Teaching with Moodle

Well, things seem to be taking off now. We are up to 260 registered users, of which 177 have so far completed the first short (pilot project) course.

Feedback from students has so far been very positive, with several actually coming into my office to thank me personally and asking for more!

I have just completed working on a second, slightly longer pilot. This still has a quiz, as the students have been pretty much universal in their praise for this. We use them basically as a self-assessment tool so that students can check their own understanding of the subject. In addition, this latest course also has several journals spread throughout, to allow students to make notes, and write their own conclusions after being asked to research certain things. Lastly, there is a fairly large amount of material available, mostly composed by me as html pages (some of them with diagrams embedded in them) from word documents given to me by the tutor I've been working with.

This course goes live next week.

Lastly...I've just started gathering material for a much-expanded version of our original pilot which will have multiple quizzes, journals and html pages with embedded video and slideshows / animations. I shot the video last week and have to get down to capturing it onto the PC and editing the segments up, then converting the slideshows to flash objects. It's ambitious.....but thankfully doesn't have to be ready until the end of august...so I've plenty of time to make mistakes...and then hopefully fix them.

The teaching staff seem to be getting quite enthusiastic now about the potential of moodle to reinforce their conventional teaching. I've just got to make sure that a.) They don't try and dump whole sections of the course onto moodle as a *substitute* for real live teaching, and b.) That they realise that I'm only one bloke and can't perform miracles.

rgds

Oxford Beardie

P.S. I *will* resume work on the "Using Moodle - for students" course soon. I *will*...(now, where did I put those extra ten hours a day?)