I’m a big believer in Moodle. Moodle has the power and flexibility to provide an excellent, full featured learning experience for teachers and students.
The biggest roadblocks for Moodle are the learning curve and the “look and feel”. The learning curve is what it is. Moodle is powerful software and there is some learning to do. (Boy, if only someone would write some examples to learn Moodle effectively). So, there really isn’t too much to do about the learning curve. Teachers will put in the effort to learn once they really realize the value.
The other issue then, is the look and feel. Moodle can look a little dated. Yes, there are lots of themes that can change the look and feel. (Moodle seems to have acknowledged this in large part. There are only a couple of simple themes included in the core release now.) However, there really isn’t a super easy way to change the size or fonts of the Topic sections. There are icons which correspond to different activities. While these are informative, they also look dated.
What to do? Well, I also get to work with the very talented Mr. Chris Kenniburg. We’ve been talking for a couple of years about making Moodle more user friendly. One of the topics of discussions was to make Moodle more “Facebook” like. Teachers are very familiar with Facebook and would find that easy to use. Unfortunately, the work was beyond the budget that I could creatively find. However, Chris is resourceful. He worked with Bryan Smith of Ingham County ISD to garner funding through a grant to implement.
And they did. They have now unveiled the first run of the Moodle Social Wall (originally named the e-Community – seems naming can be more tricky than one thinks). This can be downloaded and installed (note though that there is still some tweaking to do) by REMC members (the plan is to provide an open source edition later on).
So why bother with all the trouble and work of writing a grant, pitching the idea, working up the schemas, etc? The whole idea is to more readily get teachers involved in using Moodle. I’ve seen many teachers spend lots of time chasing “bright shiny” things (web sites, web apps, etc) and become frustrated. I sat down with one teacher and we talked through the time that she had spent learning different “bright, shiny” things. (This was after a student had creatively placed lots of text in a Padlet that she had created. She wanted to know who it was. There was no way to know.) We very quickly ran up a tab of over 20 hours that she had spent learning things that she was no longer using due to inadequacies, frustrations, limitations, etc. I calmly pointed out that those 20 hours would’ve gotten her pretty far in Moodle. (For some odd reason, that didn’t make her feel any better or happier 😉 ).
So, with the Social Wall format, the idea is to allow educators a very comfortable environment with the full power of Moodle behind it. The Social Wall looks and acts very much like popular social networking tools. Educators can use the Social Wall and work just fine. They will have the extra advantages of being able to create Quizzes, add resources and more. They will also absolutely have the power over their own data. However, if the educator ever decides to transform their site into a more structured course, the power and structure of Moodle will be right there.
Seriously, this is good stuff. Take a look.
Leave a Reply