Hello, I'm looking for someone who is in San Diego, CA and regularly uses Moodle to present at SDCUE (San Diego Computer-Using Educators) annual tech fair on Oct. 29 (more info at www.sdcue.org). The payment is the graditude of the SDCUE board and a lovely sandwich, chips, and soda - who can resist!
If interested, please e-mail me at danmcdowell@cox.net
Thanks!
Hey Dan. If no one else turns up, I can talk about how we're moving all 13 sections of EDTEC 470 onto Moodle.
Bernie,
I'm teaching an Educational Technology (EAD824) course using Moodle...did a couple of presentations on it at the Oxford Moot a couple of weeks ago. I would be interested to see how you are organizing and conducting the 470 courses...maybe we could share some resources, tips, ideas?
You can take a look at my course here:
http://www.kentuckyclassroom.com/teacher/course/view.php?id=56
The enrollment key for guest access is "sayplease"
Steve
Wow! Very inspiring, Steve. There's some overlap in the content of my course which is at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec470. I'm creatively stuck right now along a number of dimensions:
1. Keep the content of the course on edweb and just use Moodle for interactivity, or move it all into Moodle as you've done?
2. How can I visually highlight the blendedness of the new version of the course. We're starting with 2 virtual sessions and moving towards 5. I want the separation of what's F2F and what's virtual to be very clear.
3. How to organize the course within Moodle. We'll have 10 instructors, 13 sections. Make one course with separate groups? Make a metacourse for the resources? Make a model course and clone it 13 times?
Your course has given me a good jumpstart to my thinking. Thanks for sharing it! And if you have any insights on my three questions, I am (as Ross Perot once said) all ears.
1. Keep the content of the course on edweb and just use Moodle for interactivity, or move it all into Moodle as you've done?
2. How can I visually highlight the blendedness of the new version of the course. We're starting with 2 virtual sessions and moving towards 5. I want the separation of what's F2F and what's virtual to be very clear.
3. How to organize the course within Moodle. We'll have 10 instructors, 13 sections. Make one course with separate groups? Make a metacourse for the resources? Make a model course and clone it 13 times?
Your course has given me a good jumpstart to my thinking. Thanks for sharing it! And if you have any insights on my three questions, I am (as Ross Perot once said) all ears.
Bernie,
Thanks for the link...I like your resources page...lots of useful links there to some good stuff I can use in my course.
I certainly understand what you are facing being creatively stuck...I seem to be in that mode constantly I've been trying to find the best answer to many of the questions you pose...I'm about to the point of deciding that there is no best answer. Just some thoughts...
1. Keeping stuff in edweb vs moving everything into Moodle. I'm not familiar with edweb, so I can't compare the two. However, from my experience, if you are not running Moodle on a dedicated server (if you have a shared account on some commercial server) then I would recommend caution. I posted a thread here on moodle.org back in the spring about being booted from my shared commercial account due to using too much of the server resources...I had plenty of bandwidth and storage space, my discussion forums seemed to be more than the server could handle...or more than my provider wanted to handle. I now have a "hoss" of a dedicated server (dual opteron 244 processors and 4 gig of RAM)...server performance hasn't been a problem since.
2. Separating F2F and Online. I've tried a lot of different approaches here and finally settled on using modules...onground and online. Notice in my course that I have 8 onground (F2F) modules followed by 4 online modules. If you look at the dates of the modules, you will see both the onground and online modules span the term. I have been doing this for a number of years in my web-enhanced courses and it has worked well. I don't know if there is a better way of highlighting that visually in my course...I've tried different things but just having the 12 modules (8 onground and 4 online) seems to be simplest for me to manage.
3. I haven't experimented with metacourses yet and the way groups work in Moodle is just too complex and confusing for my simple mind, so I prefer to create a master course and recycle it. During this term, for example, I am teaching 3 sections of this course and using one Moodle course for all three sections. An adjunct professor who has never taught for us before is teaching a section and I've just given him a copy of my course to use and modify. I'm also working with a professor at another university (Northern Kentucky University) this term and he is running the same course there from my template. Creating a master course is by far the simplest way to do this in my opinion.
Steve