Moodle

Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment MOODLE

In my educator role, I use Moodle only sparingly as I am not leading a module or course, although I'm added to the Moodle sites of the courses I'm involved in, so I can see what the students have access to.

Now having been enrolled in the PGcert course as a student I was able to experience a few more functions of Moodle, that I had not used before or was not aware of. For example, I enjoyed using the small group forum function and I appreciated that our educator Suzan Koseoglu had posted a video there to show how to embed video into the forum posts. 

Before I returned to Academia, I worked in User Experience Design, and I have to admit Moodle's user interface presents many issues that I would have flagged up as counter-intuitive design if I were employed to critique it.

The layout and the order of information can be confusing, with certain sections not clearly enough delineated. The submission link(s) appeared as too small. In our institution, the design is bland, unattractive, and overall text-heavy. I had difficulties finding the feedback for my assignment. The integration with Turnitin's 'feedback studio' is clunky. 'Turnitin' is an online document submission tool, which facilitates plagiarism checks on the students' submissions, yet the process is not clear. Overall, I understand why students do not rush using Moodle, it feels more like a content repository and a means to an end to deal with assessments. 


Some features in Moodle are excellent such as the messaging system for student cohorts. For example, when I gave my lecture to the BA Digital games design students, rather than letting them type out the URL for a specific website I sent it through Moodle so they only needed to click on it.

With a colleague who taught in primary education, we discussed the issue that students do not always look at Moodle sites. She shared a tip on how to get students to log into Moodle. When using the messaging function she would use the words “relevant to your assignment”. After sending a message like this she explained her students always accessed Moodle since they did not want to miss important information on assignments.

I have a colleague in the School of Health, Prof David Evans who has completely customised the Moodle pages for his course to be more engaging. If I were a course leader, I would try to do the same. I would aim to display it in a way that nurtures a sense of community and represents a safe learning space (Holley &Steiner 2005, Wilson et al. 2015) by using inclusive imagery and messages. Yet, these customisation efforts need to be balanced with the overall Moodle experience by students of other course pages and not add any confusion as to where to find content or the submission link. 


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