Moodle birthing

I have generally been a teacher approaching Moo from the front-end. My interest has always been from a curriculum focus – what new tools I can incorporate into my courses to inspire my students.

Today, however, I became a back-end fella, and installed Moodle to run locally on my own machine.

I had a couple of reasons for doing so; firstly, I have been asked to be part of the process to phase in Moodle at another school. The second reason is simply curiousity.

I found the installation process to be pretty fascinating. Having downloaded the install pack, and already having a webserver running locally, installing and starting up Moo was a sinch! Literally a 5 minute job. Knowing what I know already about Moo, I was able to set up a few users and courses and began nutting out how to enrol one into the other…..

Anyway enough of techie stuff. what I found quite thought provoking was the sheer emptiness of the site once it is up and running, even with a couple of courses created. Our e-learning developer has spent the better part of 3 years building the monster that is now our multi-campus college moodle site, and I had to stop and reflect on the sheer volume of development that has gone into making a really neat, tight LMS.

It struck me that to make a site that really works on a curriculum level, a serious amount of planning, and thought needs to go into the ‘what-goes-where’ questions. I remember having arguments with our Moodle-development committee trying to decide how to create the links to separate Primary from Secondary, and one campus from another. Let’s not even get started on the difficulties we faced considering how to create links to subjects that had students taking the class cross-campus.  But if the site is to be student-friendly (and novice IT teacher friendly), this needs to be thought through.

The other thing that the blank canvas made me consider is the many uses of Moodle. Having adopted moodle at an ‘in-construction’ phase, the new courses we inherited already had some basic formatting and topic titles added. Yet when the course is empty, one tends to consider how many possibilities there are for a moodle course. Extra-curricular pages, welfare pages, pages for year levels…the list is endless and only limited by your imagination.

The thing I have come to love about Moo is its flexibility, the variety of ways in which you can use its courses, and the way that a teacher can shape a course to suit their needs. The other big positive with Moodle is the way it promotes collaboration, but more on that another time…….