product I’ve produced. I learned a lot in trying to create a splash page with a Graphic User Interface (GUI), including what in the world that means in the first place 🙂 Going forward as I continue to build courses in Moodle for my students, I will take a completely different approach, being aware now of all the things that Moodle is built to do (and not do).
While at times the quasi-requirement that we build pages in Dreamweaver or Amaya before importing them into Moodle made the assignment seem overwhelming, in the end I understand why we were asked to do so, and can appreciate not only the skills I learned in working with html, but am happy to know that I have special powers over Moodle, in a way. That is, I can make my Moodle pages look and feel and perform in ways that Moodle doesn’t necessarily have built-in affordances for. Html code is quite powerful, and myself and many of my colleagues are just beginning to scratch the surface in learning how to wield it.
I hope others enjoy my course site as much as I enjoyed building it. It’s a shame an entire module has to be hidden from the masses, but such is life. Enjoy what’s available now, and my students can enjoy the selectively released module when the time comes.