Thursday, 31 January 2013

Moodle friendly: friendly moodle

In an earlier post I was pondering how to make classroom materials moodle friendly so that an IELTS course could be delivered through the platform as a distance course. I believe I have been largely successful in that task although time and students will be the judge of that. However a piece of feedback from one of the initial students to use the course was that the course was unsuitable because it was missing certain elements. Elements which I had put into the course because as the student quite rightly pointed out they are quite important for the study of IELTS. It can them be assumed that the problem is not the course content but moodle navigation. After some discussions with colleagues it seems the problem is the inverse to the initial one of making moodle friendly courses in as much as we need to make moodle courses friendly to the user.

I have not yet worked out how to do this but my first step has been to put a link with pictures to the teacher profiles so it is clear how to contact them with an additional skype button so students are made aware that it is, not only ok but, encouraged to use skype as a means of communication. To me this is just a cosmetic difference but may indeed make students feel more welcome on the site the larger task will be to make the site easily navigable for students whose native language is not English. Perhaps in this case the tab settings to reduce scroll of death are not helpful and should be removed to make way for visible (and larger) icons.

… to be continued

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