Source: http://sterlingseas.com/images/wizards.jpg

Ask a group of people to guess what “Moodle” is and the answers are varied: “a puzzle,” “a new soup,” “a gathering of wizards.” In fact, Moodle is a software package designed to help educators create high-quality online courses quickly and easily.
Source: Royal Roads University

As I eagerly await my reviewer’s copy of Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development, I’ve been following several conversations about course development. Moodle is clearly a well-respected tool, as this Top 100 Tools: Moodle page points out.

Many are aware of Moodle Commons, which is pointed to as a central place to share…unfortunately, there’s not much there that catches my eye for use with my population. Learning ISD is another place sharing Moodle courses online.

And, though I have the best of intentions in developing content, I find my days filled with organizing and managing projects…my small team of folks also is stuck keeping their heads above water. To pick up something, you have to let something go sometimes. I suppose if I gave up blogging and did course development in the short time I have for blogging, something might develop.

One of the efforts is in Texas, which retired educator Ken Task is spear-heading. A short time ago, he shared this update with Texas educators, but others may have missed it since it was done via an email list. Simply because Ken is appealing to Texans to craft Moodle courses to share, it doesn’t mean that an international audience can’t participate:

Recently uploaded by Mike Gras of WhiteOak, a Moodle course template (shell course) with sections containing content examples and suggestions.

Under construction … a “Mega” Moodle Template … another approach to a course template which contains hidden sections for the new teacher to use/discard.

Sections include: Open Source Software for Producing Moodle Content (links), Glossaries (K-2, 3-5, Tech Apps 6-8, NETS-S and NETS-T), links to all the
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills by Chapter and Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills by Grade Level (Elementary), and a “Techie” Section with links for a user to acquire the typical software they might need in interacting with most online courses today (Adobe Acrobat, Flash, Apple QuickTime).

Working on combining some of Mike’s sections into the Mega Moodle Template.

If you are already a Coloodle member, check it out! If you are NOT a Coloodle member, why not? Come join the collaboration and show/demonstrate your 21st skill!

http://sos.tcea.org/coloodle/

Another place conversations are taking place include the Moodle Courses at the K-12 Open Source Community Ning. Some of the points being raised there include:

• Beth Still shares: I am a social studies teacher in western Nebraska. I teach both face to face and online. The online component of our program was added this year. We have developed all of our courses from the ground up because we could not find anything out there that was ready to go that we thought fit our needs.

  If you would like to learn more about our school click here to read a blog post I wrote a few months ago. Please feel free to take a look at the classes that are still being developed which are housed on our test server.

  I learned a lot after teaching online for one semester and I have gone back and made some major changes in layout for my second semester classes. You can find the two classes I am currently working on here. They are World History: Semester 2 and US History:Semester 2. The enrolment key for both classes is history. Please remember these classes are works in progress and still need quite a bit of work before they can be considered finished. Unfortunately, the World History class is textbook based. My US History class is based on the US History II book from Hippocampus.org.

• Jim Walker shares: Collecting sharable Moodle content is a needed project. The curriculum may belong to the school and many teachers don’t even know how to share it even if they wanted to. I have a new position as technology coordinator and a few teachers have express interest in Moodle. I have a website and an introduction to Moodle at www.learning2oh.com/moodle. login as guest and go to the Using Moodle course.
• Jeff Watkins: Moodle Exchange on Moodle.org. http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=15

Others are also finding ways to extend the conversation. Andrea (Learnscape.org) points out:

I am most excited about the prospect of teachers sharing curriculum. I am a huge fan of the whole creative commons philosophy. It makes so much sense for us to work together. This video is a great overview of the philosophy. We should be able to use this concept to collaborate and develop online curriculum. MIT is sharing a lot of their courses online. But the Open University has gone one step further and puts the units in Moodle online. You can download these and bring these into your own Moodle. I can see integrating some of the introductory units into my class an tweeking them. Of course I’ll share….

The video Andrea points to about Creative Commons is fun to watch. Other folks are individually publishing their Moodle courses online, such as Game Maker Online. The author (Darren Smith) describes it in this way:

I have put up a Moodle course that takes students through creating their own computer games using the excellent (and free) Game Maker program. This Game Maker course was put together by Darren Smith. Most of the content comes from the Game Maker website and it has just been packaged into a Moodle course. The course and original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Please see the Game Maker website for their content license.

How are you using Moodle and are you sharing it?

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