We're excited to participate in September's Moodle MOOC, starting on September 1st - this Sunday.
The MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, will give Moodle an opportunity to showcase its potential in a larger, scalable implementation. By designing this class for teachers who have little or no experience with eLearning, Moddle has really created the perfect way to deliver an introduction to the community and Moodle itself. If you're interested in taking this course, plan to commit 2-3 hours per week for four weeks. We've posted the outline below.
The course design will happen on Moodle version 2.5, so even if you have experience in Moodle, this course could give you a great introduction into the new environment. We'll be learning the following topics along with thousands of other future Moodlers. Below is a list of what you expect to learn:
- How to set up a new course
- Adding content from a variety of sources
- Creating and facilitating interesting activities from a variety of sources
- Monitoring and assessing students via the gradebook and other tools
Quote from Martin Dougiamas, Moodle founder:
"Moodle has a lot of features, and it can take quite a long time to learn them all. As an open-source learning platform, it’s benefited from the experimentation and feedback of thousands of online educators over the past 12 years, and evolved a lot of tools that are completely unique. It’s rarely useful to learn all the capabilities in a vacuum, though - the best way to learn them is to be teaching a real course, to be open to new ideas for what you want to do and then look for solutions to each problem. Being part of an ongoing support community is ideal for this sort of professional development: our community is full of great teachers with great ideas."
Even though we have a serious passion for eLearning and we're really excited about all the potential new Moodlers, the absolute best aspect to the MOOC has got to be the Moodle community aspect of this event. Below is just one snapshot of almost 2000 threads in the Moodle MOOC forums, and it truly illustrates the global reach of the Moodle brand.
You can register for the course here. We hope to see you there. Moodle On!
