Response to Faculty Perspectives on Moodle

My first experience with Moodle was in rebuilding an online course for an educational association. It was my first experience with LMSs and the the consulting firm that hired me explained what LMSs were all about and even gave me a copy of Gardner’s magic quadrant review of existing LMSs.  They also explained how to use Moodle and post my course. My first reactions were horrible. I felt the interface was totally clumsy and not well organized. To post my course I needed to go through a course document of about 100 fields and needed only to complete about 3. Furthermore, the course had quizzes and bookmarking that didn’t seem to show up in the interface. As far as I was concerned free didn’t necessarily mean worthwhile. I had written off Moodle for good.

It wasn’t until I came to CCSU and Dr. Sponder used it for all of his courses that Moodle made a lot more sense to me. The more traditional week by week organization used at CCSU made sense of this beast for me. I really liked the weekly organization but I still felt the interface seemed a little immature.

Then, last semester I took a course with Dr. Foshay using Blackboard and I was even less impressed. With all of the money a commercial system has, the interface was not any better. It was still boring and even worse the content was not organized by week. Dr. Foshay told me that he stripped the course down to the bare bones and that it could do so much more but I am still skeptical.

Reading this week’s assignment only confirmed my suspicions about Blackboard. Having said that, CCSU’s Instructional Technology Department will be offering courses on Blackboard that I hope to take in the next few months just so I can truly speak from experience.

The reading articulated many things about Moodle which I have been experiencing. I do think Moodle is excellent in the weekly organization but I can relate that students need a little more show and tell on how to use its features. The ability to work any time and any where is a great feature of online learning. Allowing shy students to speak up via discussions is another positive point. While I like the ability to give users extra information “just in case” the article made me realize how this can be overwhelming for students. In the "old days" a teacher wouldn’t photocopy an overabundance of articles “just in case”. This is something for me to keep in mind.

One author, Brian, noted how students can’t share work with each other. This is definitely a draw back. At CCSU, Dr. Sponder gets around this by having students post work to their websites. But that does detach the work from the grades, if gradebook is being used.

One feature I would like to see implemented in both Blackboard and Moodle is the ability to comment on readings. If a reading is posted students should be able to post comments like they do on Crocodoc.com. Comments should either kept private – like a student keeping his/her own notes or public – a student commenting as part of an assignment or for the purposes of a discussion.

I guess nothing is ever perfect and the features of an LMS definitely make learning easier. However, I’ve seen many other applications that are slicker and more user friendly and I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask Blackboard and Moodle to step up their game.