Scribbles – Moodle vs Blackboard Wk 5

Moodle vs. Blackboard – These seem to be the “big” two LMS out there at the moment. I’ve used each of these in courses at UNT and there are things that I do like and things that I don’t like about each. One small thing that I like about Moodle, as a student, is that a person’s picture can be added to his profile. Even in the digital world in which I study, I like having a face to put with a name. The small (or sometimes not so small) thing that I like about Blackboard is that as a student I can edit my posts anytime (if the instructor chooses to allow that) and in Moodle there is only a very small window of time in which edits are allowed.  Other than these things, once I’m in either Moodle or Blackboard as a student I generally adjust to the environment and don’t think much about it. The thing that I like least as a student is having one class housed in Moodle and another class housed in Blackboard in the same semester. This requires much more work to keep up with the separate classes because they can’t both be seen together.

The biggest difference in Blackboard and Moodle, besides the cost, is on the Instructor side of the system. I was able to go into Blackboard and build a quiz or activity without having any manuals to look at. The interface was user-friendly and self-explanatory enough that I could follow the instructions and get the tasks done. However, when I attempted to make a short quiz in Moodle, I couldn’t find any instructions for how to begin a new quiz on the page itself. After many failed attempts I finally realized that the “Google Docs for this page” link that was sitting very unobtrusively at the bottom of the page is what I needed to click on to find detailed instructions!

Instead of a folder system with tabs Moodle has a drop down dialogue box that allows you to choose your role: Teacher, Non-editing Teacher and Student. However, this dialog is placed in the upper right corner and I had to look several times in order to find it. For me, the folder tabs in Blackboard are easier to understand. These sections are separate but the view stays the same. You can select “Build” to add content to pages, “Teacher” to view entries and grade then the “Student” to go through the course materials yourself as a student would – right down to taking tests and viewing the feedback and score.

In the days and weeks to come my goal is to get familiar enough with both systems to get at least an initial course outline up and running. I am interested in what the learning curve is for both systems – both to use the “basics” and to learn the “bells and whistles.”  I’m also interested in how explainable the systems are; in other words, if it was my job to teach a group of instructors how to get their courses online, how would I do that in each system. As a student, I’ve seen many of the features of both systems but I don’t really have a feel for what it took to get those features up and running. Especially for “on the fly” instructional design it would be important not to have delivery hindered by technical difficulties.

Scribbles – Week 4

When designing online curriculum the “technology as multiple” idea really starts to become evident. As a medium, we want technology to be invisible as Soloway mentioned when interviewed by Robert Scoble. We want the technology to be invisible as a clock is invisible when we look at it to tell time; we see the time, we don’t see the clock.

Technology is a space because we use it to organize our thoughts, files, resources, music, videos and anything else that has a digital format.  It is comprised of an infinite number of interconnected rooms that we can use as we see fit. There are now sites that allow us to store our pictures and videos of our family vacations, sites that act as an online file cabinet for our documents, presentations and any other information that we might have need to have access to from any computer. This allows us to stop worrying about whether we have enough space on our flash disks or whether we even remembered to put it in our bag before we left the house or office.

Technology is a resource in that it connects us to worlds of information that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise.  We can read articles and books that we could never actually touch and we can have rich conversations with people that we never actually see or hear.  Chat rooms have developed so that people with almost any interest can get together to exchange ideas and information. Journals are published online and allow us access to scholarly articles that we would never have seen in the past.

In a similar way, technology is a tool that gives us computing, word processing, and information storage and retrieval systems with the click or two of a mouse that would have taken us hours or days to compute or organize in the past. A spreadsheet can be made and organized or reorganized to see the data from any point of emphasis that we choose. Databases are built that hold the answers to questions that we may not have yet thought to ask.

Reading this chapter of the text made me start thinking seriously about what it would take to design an online environment for TYC students to use. In the 2008 version of the text Terry states that Athabasca University went with Moodle as its LMS system wide. What would it take to convince the folks at IRD in Austin that Moodle could be put on our server without causing the entire system to implode? Would the administrators and other teachers “buy into” the idea of an online curriculum and would the teachers be willing to help in the development of these courses?

Davis states, “Any credible educational endeavor is dynamic in nature, responding to new knowledge, understandings, and approaches to the disciplines, to new employment market needs, to changing student demographics, and so on.” However, in my experience, public schools are either quite slow to change or they follow some education guru without really understanding the ramifications of the changes.

A Day in My Online Life

My day usually begins about 5:30 AM. I get up, pour myself a cup of coffee and log into Blackboard. I check to see if I have any mail or if anyone has posted anything since the last time I checked. Then I either read articles, post to the discussion boards or work on assignments until about 6:15. I teach from 7:30 to 10:45 and then we break for lunch. After walking or using the eliptical trainers in the gym I log back into Blackboard and work on school work until the students come back from lunch. I often stay logged into Blackboard most of the day just so I can check the discussion board or download an article to print as I have a moment between questions from students.

I try to work on school work for a while each evening but my biggest block of uninterrupted time to work is usually on Sunday. I reserve Sunday afternoon and evening for school work because that’s when I’m the most rested and have the fewest demands on my time.

Taking online classes requires a huge amount of time and discipline. I try to stay caught up or even ahead in my classes just in case an emergency arises with one of my kids or with my dad. I don’t think that I would have handled this environment as well when I was 18 as I do now.

If I Were to Give a Speech…Part 2

Here is the Power Point presentation that I developed for the speech that I’ve been asked to give about the current trends, oportunities and challenges of online education. Empowering the Online Learner

If I were to give a speech…Part 1

The first document is a map of how the parts of online curriculum relate to each other from the perspective of the student. The student has one-way communication with the curriculum but two-way commucation with other students, the instructor and other sources of information and input on the Web.  elearning concept map