Johnson - Moodle Reflection

Moodle Reflection

Revisiting Moodle
A few years ago, I remember attending an in-service training at our District’s Technology resource center. The training covered various topics, and one of these was Moodle. We spent a full morning learning about the interface, and I remember practicing posting some basic items on the calendar layout. These items were online versions of some of the handouts that the students had been receiving in class. I remember hearing that we could host discussion boards; however, having had no experience with online discussion boards myself, I failed to see how integrating this feature into my teaching could be of much use to me. This short workshop was my first exposure to an online LMS. This was during my second year of teaching, which was a few years prior to my entrance into the EDTEC program. Even though I thought Moodle had merit, I never did find the time to flesh out the initial samplings of course content that I posted during the training. Since entering COMET, I have been impressed by various Web 2.0 tools, and have used a variety of these online tools in the re-design of a more interactive classroom website for my students. On occasion, a colleague would ask me about using Moodle as a tool for designing a class website. I compared what I remembered about the LMS from my brief in-service years ago with my emerging knowledge on versatile Web 2.0 tools, and I gave what I now consider to be a very ill-informed opinion. “It’s clunky,” I said, on more than one occasion.

Possibilities unfold
This course, and the process of designing my own mini Moodle course, has shown me that Moodle has far more expansive capabilities than I initially realized. One source of this confusion may have been the way that Moodle was initially presented to me by our district. It was described as “another tool for creating your class website.” While this is true, it leads one to think about website design rather than course creation. In terms of aesthetics, there are certainly countless more appealing tools out there for making a class website. However, these tools began to appear limiting as I gained a greater understanding of the diverse features that Moodle offers.

I chose to design a course entitled “Concepts of Heroism”, which would be a revision of the traditional study of The Odyssey that is part of our school’s standard Freshman English curriculum. The thing that I found especially beneficial about doing this was that I had to carefully specify my learning outcomes and deliverables at the outset. Doing this forced me to see that so much of the traditional “curriculum unit” was really teacher-led classroom activity, more than learner-directed focus on specific objectives and meaningful products.

I remembered learning about discussion boards, but several features were new to me. I was especially taken by the collaborative glossary feature, and also with the interactive lesson capabilities. I had not known that one could create a quiz directly in Moodle. I decided that I would incorporate all of these interactive components into my course.

Design process
In designing my course, I incorporated aspects of VDILS. I did this by allowing for learner autonomy in the initial assignment. Students had to explore the TIME “Most influential People of 2010” website, and could customize their readings within that extensive site based on their interests and preferences. The discussion boards assignment asked students to reflect on this learning experience. I created specific questions to guide these discussion board reflections. I aimed to encourage learner autonomy in my choice of prompts (for discussion board, journal entries, and essay) that required students to develop their own perspectives. I used the discussion board and the collaborative glossary, to incorporate dialogic instruction into my course.

Initially, I thought that I would simplify the process by allowing guest access to the course. When I did this, I failed to realize that guest users were not allowed to take the quizzes. So I created an “enrolment key” to solve this problem. I realized also that I had neglected to supply links on my syllabus to some necessary course materials (such as the main class website, and also to the free software, such as Safari and Firefox).As I was working alone, I felt especially challenged by time constraints, even though the learning payoff was certainly worth the effort.

Implications for future use
As I create more courses using Moodle, I would like to incorporate the interactive lesson feature with regularity. I had initially planned to use this feature, but found aspects of how to incorporate it somewhat confusing. So I opted instead to use posted materials followed by a quiz. Another feature that was new to me was the journal feature. I like this a lot. As an English teacher, I know that an important part of developing student fluency and thoughtfulness is by providing space for informal writing activities such as journals. However, I often find journal activity hard to manage, and often so grammatically poor that it seems that many students are reinforcing bad writing habits. By typing journal entries in Word prior to posting, students can easily edit for grammar and spelling errors without going through a complete revision workshop. In this way, I think that they may cultivate better writing habits.

Another feature that I liked were the quizzes. I liked that every time I created a question it went into a comprehensive question bank, so that each question might be used in various ways throughout the course. I often have felt that I may be doing the students a disservice by not giving more tests. I tend to focus on writing almost exclusively. One reason for this is that I dread correcting tests. Moodle streamlines the process. Also, if I design quizzes that are exclusively multiple choice, my students can have immediate feedback on their scores, including any specific items that they missed, without any additional effort on my part.

While I continue to learn about dynamic design tools, and become more adept at creating great-looking websites, I think that I will now make my course curriculum using Moodle as my primary tool. Far from “clunky” (except, perhaps, in appearance), Moodle does a wonderful job of streamlining a great variety of online learning activities within a single system.