How does Moodle enhance teaching and learning?
Moodle’s learning innovations excite educators. At its core, Moodle is educational software grounded in a philosophy of collaborative learning, often referred to as social constructionist pedagogy. This approach views learning as a creative social process, as much as it is an individual one, where people learn together by investigating, analyzing, collaborating, sharing, and reflecting. Perhaps this is a key reason why it has had such a rapid uptake among the educational community. Moodle was built with elements and tools that embody pedagogical understanding, including these concepts:
- Effective learning takes place when learners are actively engaged in constructing knowledge (i.e., creating or doing), rather than passively reading, memorizing, or viewing.
- An inquiry- and discovery-based approach is an effective way to learn.
- Students learn better with supplemental materials.
- Observing and interacting with our peers and the community is also crucial for learning and retention.
- Collaborative environments encourage participants to be both teachers and learners at the same time.
- Learning environments need to be flexible, and adapt quickly to satisfy learner needs.
- Creativity and innovations are sparked (emotional appeal) when everyone has an opportunity to contribute, exercise his or her voice, and participate.
The organization and design of Moodle’s interface supports learners and learning tasks, not technology and tools. As an organizing framework, Moodle offers a choice of three different course formats that cater to a variety of e-Learning experiences. For example, you can organize your course materials using the traditional Topic format, a Weekly format, in which you organize content chronologically week-by-week, or even a Social format, which is less formal and more discussion-focused.
In terms of features, Moodle has all the standard features of a LMS that supports a content-driven learning model (i.e., tools for course structuring, presenting text and multimedia, interactivity, quizzes, and assessments). Figure 4 shows a partial list of the available collaborative activities. In addition, Moodle provides a suite of tools to promote interaction and social networking among people, so that they can share ideas, collaborate in small groups, discuss, and reflect upon experiences.
With Moodle, you can create richly textured courses, each with its own set of resources and activities, including audio and video. A Moodle course can consist of lessons, including reading materials, activities (such as quizzes and projects) and social events that encourage participation between students. For example, students can upload assignments, and teachers are alerted to mark assignments and send messages to students.
Moodle offers hundreds of optional modules. The Chat module helps groups of students with face-to-face learning with supplementary activities, both remedial and extension. Teams can use the Wiki module to co-author a document. The Choice module provides a poll to ask students simple questions. The Quiz module allows you to use a variety of item types to conduct simple assessments.
Discussions and dialogs are at the heart of effective online courses, and Moodle supports these through three standard channels of communication: Discussion forums (an asynchronous, public way of sharing thoughts), Chats (a more immediate and simultaneous conversation with groups), and Dialogues (a private channel between two or more people).
Using the optional modules, Moodle draws on Web 2.0 scenarios and promotes new channels of collaboration, such as:
- Journals, to encourage participants to reflect on the course and content, to experiment in a safe haven, and to stimulate deep thinking and learning
- Wikis, as a simple, flexible way to create artifacts (e.g., group lecture notes, papers, or contributions to other wikis) collaboratively
- Glossaries, that learners create collaboratively to internalize the vocabulary of the field and negotiate their meanings
- RSS and other forms, provide a hub for sharing, such as collaborative works created by learners via blogs, video blogs, and Podcasting of shows created by students
Another example of using Moodle to enhance learning is the ability to provide timely feedback and responsiveness. Analyzing student requirements and providing prompt feedback addresses an important criticism of e-Learning compared to traditional face-to-face classrooms. Moodle allows teachers and students to provide both quantitative (via grades) as well as qualitative (via customizable scales) feedback for nearly all activities and modules. For example, the Assignment module (in which learners can upload their work in any file format) allows the instructor to provide detailed comments in text as well as in audio formats. This is also true of Journal and many other modules, in which you can restrict feedback, or make it accessible to all participants.
Help from the developer community
In addition to educational value, Moodle catalyzes a passionate and active developer community. The developers and educators are continuously innovating, and adding more sophisticated features to enhance the teaching and learning experience. While a core team of developers resides in Perth, Australia, contributing developers are located around the world.
Sidebars 1, 2, and 3 provide links to important resources in the developer community and elsewhere.
|
If you want to find out more about Moodle, you can take a Moodle Features Demo course that provides examples of activities and resources at the Moodle Demonstration site: http://demo.moodle.org |
|
These resources discuss ways to develop courses and to teach online. They have a social networking focus, and they incorporate interactive activities to encourage sharing and group communication. The authors accommodate multiple ways to learn, and facilitate development of a robust, active learning community. In these books, look for ways to connect teaching with specific Moodle activities and resources for better teaching, more motivated students, and more successful courses. Also, look to see how you can add interactive activities and social features to encourage students, and help them reach their learning potential.
|
|
Moodle going forward
After a five-month beta-testing period, and a year after the release of version 1.8, they released Moodle version 1.9 in 2008.
Major new features include:
- An all-new Gradebook, designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems (sponsored by Open University).
- Integrated support for Outcomes, so that you can tie learning goals to individual courses and activities, and grade against them.
- A huge increase in performance due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code. Large sites especially will see major speed increases. In particular, special thanks to Catalyst for their scalability work on the core Roles functions.
- Tagging is now a core function, allowing us to easily link things like users, blogs, courses, etc., as well as to link external sites like Flickr and Youtube through using simple tags. (Google SOC and Moodle.com)
Work is now ongoing for Moodle 2.0. Some changes expected very early in 2009 are:
- File handling improvements
- Conditional activities that allow dependencies, and forced paths through activities, e.g., "You can't do this thing until that thing is completed."
- Learner plans and competencies, so individuals can have learning plans that are updated when courses are completed.
- Improved HTML editor 2.0
- Community hub interfaces, which make it easy for users to find and navigate other systems and external Moodle repositories, leveraging the Moodle Network in various ways.
- A Feedback module, that is cleaned up and included as a core module.
- An improved Wiki module (nwiki), that is cleaned up and included as a core module.
You can follow Moodle’s roadmap at: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap and Moodle news at: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=82 to monitor upcoming changes.
Summary
The bottom line: tools are abundant in Moodle, but what is equally important to teach effectively using Moodle is willingness on the part of the teacher/facilitator to own and use the constructionist pedagogical principles. This approach entails a shift towards focus on the learner, learning as a social process, and learner as facilitator. Also, this would include a shift from being a “teacher” to a “facilitator,” as well as a shift from being just a “source of knowledge” to being an influencer and role model of classroom culture. Many consider Moodle as a way to enhance teaching more motivated students and more successful courses. More on this philosophy appears at: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy.
The Moodle crowd is a very passionate community of developers, educators, and administrators who want to see education change to a more creative, social networking, collaborative experience. They see using Moodle as a way to change e-Learning, as we know it today. It will be fun to sit back and watch the future. Will Moodle help change the way we learn? Will it help to make learning more personalized? Also, will the numbers again double by this time next year, or is Moodle just another passing trend? What is clear is those who are using Moodle are choosing to embrace the social constructivist pedagogical principles for more creative, collaborative learning.
