My Experience with Moodle
Moodle is a Learning Management System that is used by San Diego State University and many others. Within this paper I will describe my experiences and information that I learned about this LMS. I had never designed an online course within Moodle and while designing the course in Moodle there were challenges and successes and much learning.
Moodle has various administrative functions available. Moodle allows for assigning roles within the course including; non-editing teacher, student, and guest. The Settings function allows for editing course settings and creating defaults within the course including format (ours: weekly format), start date for course, ability to hide sections and show chosen items, choice to show gradebook and activity reports to students, as well as upload size. We chose the sdsu-bridge as our force theme. The Settings also include enrolments, groups, availability, language, and role renaming. The administrative functions also include grading, grouping, backup, restore, and importing. The reset function allows the administrator to remove user data but keep activities and settings. The Report function allows the administrator to create logs that will demonstrate how learners are using the course. The Questions function helps with the creation of tests and quizzes. The Files function allows the administrator to collect resources and store within a central location. A function allows for unenrolment and for profile creation and editing.
The course creation functionality within Moodle allows for administrators to design a course that includes images, block designs that can be used for weekly lessons, etc., ability to create blogs, forums, and other interactive functions within the course. The course allows for creation of labels, text pages, web pages, links to files and web pages, display of directories, and inclusion of IMS content packages. Various activities can be added including various types of assignments, chats, glossaries, wikis, surveys, etc.
The editing functionality within Moodle allows for rearranging the look of the page itself and its contents. The contents can easily be moved left to right or right to left. Course items can be easily moved within the page by clicking on the move icon and then clicking on the box in which you wish to place the item. Items can also be easily editing through use of the update icon. Items can also be easily deleted or hidden by using the delete and hide icons. These editing tools can be very simple to use and because of this it is advised that the user be clear whether they want to complete the editing so to avoid quick deletion of much work. It seemed relatively easy to undo most changes, however I would like to see a “undo changes” button on Moodle to make it much easier to undo any changes that may be not as easy to undo. For the more novice user the administrative setting could be simplified and made for easier “undoing” of administrative errors.
The Moodle project that I designed with my partner, Papith Lee is based on the Earth Science standards for third grade and focused on the Solar System. The name of our course is, “The Solar System”. The course includes a syllabus, four lessons, interactive items, quizzes, and added resources. The interactive items include forum, blog, and Deep Space glossary. A notebook and text readings are included to help students complete activities and retain information. There are many extra activities and resources to allow learners to expand from the lessons.
The participants who reviewed our course for me using the High Quality Online Course Rubric were both college students. One rated all aspects “exemplary” and the other rated most aspects “exemplary”, rating a few aspects “effective”. It appears that the successes within the course are the ranges of instruction and resources, as well as the clear objectives and syllabus relation to the course. The most positive of comments were concerning the multiple types of activities to enhance learning. In reviewing the comments the course syllabus, objectives, lessons, quizzes, and activities appear to be well designed. The overall structure and support was praised therefore very little would be changed in the course in response to the current evaluations. The aspects of the course I would change include increasing communication among students and with the instructor and increase the tools that facilitate communication and learning so that the learning is more socialized.
I believe that most of aspects of the model for designing VDILS were used within “The Solar System” course. The course is dynamic and individualized as it allows the learner to learn in various lessons in various ways over time though its lessons and extra activities. The analysis is designed to be individualized but also interactive with the lesson and others with the notebook allowing for more individualized front-end analysis. I believe that work needs to be done to include the learner more in the instructional design process but that the course does include the learner in self-instruction design. The course was designed to provide activities and interactions within the learning objectives in an individualized way and to provide the learner with opportunities for emergent objectives through the multi-modal lessons and activities. Learners who need to redo quizzes and lessons have as many opportunities as necessary as well as many resources to experience the information in a variety of ways. Overall, I am very proud of our project.
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