Designing and Organizing an Online Course

 
Moodle is a fantastic learning platform to help run and organize an online course. Instructors are provided with an array of tools and resources to support student learning and teacher instruction. The primary assignment for this week was to embed many of these resources into our moodle course, such as wiki, a discussion forum, quizzes, a checklist, and folders etc. The essential question we need to ask ourselves is not how many resources are available - there is an abundance - but what is the best resource available for what I am trying to accomplish? For example, when should I use a wiki vs. forum? When should I use a URL vs. page? When should I use a quiz vs. survey?

Veteran teachers, like myself, have access to a pool of activities, lessons and projects, etc. One of our challenges is picking the "right" activity, lesson, or project to meet specific learning outcomes/objectives. This challenge is magnified when teaching online courses because we have limited time (~5 weeks), so every assignment must be purposeful and meaningful. 

The second thought that emerged during this week was the importance of creating an organized, visually-appealing Moodle Page. For an online student, their first impression of our course is based on our Moodle homepage, unlike a traditional course where students form impressions based on the teacher, classroom, building, classmates, etc. Accordingly, we must give just as much time to the design of our Moodle page as the content we embed.

Comments

  1. TrollgeekJune 5, 2017 at 9:05 AM

    You are so right about limited time, especially with adult studies courses. It is so important for everything we do in these courses to be focused and relevant. As you use various tools, it then becomes more apparent what the limitations are and what might be a better alternative.

    I would actually like to do a lot more design things with Moodle, but we are pretty limited by the template we have. We can add graphics and spiffy labels, but can't do much with backgrounds, font choices and colors.

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