ED 700: Ins and Outs of Learning Management Systems
Moodle Project Paper
Course Title: Exercise Your Options (EYO)
Course Summary
The USDA’s food guide pyramid is a resource that we use as part of our curriculum when teaching nutrition to our middle school learners. The food guide is a comprehensive guide including portion size, recommended daily allowances, as well as balancing food choices across all of the food groups.
We designed the content for our moodle project to cater to our learner audience, our middle school students. The four class sessions of this Moodle course are intended to be a part of the seventh grade nutrition unit.
Our Process
On our own, we familiarized ourselves with the Moodle interface. We touched basis with one another regularly via email, text messaging and Skype as we worked to edit our Moodle shell. As we continued to improve our editing skill, our Moodle page showed good progress as well. We each figured out how to edit the page and added our portions to the project after conferring with one another collaboratively to develop our Moodle page to its present form.
We agree that the characteristics of Moodle we found to be most useful in creating our course was the ability to have all the resources such as agendas, learning objectives, syllabus, forums, links/resources, and assessments all on the same page. Having these tools available gave us the opportunity to clarify learning objectives and student expectations for each module and post assignment information and resources all within a particular module. We like that Moodle acts as a "one stop shop" for the instructor and the learner. We value student collaboration as well and took advantage of Moodle tools that allow students to post work, provide feedback, and collaborate with peers and instructors.
One feature that we were not satisfied with was the Moodle “Wiki”. As an alternative, we decided to use www.wikispaces.com as our class wiki. Although this alternative was not directly attached to the Moodle platform, we feel that this was a suitable alternative to meet our instructional objectives.
Usability Test
Currently we are on summer vacation and didn’t have access to any of our students`. However, we were able to find three (3) volunteers to participate in our usability test. They included two elementary school students and one science teacher. The students have no prior knowledge in online instruction but use social networks such as, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. They are also avid text and email users. The teacher, however has taken a few courses online, which by her description was most likely an asynchronous online course.
The think aloud
The users were given five tasks/challenges while becoming familiar with the EYO course site. The tasks involved locating specific information about each class session. These five tasks were:
Locate the link for the course syllabus.
What three pieces of information do the groups need to include in their presentation?
Can you open the links to view the menus for the four fast food restaurants?
Locate the Food Diary forum post icon in the third class session.
Can you access the class wiki?
Team Responsibilities
Matt created the course technologies, learning materials, assessments, and grading scheme in the course syllabus, session two and session four of the course, the class Wiki page, the food diary rubric, and the nutrition label PowerPoint presentation, and provided nutrition resources. We collaborated together via Skype and worked on the course being user-friendly for students and ensure that we met the requirements for the Moodle Project Check off Sheet.
Leo Hsu was responsible for learning the Moodle interface and teaching team members how to use it. In addition, he created the course goals and policies in the course syllabus, the topic outline page which included the course objectives and session three of the Moodle course which included the assignment, image, and forum. He also added a couple of nutrition resources as well as the extra credit assignment.
My responsibilities to the Moodle development included creating the course description and the instructor profile in the course syllabus, the course agenda, session one of the Moodle course, providing the links to the fast food restaurant nutrition guides, and adding nutrition resources. It was helpful to have the materials readily available from having previously taught the materail and simply place them into the Moodle platform for immediate use.
After having been given the opportunity to learn how to create a course via Moodle, I am looking forward to using the Moodle platform with the students. I am confident that the students will appreciate being given the opportunity to complete coursework online. I believe that it is safe to say that a person with average ability to navigate about a website as well as being able to email and chat will find quick success when using our Moodle classroom page.
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