Lounge

Hmmm the no add on mods is tuff but I'll put on my thinking cap. I think a month at least from the time you open to close for submissions.

I think this is a great idea.

Just brain storming some ideas here.

You might think about having different categories for classes aimed at different age groups. Perhaps Secondary Level, Elementary Level, Post Secondary Level. Another category idea might be to separate educational/training uses and other uses.

Another idea might be to divide up the Best Application category into some other categories... such as most interactive, best use of communication tools, most imaginative use of tools, etc.

I've been working with Moodle for almost a year now, making a series of introductory, self-help courses in a variety of IT issues: HTML/Css coding, Unix/Linux/Bash for bioinformaticians, Perl Programming, PHP programming, etc. More courses will continue to appear, at least until the funding runs out. I hope to do something with Microsoft products too at some point: C-sharp/Asp/Dotnet, etc.

For each such course I build an external, book-like website for background reading material (complete with links to other external resources). The course itself (the Moodle part) is a sequential series of topics and homework assignments, each of which involves at least some reading from the background reading and resources website.

For me this is the only way to do it. Moodle's page publishing capabilities just aren't powerful enough to do the whole thing. I've worked with Blackboard and Desire2Learn and they aren't any different (just a heck of lot more expensive).

I'm not sure why I'm posting this. Perhaps to point out: "my best work wouldn't fit into the competition," because I have a hunch you want 100% Moodle courses, that exist entirely as a distributable, scorm-format zip file. But I don't think that's the best way to make use of Moodle.

Flesh and blood classroom courses usually involve the combination of a teacher
and various textbooks. Online classes, for me, involve one or more teachers, course software of some kind (Moodle) plus easily editable, external reading resources.
(external reading resources that include intuitive page-to-page and section-to-section navigation plus keyword search.....that's what Moodle does not provide)

Hello,

I am a high school science teacher in Bozeman MT, US. I think it would be great to categorize the sites by level, elementary, middle school and high school, then by subject area. It would be great to see a listing of great example Moodle sites that one could reference to see how other teacher are using Moodle.

Here is a link to my Moodle site,
http://eschool.bsd7.org:8888/moodle19/course/view.php?id=137

Thank you,
Brian Swarthout

Very good idea. Very smart.

Just to be clear: Any of the standard Moodle packages will do, right? Even, for example, version 1.7.7?

Thanks,
Art

Hi Helen

Good plan! Hope this will open up the content-barrier ;)

Hier are my comments:

- > to encourage people to donate great Moodle demo courses

"demo" in the sense of quick sample or should they be self-contained and usefull as it is? Neiter demo nor sample nor test courses, rather production grade?

- Duration: 2 months is perfect.

- Categories: As others have mentioned a couple of seperate categories are necessary. For example Elementary (Primary), Secondary, Tertiary, Adult Education, .. Or application categories as Paula mentioned.

- Rules
> 2. You may enter as many courses in the competition as you wish.
> 3. You can only enter your course in one competition category.

one course in one competition category

> 5. Your course must include at least 3 different types of activity e.g. a forum, a quiz and a wiki.

Is this necessary? In certain application categories like "most interactive" for sure, but universally?

> 8. All course content must be freely available or available under one of the Creative Commons licenses

Have you considered GFDL too? http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/fdl.html

> 9. You must have the authority to publish the course under one of the Creative Commons licenses

under the licence you have chosen above (§8)

> i.e. you have created the course yourself or you have permission from the course creator.

or the previous authours have published the work under such licenes which allow you to ...

IMHO kind of obvious.

How to Enter:
> Check carefully that all course content is copyright-free or covered by a Creative Commons license

or the licence you have chosen is right/valid.

Prizes:
One Week active vacaion "bushwhacking the outback"

I have a dilemma about the competition - we've used the category/course hierarchy in Moodle in a really unique way. One of our training units (soory we've developed our own terminology!) is equivalent to a sub-category and each module within that learning unit is equivalent to a Moodle course. Therefore, I can't actually submit a 'course' as others would, as this will only constitute a fraction of one of our learning units.

The training I'd like to submit is actually a suite of six Moodle courses, all interlinked, where the learner moves easily between them.

How can I go about submitting this? I'm assuming our unusual way of using Moodle may be a good example for the demo area - Martin said at the MMUK09 that this is why the comp was set up: encouraging innovative examples.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

Lynn

Great idea! For a category, how about "Most innovative"

Hi Helen

Great idea, I think this will encourage me and our faculty at Sultan Qaboos University to design creative courses and share their experience with others in moodle.org.

I remember once when faculties at SQU were really keen to design good course just for sack of winning the best course design competition in WebCT. I really don’t believe that we should design courses just to win a competition but to encourage student to learn effectively.

I know that some of our faculty members have designed really interactive courses and would love to see them participating in Cool Course Competition . Unfortunately, we are not allowed at SQU to donate the courses, but this competition would be good excuse

Faisal