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| Moodle Expert, Teo Chuin Hau |
Moodle: A Virtual Learning Environment, No Relation to Noodles (Except in Culinary Colleges)
Getting your teaching and learning stuff done over the internet has become a pretty popular concept over the past five years or so. Nowadays, you'd be hard-pressed to find any college or university worth their salt that doesn't implement any virtual learning environment (VLE) for their faculty and students.
A virtual learning environment, in its most basic concept, takes the form of a webpage where teachers upload information and students download that information. Most, if not all, VLEs nowadays definitely offer chat or discussion facilities where students can interact with their teachers online. In terms of form and function, it is pretty similar to any of your garden variety forums that you find mushrooming all over the internet.
Of course, this is if we're talking basic concepts. It is entirely possible for VLEs to incorporate online quizzes, assessments, grade tracking, messaging, e-mail notifications, games, and so on and so forth, till we can conceivably plan out a VLE that is similar, but not identical to, say, Facebook – except academics-based.
Yes, it can be that cool.
In any case, VLEs are a great way to modernize teaching-learning and to get the modern-day tech-addicted youths interested in their studies. Of course, Vision College might be small but we certainly don't plan on getting left behind – so we've went ahead and begun implementation of a VLE of our own. At Vision College, we're using the free source Moodle as our VLE. Free source means that we don't pay for it (much), so we can pass the savings on to the consumer.
Now, when you tell someone about the word 'free source' they also think of its alleged accomplices, such as 'instability', 'user-hostile', or 'bug-ridden piece of ****', but truthfully most of the widely-used free source software nowadays do match their more expensive and enterprising cousins in usability. Moodle is no exception, having been selected by many universities as part of their VLE effort; Open University and the University of York in the United Kingdom, as well as Australian National University, Melbourne University and Monash University in Australia are just some of the multiple institutions of higher learning utilizing the software.
So, what are we doing with Moodle nowadays?
As of now, we are in the phase where lecture information is being uploaded to form a cohesive database. This database will serve as a repository for both teachers and students to view and download lecture slides, lesson plans and study notes. By giving easier access to the information, we make it possible for teachers and students to be less tied down to college premises when it comes to the teaching-learning process.
So, that's probably what we call Phase Two.
By the way, Phase One was where we set everything up and went for a trial run or two.
Phase Three, slated to commence in January 2012, will see all courses being run with the aid of Moodle. This means that teachers will have to direct their students to the website and let them know that yes, they can get their slides from the internet now. In this phase, the teachers will also be able to open discussion forums where students can ask all the questions they never got to ask in class because they were too shy. (Note: look into auto-censor filters for Moodle forums)
And in the Final Phase, Phase Four, the use of online assessments, quizzes and grading will come into play. It is a markedly more complicated affair because the one-shoe-fits-all approach does not work here, due to the varied assessment methods employed by the different programmes. This phase will also see the introduction of a unified gradebook spanning all subjects so that we can track grade points, averages of those grade points, and the cumulative sum of the averages of those grade points for each student throughout their fun-filled academic life, which will involve a lot of mathematics and be pretty cool.
If we're really, really brave, we'll slap Phase Four together with Phase Three and run it concurrently. Here at Vision College we think optimistically.
Well, that's really about all there is to say about the Moodle VLE at the moment. No pictures are around because all the really, really cool stuff isn't up yet and unfortunately, no one I know wants to look at rows upon rows of lecture slides.
Oh well.
