Reflections on a Blackboard to Moodle Transition
Contributed by Veronica Pejril
This spring, I began using Moodle for delivering content to my students in Music 110, Introduction to Music Technology. At first glance, the new system seemed overwhelming; whereas Blackboard offered me a predefined, rather linear template for delivering content and managing online interaction with my students, Moodle presented me with new choices to make that I’d never had to make before. Many of these choices were cosmetic in nature, such as page layout and theme choice. It was easy at first to get bogged down in, and even annoyed by, the details of presentation, before I got down to business and concerned myself with the task of adding content.
I was pleasantly surprised that linking to audio and video content from within Moodle provided live media-players on my students’ screens without having to take the extra step of “serving” that content elsewhere, as I had to do the previous semester with Blackboard. This was particularly helpful for my class; I was able to quickly share my students’ creative music projects online so they could listen to, review and critique each other’s work, all from within Moodle.
Another tool I discovered was the RSS Feeds block, which I used to consolidate content from my class blog into the students’ Moodle page. In the end, my students had just one place to go for all their online course content and announcements. Blackboard didn’t offer a way to integrate that blogged content into the course management system.
By the end of the spring semester, my perception of Moodle changed quite a bit, and I started thinking of it as something of a Swiss army knife for learning management. When all the knife’s tools are folded out, it looks and feels unmanageable and overly complex; by hiding those tools I didn’t need for my own curricular goals, the tool became simple and quite useful for my teaching.
FITS has created a Moodle Resources and Documentation course for you to use as a reference.
http://moodle.depauw.edu/course/view.php?id=48
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