Join the dots

Today saw the Moodle Masterclass in Melbourne, the warm-up act for the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot. Having written up what the ideas were in my head a few months back, its now worth doing a little reflection on how it went.

Firstly, big kudos to both Dr Curtis Bonk and Julian Ridden, who both gave great presentations/demonstrations throughout the day – I asked quite a few people on the day how they felt about the session, and the response was uniformly positive, largely because of the ideas put forth by both of these excellent practitioners. Also thanks to Phil Marriott who was the driver behind the logistics, activities and the overall session structures, and to helper monkeys (along with me as chief helper monkey) Thalia, Bek and Tim.

Now enough thanks and more analysis.

When Phil Marriott and I looked at how this could work, particularly trying to take into account the ideas from Curt and the potential translations into Moodle by Julian, and then the amount of time we had left over for people to actually work on their course, it became clear that the biggest challenge was going to be how to get participants to create something meaningful. The original plan I had in my head for this back in March was to have the pedagogy leader (Curt) and the Moodle master (Julian) working around a topic which everyone would have some knowledge of – my ideas were coffee and the weather. Hackneyed, but do-able. The one thing I didn’t really want to do at the time was to have the content being about online learning, or I thought we’d risk having a circular ‘we’re creating an online learning course about online learning’ thing.

Unfortunately, the more we looked at the logistics of the situation, the more it looked unlikely that we would be able to do anything other than this, and I put this down to two reasons:

1. Creating a course like this focuses somewhat on the content, under a model that content someone else has created is the primary entity within the course. This of course flies in the face of the constructionist idea that it is the student interactions and subsequent student-generated content which are the most important part of an online learning environment; and
2. Even if we were focusing on course content which someone else had created, one day working with a bunch of people you don’t know is a foolishly short time to expect to create anything of consequence. Not to mention breaking most instructional ideas which put an emphasis on good course design being something you do before you get in and set up your Moodle course.

Now at this point I must tip my hat to Phil for the initial activity participants did, which involved critiquing some Moodle courses, analysing them against Curt’s R2D2 model, and using a Moodle Feedback activity to get people sharing their perceptions of the courses as well as experiencing the Feedback tool itself – worked an absolute treat I thought.

As the day went on though, I felt in myself that we’d lost focus on exactly what the desired outcomes from the day were meant to be.

Moodling around the Masterclass

When I listened to Curt present, it was at times like a Tsunami of information and ideas, some of which were highly relevant to Moodle, some of which were more to do with good teaching practice and how to use a bunch of technological goodies to best effect.

When I listened to Julian for the most part, it was more focused on Moodle and the use of the tools within, with his session on Databases being a stand out for me along with some of the course design principles and tricks shown early on using (among other things) HTML blocks. The final session did however go into more detail about some of the things coming in Moodle 2, and there were some diversions in there to the power of Twitter, which was interesting but not directly Moodle related.

So then all sorts of other questions popped into my head. Had this ended up being really an ‘eLearning Masterclass’ which had Moodle as a bit player? Was it even possible to have a Moodle Masterclass without bringing in a bunch of other tools to supplement it? By having so much information ‘pushed’ to the participants were we violating the very notions of constructionism that we were meant to be espousing?

Ultimately I think there is a potential conflict in these events between the people who are there because they need to know how to use the more advanced features of a tool, versus those who are there because they need to know how to improve their teaching techniques irrespective of the tools involved. I don’t really know how to manage it either, or for that matter if I’m just thinking too deeply about all of this…

One thing I will say though was that I’d be stunned if people didn’t leave the session with at least one good tip on improving their teaching practice and one good tip on how to use Moodle better, and probably a whole bunch of ideas. The people I spoke to all seemed to be happy with it, but I’d love to hear some more thoughts here about what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do better next time (if there is a next time).

All in all, considering this was one big experiment, calling on two extremely busy people from other sides of the globe to work together and come up with something which we could feasibly deliver in a day, I’m happy with how it went, and I’d like to thank all of those who came along and made it an enjoyable day.

Tomorrow – the Moot begins!