Developing a workshop training course for university students in Moodle

After being with Carleton for nearly a month, I've just been given my first Instructional Design related project. Thus far, I've been mainly dealing with helping instructors with the Moodle courses and looking at other training option for getting everyone transferred over from the old WebCT system. While those were challenging in their own right, I'm pretty excited about this opportunity that I've been given.

What I've been asked to do is to develop a workshop type of independent study course that will help students succeed in their studies. There is current training currently being offered F2F, but putting the information online will be a first for this department. They are looking to start with just one workshop, but over time there are at least five different workshops that will be going online.

I met with the subject-matter expert this morning briefly to outline the capabilities and limitations of Moodle and to discuss what her expectations are for the workshop. She gave me a pretty good picture of what she is looking for. I gave her a few questions to think about so that we can create strong learning objectives and expected outcomes and we'll meet again next week to discuss further.

I've done some reading and I'm trying to decide what the best strategy to take for this type of course could be. I looked at problem-based learning to allow students to work through some issues and transfer the knowledge gained to the problem, however, this will be an independent course and I could see that it may be difficult to manage without more instructor support. I also looked at cognitive strategy instruction, and while this does seem to be a good fit for it, it may pose a challenge for first-year students who aren't really cognitively aware of when they should put these strategies into place.

I'll follow up with further posts as we move along in the process, but if anybody has any insight they wish to share, please provide them in the comments section below.

My first education blog post!

Hi everyone, welcome to my very blog post focused on my interest in education and technology, particularly in the area of English Language Learners. I plan on exploring the many different uses of technology that are available. In my current role as Academic Coordinator at my language school, we are working to implement a distance learning element to our school so students from around the world can take part in our language training. While this is a big part of my focus, we still have regular classes taking place in which I would love to motivate and encourage our teachers to introduce more technology in the classrooms.

First up, I want to tell you a thing or two about what I'm doing right now with my work. Perhaps I can get some advice on how to deal with some of the difficulties that I'm facing. Maybe I'll just work out the problems on my own as I'm typing. Who knows, but I just want to share my experiences and hopefully we can all learn from each other.

Currently, I'm trying to get an online placement test up and running so that our students will be able to have their tests logged and scored almost instantaneously. Of course the written part will have to be graded, but the rest can be given as feedback almost right away. I would like to use moodle as a simple way to get things up and running because I'm familiar with their quiz function. The problem is that there are currently two factions within our school having difficulty deciding on what platform to use; Blackboard or Moodle. In my opinion moodle acts as a better LMS, but there are internal politics to consider. Question: Does anybody know of a quiz/test creation software that would be compliant with both platforms? I've looked at a few different ones, such as Hot Potato and Articulate, but I was wondering which one would be best for me to easily adapt to either LMS.

Thanks for reading and I expect to be writing more soon.