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