Moodle Reflection Paper - Chau

Minh Tam Chau
Teresa Richards

My Moodle Experience

Moodle is a very powerful tool for a learning management system. It has many functions that are useful for the development of our course. When we first started using Moodle, from first glance it looked so difficult and confusing but with tutorials and practice, we were able to get a hang of it. There were numerous tools that we thought were a time-saver for us. For example, students were able to self-enroll themselves which was a plus since we didn’t have time to type in all their names. In addition, all the resources from Moodle were placed in one specific location for students to look up information and find out what is due. Students do not need to ask for their grades anymore since they could check their grades online. They could also take a quiz, upload their work and participate in blogs/forums. Moodle is truly powerful when absent students could always find missing assignments. There are no more excuses for losing their work or not knowing what the assignment is. Moodle also allowed our team to display our course in week-by-week or topic-by-topic or other format such as LAMS and SCORM. It also had the option to set up classes by groups or periods. We didn’t use this option because we only had one group. We really liked the quiz option because it could score student’s quiz without the teacher having to manually grade it. We also like the offline assignment option where we could grade essays or math problems and enter it in the grade book.

We found the editing option for all blocks to be fairly easy in Moodle. One thing that we didn’t really understand was the aggregated total grade. There were too many options (subcategories? Aggregated?) for grading that it was confusing. We wish that Moodle would have more video tutorials for editing.

Our course is entitled Introduction to Culture designed for High School students. All students have a culture but many do not know what their cultures are. Cultures shape our world, others, and us. In our course, students will be learning how to define culture and examine how it affects them.

Our team tested Moodle with eight High School students, some were juniors and a few were seniors. Most of the participants liked the “important days marked on the calendar” and the links section. They liked that the homework was highlighted and they thought it was “incredibly useful.” Another thing that they really liked was the layout was simple and that it was easy to navigate. They also like how they were able to interact with other students to broaden their culture horizons. A few students thought that it could be “a little more colorful” and that they would like “color coordinate the sessions so that they stand out from one another.” One other comment was that it would be nice to have “cool links to videos or clips that demonstrate the word for the definition assignment.” The only aspect of Moodle that I would change is the color layout. I have to agree that it does look a little boring and plain. Other than that, I think Moodle is a really good tool to teach students and it also help them work independently.

My partner, Teresa Richards helped me tremendously with the Moodle project. She was extremely organized and always on time with everything. Teresa was the testing leader and she organized students’ participants. She was the subject matter expert for our content—she had taught English for ten years, and had a lot of experiences with the curriculum. I was worried that she would be doing too much work but she mentioned that she had taught this class before so all we had to do was to plug it in Moodle. My contribution to this assignment was helping out with Moodle. I helped set up the Moodle site, including the grade book, quizzes, blogs, resources, links and the background layout. I was responsible for putting the contents in the right week format and making sure that it was easy to navigate. The hardest part of creating Moodle was the quiz block. We took some time looking at different Moodle video tutorials and practiced creating quizzes in Moodle. Time was probably a factor for learning how to use Moodle but once we knew how to do it, it was easy.

We are very pleased with our course Moodle. We like how it allows students to interact with each other on blogs and forums. I think that students learn best when they are learning from one another. I also think that Moodle is as great tool to help students become more organized and self-sufficient.