Using Moodle

Chapter 15. Putting It All Together

Now that we’ve taken a look at all the tools available in Moodle, I want to take a step back and look at the big picture. Moodle has a lot of nifty capabilities, but they are only useful if they are applied in the service of effective course design.

If you are a professor in higher education, you are an expert in your field. You know more about your discipline than 99% of the rest of humanity. Universities do a great job helping people become domain experts and resarchers. They do a poor job of teaching those experts how to teach. The assumption is that teaching comes naturally, that since we’ve all been to school, we know how to teach. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Creating effective learning environments requires training and careful preparation.

In this chapter, I hope to give you some ideas and background from which you can develop your courses. We’ll spend a little while talking about learning environments in general, then we’ll talk about how to apply everything you’ve learned so far to your courses. I’ll provide some design patterns for different types of courses that research and experience have shown to be successful.

What Is a Learning Environment?

Since we’re developing an instructional environment, it would be a good idea to have a definition of what we’re hoping to develop. What makes a web-based learning environment different from a web site?

There are two important features of a learning environment that are different from other ...