Amanda Hefner, a Moodle guru in San Antonio, has been converting PBS TeacherLine courses to Moodle format. The process has taken awhile (a few months) but as we near the end of the process, I’m amazed at the work Amanda has done. One of the questions that popped into my head was, “What additional modules did you add to Moodle and why are they relevant in these courses?“

Amanda responded and here are the modules she included in the courses…I’d never heard of them before and thought to share them here with her description:

• Course Menu block – Adds the folder navigation hierarchy on left of the course ~ big advantage on courses with a lot of topics and/or scrolling.
• The Learning Diary was not required, but I used it to combine the many Reflections into one ongoing diary ~ much more efficient and appealing to adults. There are so many individual activities in each section that the list appeared exhaustive. So that was a useful way to consolidate some, while the forums, which were consolidated by PBS, needed to be broken apart to accomplish their purpose. It’s a 3rd Party Mod not hosted on Moodle.org.
• Exabis ePortfolio is not currently in use in the courses, but we have really liked it on both Professional and Student Moodles as a repository for users’ to store top projects and more importantly, to allow file-sharing to classmates/teacher for review, collaboration or comments. I thought you may like to check it out for broader use across courses. It allows for collection of files, notes, hyperlinks, etc. and exports to SCORM. Items can be shared to all site users, only those in a common course, or individuals. (similar to eLGG artifact sharing, but within Moodle)

Incorporating these modules into any online class is going to be a challenge as I try to understand how they can be used. I hope that others using them will share why and how they are using them with the rest. Special thanks to Amanda for her hard work and explaining these modules!

var addthis_pub=”mguhlin”;

Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org

Be sure to visit the ShareMore! Wiki.