For the past three months, I've been working with an open source course online management system called moodle. Moodle is free and has many features such as:
- Forums
- Content managing (resources)
- Quizzes with different kinds of questions
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Database activities
- Surveys
- Chat
- Glossaries
- Peer assessment
- Multi-language support (over 60 languages are supported for the interface
Moodle has gained in popularity amongst educators and the statistics have proven that with a user base of 18,204 registered sites with 7,270,260 users in 712,531 courses.
The course that I developed was an Introduction to Computer Science course. I used a textbook for the online course called Computer Literacy Basics by Thompson Course Technology. My time was spent mostly on content than it was learning how to use moodle.
Quite frankly, moodle was easy to use and the content took some time because I created the slide deck and video content to go along with the course and the evaluation tool after each lesson.
I created the movies with
Camtasia software by TechSmith. Camtasia allows you to record, edit and share high-quality screen video on the Web, CD-ROM and portable media players, including iPod. Here's an
example of one of the movies that I created. There were 3 modules that were created and a total of 29 lessons.
Module 1: Computing Fundamentals
Module 2: Key Applications
Module 3: Living Online
Even though this will be an online course, there will still be an instructor working with the students taking the course.
The chat will also be used by students so they can communicate with each other.
I had a few of my students review some of the lessons and they liked it so hopefully future students will like it as well. All in all, I liked working with moodle.