So what are the best ways to use moodle ?
For a long time, one of the biggest difficulties in teaching has been to create effective, reasonable courses, tests and assignments from which to teach and train. It’s hard, preparing these ahead of time, with no field tests of the students in question, and a dry run isn’t something you can really do when it comes to teaching.
Oh sure, test and course design software’s as old as computers itself, but the problem is that these old tools were designed to create courses for an old approach to teaching, one that is outmoded in all but public education facilities (and hopefully soon not there either).
Modern learning techniques are not only less adherent to the old Prussian classroom roots, but are much more of a social experience, and a digital one. This allows them to be easier to schedule, due to location being less of an issue, thanks to mobile internet. Moodle is a software kit designed to make designing courses for this environment, as well as executing them, vastly easier.
So, what are the best ways to use Moodle? Here are a few ideas for harnessing it, along with modern learning techniques, to accomplish great things.
#1 – Gamification Enhanced
Gamification is all the rage in learning circles, and this is for a reason. Using the placebo of game logic, we can tap into base human engagement and motivation in ways that tedious classrooms cannot. By replacing grading with levels, experience points and other such things, and by providing tangible rewards and privileges for reaching levels, motivation and engagement is high.
Along with this, encouraging interoperability and teamwork among students, valuable in the workplace, is easily accomplished by setting a similar layer of achievement and directive/reward scenario for the group as well as individuals.
Well, you’re left with abstraction, in gamifying this most of the time, but Moodle is a good stepping stone for building a real, functioning “game engine” for your training. With the media-rich, very customizeable courses, access systems and the like that Moodle enables, your courses and test systems can actually function with and on top of the rules of gamification you have implemented.
You can be creative, and make it as much of a fleshed out game as you can, with Moodle’s very open ended course and test design structure. Be creative, and go the whole nine yards – it’s not only a fun creative experience for the teacher, but a memorable one for students as well. Moodle is perfect for this.
#2 – Head in the Clouds!
Moodle is cloud-centric by its very nature, and designing and deploying courses is entirely web-powered, with the new web technology of modernity to make it just as slick as native software. This means that it runs beautifully on any netsmart device of the modern generation. iPads, laptops, PCs, mobile devices and even handheld consoles can access and interact with these courses and tests.
It even allows cooperative interaction with multiple students working together to solve problems, share study and even test as a unit. The mobile cross-platform power of this cloud model means that students can learn from anywhere, any time. No longer do they have to schedule time out of their busy day to attend a group learning session. This makes it more convenient for the student and the teacher on many levels, naturally.
Use this cloud structure to overcome that hurdle of scheduling conflicts – one of the biggest recurring problems in training, solved just like that!
#3 – Use Tutorial Integration
Want even more functionality and media richness out of Moodle? Well, being designed the way it is, other systems can integrate with the courses and tests, and work like an AI tutor for the students. This relieves the problem of not enough of the teacher to go around, and makes the student more confident, knowing the machine can quietly help them along, with no need to call attention to their insecurities abut given material. These systems can also operate the tests, and grade the students live, while the teacher remotely watches over the cloud network.
Automation along with power is what you get with Moodle and a tutorial creation system married together like this.
These are just three of the best ways to use Moodle, there are a lot of things this system can do, but I figured I’d start with an overview of basic things a system like this can allow. In the future, I’ll talk more and more about Moodle, and what wondrous changes it and other software will bring to the self service, training and CRM world in the coming years. We’re in for a wild ride, but a good one!