AECT Conference 2005 : workshop proposal

Although the popularity of the open source Course Management System called Moodle is growing many teachers in Higher Education / K-12 have no inkling of how it can assist classroom teaching. This hands-on workshop will enable participants to get a feel for how their courses could be enhanced using Moodle.

Introduction

This workshop is intended for teachers, administrators or instructional designers who are interested in how the Moodle web based learning environment/course management system can enhance classroom teaching. The Open Source system called Moodle has some unique features which make it particularly well suited to use in the small college or high school context. The presenter has extensive experience with helping teachers in a small college to use Moodle effectively in their courses; he has also taught a course using Moodle intensively and is currently working with students to create and modify Moodle modules.

For this workshop no experience with any existing CMS will be expected and the focus will be on using Moodle as an adjunct to classroom teaching rather than in a pure distance learning context.

We will cover the following topics:

1. Overview of Moodle as an Online Learning Environment as compared to a more conventional Course Management approach. Focus on learning outcomes rather than merely managing course input.
2. Strengths and weaknesses of Moodle as an Open Source system – hidden costs, support, and training issues. Integration into campus information systems.
3. Designing and constructing your course on the Moodle system.
1. Setting up the course and adding students [hands on]
2. Customizing the Weekly outline to display course components. Pedagogical value of this. [Hands on]
3. Making course resources available online, such as scanned articles, web links, audio or video clips. [hands on]
4. Dealing with assignments online. Document upload, inline text entry (Journal), grading and feedback. {Could cover the process of journalling and the different way that this can be handled – uploaded documents (hard to manage), inline journals (no linear connection), blog (inline and connected) [hands on]
5. Discussion forums – types of forum and examples of use. Using groups with forums. Grading issues. [hands on]
6. Informal interactions student-student , student-teacher; chat & dialogue.
7. Pedagogical tools – overview of use of Workshop (peer review of assignments), Wiki (collaborative web sites), Glossary (student reviewed definitions) [Demo]
4. Consideration of the computing environment which Moodle is situated within:
• Accessibility of resources – many students may not have MS Office. Use Acrobat.
• Consideration of network bandwidth / file size – students may need to access Moodle from home via dialup modem. Large file sizes may not load at all. Scanning tips to ensure small files.
• Browser issues – all MS formatted documents will appear within Internet Explorer. Powerpoint presentations open up inside the browser which may not be expected. Using Mozilla Firefox circumvents these and a lot of other browser related annoyances.
• Mac users. Students may be using a Macintosh – be careful to avoid Windows only file formats.

Preliminary Schedule

1. Present an overview of Moodle as a learning environment. Discuss the implications of using an Open Source application in your school. Convincing others that this is a good option.
2. Tour of the Moodle interface
3. Setup courses – each participant will have their own course to experiment with and will enroll in other's courses as students.
4. Customize the Weekly outline to display course components using your syllabus as a template. Discuss pedagogic value of scaffolding online activities within the flow of the syllabus.

Lunch

5. Course Resources – uploading files and presenting as resources within the course outline.
6. Assignments – participants will create an assignment excercise and write directive instructions about how to complete the work.
7. Discussion forum – create a forum and 'seed' with an appropriate question. Add clear instructions about what postings and replies are required.
8. Add a dialogue or chat activity to receive comments from your 'students'.

Having created a week's worth of course participants will log in as students to each other's courses and engage in the various activities. They can then make comments directly to the course creator about the course design by means of the chat or dialogue activity.

Evaluation

Would Moodle work for you, any of your courses, in your school system, college or university? Share ideas about where to go from here.

Resources Provided

To ensure that network congestion doesn't affect the user experience (which might well occur with a remote server) we will use a Mac OS-X server with the latest Moodle installation located in the workshop room itself. There will also be a wireless access point local to the server so that wireless portables can network directly to the server. Participants will have temporary Moodle accounts on this server; collaborative work created during the workshop can be ported to another system to generate other fruitful interactions. All instructional material will be available as printouts. CDs will be provided with latest version Mozilla Firefox for Windows and OS-X.

Resources Required

Participants are asked to bring a portable PC or Mac with them that has either a 10baseT network connector or wireless card (Wi Fi 802.11b). Participants will get most from this workshop by bringing with them a syllabus that they can use as a course template and some files that can be uploaded as resources. Also bring along ideas for discussion forum topics.

Presenter

Has extensive experience instructing teaching faculty on the use of Moodle and has taught a technology course using Moodle in depth.