Saturday, August 15, 2015

Ted's Moodle Adventures: Chapter 2: Teaching with Moodle: Week 1

The Teaching with Moodle class just finished Week 1 (Getting Started with Moodle). A few observations:

The course itself is written using, and presented via, the Moodle environment, which makes the system that much easier to learn.

The main study information is presented as "books", which resemble PowerPoint slide shows, with embedded tutorial videos. There are two books for Week 1. The "Setting up your course" book explains how to initialize a new Moodle course, what the Dashboard is, how to lay out a course, and basic editing. The "Learning on the side" book explains some of the standard course blocks (these are similar to blog areas) such as Navigation and Administration, and several of the optional blocks.

The course (and in general, most Moodle courses) has a Forum area where students can ask questions and teachers or administrators or other students can answer them. I've found this most useful in getting some good answers. In a way, this is not surprising since there are over four thousand other course participants!

Each course is divided into one or more sections. For instance, this course has six - a Welcome section, one section for each of the four weeks of the class, and an Extra resources section. The sections are where you actually place your course materials, such as the books (see above), surveys, quizzes, other files to read, etc.

Last but not least, as part of the sign-up for this course, we were given the skeleton of a practice course, which will be used for the actual writing exercises. We cannot keep this course on the Moodle official site, but we can download it, then re-upload it to a personal Moodle site such as MoodleCloud.

So far, I've liked the course and am learning a lot, but the rubber will hit the road when I try writing my own materials!