Moodle® For Dummies®

Understanding Our Learners and Generational Differences

Learners are unique: They have numerous learning styles and different ways information is viewed and assimilated. Educational theorists have identified many different types of learning styles that reflect how the information may be perceived, organized, and processed.³ Learners assimilate in different ways (visually, aurally, or kinesthetically), and some forms may work better than others for individual learners. The neat aspect of using Moodle is that you, as an instructor, can learn about your learners and present information to support them using the medium in various modalities — other than kinesthetic, of course, because you would need virtual reality for that. (Perhaps in the near future the brilliant Moodle developers will design virtual Moodle classrooms that will support a kinesthetic preference.)

If you're new to the area of eLearning, keep in mind that your knowledge, content expertise, and experience are the valued commodities, not the software. Do not compromise your teaching methods and let the medium drive the content.

Moodle has provided instructors with tools and flexibility to enhance the teaching and learning experiences, not hinder them. For example, just because you can use newsfeeds (RSS; see Chapter 14) with Moodle, don't feel you need to integrate newsfeeds because other instructors are using them ...