Greetings all,
I'm an experienced Blackboard user trying to replicate the course design I have used successfully for use on Moodle. It's a simple design - Students read articles uploaded to the course site and then discuss the readings in threaded discussions.
I've been through a lot of the documentation on the Moodle site and can't seem to figure out how to get started with this. Can anyone help?
And, by the way, I don't want e-mails to go out to the entire class whenever someone posts something. Everyone is expected to log in every day and read what has been posted. It is imperative that each person can easily see what they have read and what they haven't.
Thanks for your assistance.
Don Bunis
AACRAO (American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers)
Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Donald Bunis -
Number of replies: 10
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Matthew Putz -
Hi, Don...
I can help you with that (as I'm sure many others on this site can), but I'd have to know first where you were actually getting stuck. Are you having trouble figuring out how to upload your articles, how to display them to students, or how to create forums? Or something else?
On a different note, I found your comment regarding email subscriptions to be somewhat befuddling. I don't want to sound disprespectful, but is there some educational magic that occurs when a student logs into the course and reads a post that doesn't happen when they read the same post in their email inbox? In my experience with Moodle, students tend to engage in more lively discussions when they are allowed to subscribe to forums, because they don't have to sit in your course site and hit the "refresh" button all day long waiting for somebody to post so that they can catch it and respond. (Which, of course, nobody ever does or would even have time to do - which is why subscriptions are helpful.) I'd be curious to hear more about why you feel the way you do about that - perhaps I'm missing something...
Additionally, you can enable read-tracking for forums whether people are subscribed to them or not, so that they will clearly see what they've read and what they haven't read when they actually do visit the site.
Moodle has some unique features that might allow you to do even better than simply duplicating your Blackboard course - let us know how we can help.
Matthew Putz
Faculty Instructional Technology Consultant
Bethel University
I can help you with that (as I'm sure many others on this site can), but I'd have to know first where you were actually getting stuck. Are you having trouble figuring out how to upload your articles, how to display them to students, or how to create forums? Or something else?
On a different note, I found your comment regarding email subscriptions to be somewhat befuddling. I don't want to sound disprespectful, but is there some educational magic that occurs when a student logs into the course and reads a post that doesn't happen when they read the same post in their email inbox? In my experience with Moodle, students tend to engage in more lively discussions when they are allowed to subscribe to forums, because they don't have to sit in your course site and hit the "refresh" button all day long waiting for somebody to post so that they can catch it and respond. (Which, of course, nobody ever does or would even have time to do - which is why subscriptions are helpful.) I'd be curious to hear more about why you feel the way you do about that - perhaps I'm missing something...
Additionally, you can enable read-tracking for forums whether people are subscribed to them or not, so that they will clearly see what they've read and what they haven't read when they actually do visit the site.
Moodle has some unique features that might allow you to do even better than simply duplicating your Blackboard course - let us know how we can help.
Matthew Putz
Faculty Instructional Technology Consultant
Bethel University
In reply to Matthew Putz
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Peter Bruce -
Yes Matthew! I am using forums for assessments and it is transforming the learning experience for students.
Peter Bruce
Business Management
NorthTec
New Zealand
Peter Bruce
Business Management
NorthTec
New Zealand
In reply to Matthew Putz
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Donald Bunis -
Hi Matthew,
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I'm getting stuck right at the beginning, which is a bit embarrassing considering my experience in designing on Bb. Perhaps the answers are obvious to experienced Moodle users but the terminology is throwing me off track so I'm not looking in the right places. Probably blinded by what I need to unlearn in order to learn how to operate in Moodle.
For instance, My course is set up to run in sequential modules, which may or may not start at the beginning of a week and may run longer than a week. Some courses run 30 days with a new module starting every 10 days. None of the basic course set-up options I see seem to fit that format.
Within each module there are three or four discussion questions posted by a faculty member. Students reply to each question within a specified period for all to see and possibly to reply further to -- just like this forum. What part of the Moodle user documentation should I be looking at to see how to set that up?
Finally -- for now at least-- I don't see where the reading materiel that supports each module is to be uploaded and organized by module.
I take your point about e-mail notifications of posts being more student friendly. Theoretically that is true. However, my students are all working professional who get too much e-mail already. Typically a course generates about 20 or more posts a day. That's a lot of individual e-mails, which I think students would find annoying. If they get in the habit of logging on once a day, they'll always find new unread posts. I know several students who have unsubscribed to professional list-serves because they were bombarded by e-mails all day. Is there an option to run a discussion on the class site only without the e-mails, should we decide to go that way? If not, can students receive a daily digest? Would students have the same options as I do to select not receiving e-mails from a given forum?
Thanks in advance for your help and advice. I'm sure that once I'm out of the starting gate, I can make some good progress and will one another Moodle Success story.
All the best,
Don
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I'm getting stuck right at the beginning, which is a bit embarrassing considering my experience in designing on Bb. Perhaps the answers are obvious to experienced Moodle users but the terminology is throwing me off track so I'm not looking in the right places. Probably blinded by what I need to unlearn in order to learn how to operate in Moodle.
For instance, My course is set up to run in sequential modules, which may or may not start at the beginning of a week and may run longer than a week. Some courses run 30 days with a new module starting every 10 days. None of the basic course set-up options I see seem to fit that format.
Within each module there are three or four discussion questions posted by a faculty member. Students reply to each question within a specified period for all to see and possibly to reply further to -- just like this forum. What part of the Moodle user documentation should I be looking at to see how to set that up?
Finally -- for now at least-- I don't see where the reading materiel that supports each module is to be uploaded and organized by module.
I take your point about e-mail notifications of posts being more student friendly. Theoretically that is true. However, my students are all working professional who get too much e-mail already. Typically a course generates about 20 or more posts a day. That's a lot of individual e-mails, which I think students would find annoying. If they get in the habit of logging on once a day, they'll always find new unread posts. I know several students who have unsubscribed to professional list-serves because they were bombarded by e-mails all day. Is there an option to run a discussion on the class site only without the e-mails, should we decide to go that way? If not, can students receive a daily digest? Would students have the same options as I do to select not receiving e-mails from a given forum?
Thanks in advance for your help and advice. I'm sure that once I'm out of the starting gate, I can make some good progress and will one another Moodle Success story.
All the best,
Don
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Matthew Putz -
Hi, Don - just a few ideas to get you started...
In order to run your course in sequential modules that don't revolve around "weeks," use the "topics format" (in administration, settings). Then you can use the label resource tool or the section summary tool to label each topic/module the way you prefer.
Moodle doesn't have a discussion board like Blackboard (although all of the forums you create can be aggregated through the "activities" block to get a similar feel if you like), so you just create individual forums wherever you like. "Turn editing on," under "activities" select "forum," and fill the form out. For all of the details on how to set up a forum, check this out:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Adding/editing_a_forum
Moodle uses a file repository (located in "files" in the administrative block) where instructors store all of the files needed for the course. When you're ready for students to see a particular file or directory you've created, choose either "Link to a file or website" or "Display a directory" from the resources menu with editing turned on. I don't have time to go into the advantages of this approach at this point (compared to Blackboard), but they should become apparent.
If you want students to have the choice as to whether or not they subscribe to forums, you can give that to them when you set the forum up. At this point, I don't think daily digests are available.
Hope that gets you started...
Matt
In order to run your course in sequential modules that don't revolve around "weeks," use the "topics format" (in administration, settings). Then you can use the label resource tool or the section summary tool to label each topic/module the way you prefer.
Moodle doesn't have a discussion board like Blackboard (although all of the forums you create can be aggregated through the "activities" block to get a similar feel if you like), so you just create individual forums wherever you like. "Turn editing on," under "activities" select "forum," and fill the form out. For all of the details on how to set up a forum, check this out:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Adding/editing_a_forum
Moodle uses a file repository (located in "files" in the administrative block) where instructors store all of the files needed for the course. When you're ready for students to see a particular file or directory you've created, choose either "Link to a file or website" or "Display a directory" from the resources menu with editing turned on. I don't have time to go into the advantages of this approach at this point (compared to Blackboard), but they should become apparent.
If you want students to have the choice as to whether or not they subscribe to forums, you can give that to them when you set the forum up. At this point, I don't think daily digests are available.
Hope that gets you started...
Matt
In reply to Matthew Putz
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Donald Bunis -
Matthew,
Thanks for helping me crack the code. I'll try everything you have suggested.
Cheers,
Don
Thanks for helping me crack the code. I'll try everything you have suggested.
Cheers,
Don
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Matthew Putz -
No prob - have fun 
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Ger Tielemans -
I think you did a creative job in trying to use Bb for good education. The point is that trying to use your Bb workaround does not use the power of Moodle.
maybe this cartoon helps, my 5 cents:
*) The Belgium Bb-look-alike Dokeos does offer something: the learning-line-module
**) If you want more teacher control, consider Flexpage
maybe this cartoon helps, my 5 cents:
- In Bb you have an "electronic Chinese wall" to put your assignments on. You use the forum to organize class-activities, but there is no way to visual connect these two, unless you do a lot of clever handjobs in a free format HTML-page. *)
In the end your student has a personal dashboard where switching between forums and resources becomes very crucial and is in the control of students. - Moodle offers you another model: "a marketplace": again students have the control: they choose -which and how - to visit the places on the marketplace of each course. **) You can help them with a visual queuing-design:
- for each topic you can set up a section
- you start the section with a theme: 'advanced organizing' the thoughts of the student
- then you put the resources right there under the theme
- you even can visual organize the resources by using the outline function of the Moodle section
- then you think of activities students could do with these resources and your educational goals and you paste these clean activities right there where it fits the resources-tree at best:
- a FRESH forum, one for each (sub-)topic!! (with grading) as you use in Bb
- a glossary (with grading) where students create lemmas for new words and concepts they spot in the texts (you can allow other students to comment on the lemmas etc..)
- the extra module: create a question: let students read chapter 4 and create questions of the type you prescribe. (an eye-opener for teachers: you never saw so many misunderstandings about chapter 4 on one place..)
- ...
- ...
- and finally: let students work together on a documentation-project on the topic in a group-wiki, you still can see who added or improved what in which page.
*) The Belgium Bb-look-alike Dokeos does offer something: the learning-line-module
**) If you want more teacher control, consider Flexpage
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Helen Foster -
Hi Donald,
Regarding different terminology, you may like to check the 'Blackboard to Moodle resources' link in the see also section of our Blackboard migration documentation.
Regarding different terminology, you may like to check the 'Blackboard to Moodle resources' link in the see also section of our Blackboard migration documentation.
In reply to Donald Bunis
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Michael Penney -
The Flexpage course format developed for Intel Education provides tab navigation, persistent left menus, etc.
Using it & some good theming, Moodle courses can be built to look very much like WebCT, BB, eCollege, etc. This can reduce switching cost, as faculty don't need to change their way of doing things so much, as well as provide nice methods of displaying content rich courses, courses that intermix content delivery with interactivity & collaboration, etc.
Using it & some good theming, Moodle courses can be built to look very much like WebCT, BB, eCollege, etc. This can reduce switching cost, as faculty don't need to change their way of doing things so much, as well as provide nice methods of displaying content rich courses, courses that intermix content delivery with interactivity & collaboration, etc.
In reply to Michael Penney
Re: Trying to duplicate course design originally used on Blackboard
by Donald Bunis -
Hello Michael,
This is very heartening news. However, I'm stuck right off the bat because there is no option within the installation I'm working from to choose "Page" as the format for the course. Does my administrator need to download a customization?
Also, can you provide a link to a test course that will help me see what a typical page looks like? I'm kind of big-picture learner and need to feel like I know where I'm headed. This is particularly important to me right now as my mind is stuck in the formats I'm used to on Bb.
Thanks so much for your help.
Don
This is very heartening news. However, I'm stuck right off the bat because there is no option within the installation I'm working from to choose "Page" as the format for the course. Does my administrator need to download a customization?
Also, can you provide a link to a test course that will help me see what a typical page looks like? I'm kind of big-picture learner and need to feel like I know where I'm headed. This is particularly important to me right now as my mind is stuck in the formats I'm used to on Bb.
Thanks so much for your help.
Don