My Experience With Moodle

This semester we have also been working in teams to develop an E-Learning Module on an open source application of our choice and then host it on a Learning Management System.  The LMS that we used was Moodle.  Remember I blogged earlier about a speaker, Felicia Collins, coming to our class to show us the many benefits of Moodle and how it worked.  She came twice to show us some things, but for the most part, we had to figure it out on our own, with some help from Dr. Keane.  This wasn't too bad though because it's pretty easy to figure things out if you take the time to play with it and explore the many options.

Anyway, we decided the topic of our module would be Drupal.  Drupal is an open source content management system that allows users to create their own websites.  Specifically, we taught them how to use Drupal Gardens.  Again I also blogged about a Drupal workshop that I attended at IT-ology.  Two other members of my team also attended that workshop.  That's why it was chosen as our topic.

We split the module into four topics:  Introduction, Basic Web Development, Form Development, and Website Maintenance.

Here's a screenshot of what our module Home Screen looked like (with editing options turned on) once we added our topics to it.

Within each section we covered different areas.  I did the majority of the Basic Web Development topic so that's what I will talk about.  I instructed the user on how to create and edit block elements and website content.  We used blog form to give step by step instructions on how to accomplish the tasks.  We tried to make in fun and interesting so a lot of the verbiage is very corny.  For example:  "Now it’s time to get busy on the fun part!  Excited?  You should be.  Let’s start by changing your site title."  Very corny huh..., but fun.  Here's what the blogs looked like.

As I was creating the instructions I also did the tasks step by step in Drupal Gardens.  That allowed me to use my Snipping Tool  to get screen images so the user would know they were on the right track.  

So after the user completed each task, they had to submit the URL to their site for grading.  We also set up various Discussion Forums, so students can communicate and help each other.  They could also share ideas that would help their sites look better.  

In addition to the screenshots, we also wanted to give additional resources.  We added links to videos that would also demonstrate how to complete these tasks.

Creating this module was pretty fun and quite relevant to this course.  The bad part is that our site is only available on the university server so we only have access to it on campus in the ITEC labs.  This sort of sucks of you want to share it with potential employers,but hey, what can you do.  

Ok, so that's it for Moodle.  Oh yeah, I prefer Blackboard over Moodle.  It has a much better appearance, but maybe there's some ways to customize Moodle that I don't know about.  Plus Moodle is FREE!!  

Until next time...