Basic questions about moodle for teaching

Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Ravishankar Somasundaram -
Number of replies: 7
Dear moodlers,

Here are a set of questions for which i would like to hear your perspectives.

I am asking this in multiple forums because of the need to get different views from people belonging to different departments.


1. Why do i need a Learning Management System ?

2. How can it bring a difference ? say it could be in comparison with the regular class room teaching or with the other methods of teaching online like sharing the docs,info using wave . etc and performing validations using online quiz tools ..etc

3. Why moodle ?


I would be delighted to hear at-least two points as reply for above questions from all of you smile


~ ~ ~ Peace - Ravishankar Somasundaram ~ ~ ~
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In reply to Ravishankar Somasundaram

Re: Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Ernest Brown -
Ravi

Why do you need a Swiss Army Knife when you can carry around a knife, scissors, screwdrivers, tweezers, saw, spoon, fork, etc, etc.?

Why do you use one suite of software instead of multiple applications with differing interfaces, no integration, and support from many vendors?

Why do you have one classroom in one school instead of many many meeting spaces in many different buildings in differing locations?

Ok, Moodle does not do everything.

But it is more affordable than others.

Ernie Brown
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In reply to Ernest Brown

Re: Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Ravishankar Somasundaram -
Dear Ernest Brown,

thanks for sharing your views.

thats a lot of valid points for the second question

2. How can it bring a difference ? say it could be in comparison with the regular class room teaching or with the other methods of teaching online like sharing the docs,info using wave . etc and performing validations using online quiz tools ..etc


anything for the 1st and 3rd ?


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In reply to Ravishankar Somasundaram

Re: Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers
#3 - Do an internet search for independent studies commissioned by education authorities and govt. organisations. There's a lot of them comparing Moodle and Blackboard. Moodle almost always comes out pretty favourably. Plus, since Moodle won't sue authors for writing helpful books about it without explicit permission, contracts, lawyers, etc. (owners of proprietary systems can get very possessive and protective), there's lots of very helpful books, blogs, videos, etc. out there. Have a look on Amazon for those.

#1 - All educational organisations have some kind of learning management system. You need records of student enrolments, their study programmes, their attendance, which tutors they're studying with, their work and assessments, contact details, etc. You can keep all this stuff in files in folders or in a variety of formats but it can get difficult to keep track of it all and make any meaningful analysis of students' activities and progress. A well designed database that stores all this can provide you with very valuable information quickly and easily.

Does this help?
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In reply to Ravishankar Somasundaram

Re: Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Mark Johnson -
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1. Why do i need a Learning Management System ?
  1. To provide a contextual interface for learning resources. A page on an LMS can contain headings and explanations of resources, whereas a simple respository of documents delivered via e.g. a shared network folder cannot.
  2. Keeping track of students, who has actually been looking at the resources/homeworks/etc
  3. To provide electronic and remote access to learning materials, removing boundaries to the environments in which students can work (and allowing them to easily obtain replacements for lost worksheets etc).
2. How can it bring a difference ? say it could be in comparison with the regular class room teaching or with the other methods of teaching online like sharing the docs,info using wave . etc and performing validations using online quiz tools ..etc

Not being a teacher myself, this is a trickier one to answer, but my thoughts in the subject:
  1. Using external systems like Wave, Facebook etc make it harder to enforce your institution's safeguarding responsibilities (a current hot topic in UK FE). Having your own internal system, solely containing users and content from your own institution makes it easier to ensure the secuirty of the users involved.
  2. It provides a better user experience to provide all content through one interface. You could do surveys using Survey Monkey, but then the users would have to link out to a completely different site with a different appearance, where they aren't logged in, and the data wouldn't be accessible from your institution's systems. Alternatively, you could use Moodle's feedback module which keeps all access controlled through Moodle, and provides the same interface to the survey as all the other learning materials and activities.
  3. It provides a useful augmentation to classroom teaching by providing resources/activites for students to participate in (alone or with each other) outside of contact time.
3. Why moodle ?
  1. It's open source - Therefore free and completely customisable to your institution's needs
  2. It's open source - Therefore built for the purpose of meeting users' needs, not for maximising profit.
  3. It's very flexible and extensible, but still comes with all you need to start teaching
  4. It has a very well established user base, creating a great community for sharing support and ideas
  5. Did I mention it's open source?
Hope some of that's useful!
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In reply to Mark Johnson

Re: Basic questions about moodle for teaching

by Matt Bury -
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I agree with all of the above smile

Another way of looking into on-line learning management systems for educational purposes is to study/read up on what other educators are doing with it. For example, I've been reading Jeff Stanford's book, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching and I've found a lot of great tried and tested ideas and techniques for on-line teaching and learning. There's quite a few books out there so, according to your needs, read a few books and see what has worked for other course and course content developers. In a way, you have to create your own "diploma in e-learning for your subject area programme" and follow it as best you can. Things are changing all the time so it's important to keep as up to date as possible with what other educators are doing.
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