Its been a while since my last post, and while I prepare a more significant post on the Assignment module redevelopment project, which is rapidly becoming my main focus for the next little while (among all my other main foci). What better thing to goad me into a new post than being at the 2012 Murdoch Teaching & Learning Forum in Perth.
I was lucky enough to co-present (well that’s slightly overstating the few bits and pieces I threw in to the discussion) with Shannon Johnston and Yvonne Button from the University of Western Australia CATL team, who have been working up to a release of Moodle to their twentysomething thousand students later this month. The topic of the presentation was on the strategies and practicalities of organisational learning for Moodle in the lead up to the release. One of the things which came up as a challenge when deploying Moodle is the huge amount of options available to end users once they get beyond the initial (and anecdotally quite simple) tasks of setting up a basic course. One mistake that I see is people trying to understand every last thing in Moodle from the very outset. Unless your name is Neo and you can learn by jamming a cable into the back of your skull then learning all there is to learn about Moodle will be a gradual process.
This led me to think though – if I was going to be working with a group (like I will be in tomorrow’s workshop session) who was at the very beginning of their Moodle learning journey then what would be a simple construct that I would give new users to guide their design thinking when building courses? I’m sure there are a plethora of them that could be used, but this is one shown below that I’ve scribbled on whiteboards on many occasions that has worked well in giving new users a clear understanding of the common components of a Moodle course as they relate to typical learning design concepts.
Note that I’ve not attempted to go into the tools side of things, which I think is where many people wrongly focus their attention when they are designing their first course. Thinking about Moodle course design by using a simple model as shown here will hopefully help focus thinking on the layout of the course and the teaching goals it is trying to achieve, rather that the fine detail of what each tool can or can’t do.
I’d love to hear feedback, good or bad, about this as a simple model for guiding course design for new Moodle users, and if you’re at the T&L Forum this week then please do come up and say hello at the NetSpot booth.
In general I like this approach. But since the Moodle system I manage has ‘weekly outline’ as its default (since that’s what most teachers want) talking about Topics as a top level concept would lead to a deal of cognitive disconnect. Personally I refer to the central chunks as ‘sections’ and then mention the labeling of sections with dates or numbers.
But the framework of context, content and learning pathway is very powerful. Not so sure about Blocks as ‘additional information’ though. I’m thinking that Blocks determine the course environment for students (and of course the instructor) — grades, navigation (course menu block), etc — which can be synergistic or distracting to the course as a whole.
Hi Mark,
I liked your workshop presentation very much and thought that it was succinct and to-the-point. It was exactly that kind of information that the new Moodlers needed to be presented with.
kind rgds
Julian
Hi Julian,
Thanks for the feedback, was good to have you there
Cheers,
Mark.
Great, succinct instruction about designing a Moodle course. I think that, as you say, focusing on the content/context/learning path rather than on the nuts and bolts of the tool is what we need and want for teachers.
May I use bits of your presentation, with attribution of course, for Moodle training that I do?
Thanks!
Hi Jedediah,
Provided its not-for-profit training for teachers at your school or similar, then absolutely
Thanks for the comment,
Mark.
I’m Brand new to Moodle and I can’t figure out a work-around for my problem.
I would like to setup Templates in advance.
Then have certain files linked to an area that will hold documents (repository). In the future, all I want to be able to upload and replace only those documents and not have to relink by hand in Moodle.
This way, when I open the course later, it will pull the New documents automatically.
I guess I’m asking if I can use Moodle to pull from a repository at anytime, and use only the current (newer) documents when a course is opened anytime.
I have a document, that link it once, then close the course. Next week I have update information to my document, I’ll make those changes and re save only to the document. Now when I open my course, Moodle sees the newer document and doesn’t need to be re linked by hand.
Hi Rich,
Sounds like you’re experiencing the challenges of the Moodle 2.0 – 2.2 file management paradigm – check out http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=234 for more information, or for that matterhttp://www.markdrechsler.com/?cat=5 which gives a far more detailed overview of a deceptively tricky problem.
On the plus side, Moodle 2.3 includes some planned enhancements around linking to content like you’re describing, so we’ll wait and see in about a month whether the proposed enhancements do actually fix the issue.
Thanks for the comment,
Mark.