Friendly moodle - signposts

In my attempts to make moodle more friendly, particularly for foreign students I have been thinking a lot about sign posting. Not in the traditional sense of arrows which point one way or the other but more about providing a platform that is easy for students to navigate by using links and icons.

To an extent I think I had some success in this area with the LTC moodle and the beautifully designed icons which were both visually striking and containing relevant information. In my IELTS course I am slightly restricted by the confines of the course layout so there is no possibility for big icons as such.

What I started with was a set of bullet points directing students to activities which they should complete before starting on their course. 

It is clear that this set of instructions was lacking in some way when a student asked why there was no practice test to ascertain level built into the course.

What I did to improve this situation was to rewrite the section into as set of points each of which including a link which takes students straight to the item they need to read or complete. This has the effect of removing at least one stage of the process and giving students a more straightforward link to the information you need them to have.

Blogs

This may come under format or it may be a question of assessment but I am going to attempt, through this course, to use the moodle forum function as a course blog. I have throughout the course encouraged students to upload specific information as well as general comments to the course blog. As it stands at the moment each skills section has a blog dedicated to it so as to limit confusion. It remains to be seen how well this will work in practice. In my head it is a great way of incorporating peer assessment and student communication in an on-line environment but I may just be being overly idealistic in my approach to virtual learning. The proof I suppose will be in the pudding. Fingers crossed that students share my ideals and we will have an ongoing, interactive course blog full of useful information, without the need for rose tinted spectacles.

Assessment

I am now at the stage of uploading the material as it is to the moodle platform. The challenge now is how to approach assessment. There are the obvious assessment such as submission of writing assignments and answers to reading and listening comprehensions but of course the speaking section is going to cause problems. I have suggested that students record themselves completing tasks and send ,mp3 files to the course tutor. There may be issues here if students do not have the needed software. Of course there is always skype and I am sure this will be a valuable way of communicating with students. Method of submission is an issue as well. Moodle offers assignment pages which allow students to upload documents and then provides a space for teachers to give feedback. Perhaps my reluctance here is something to do with the fact that, as a student, I never used this feature but preferred to email the tutor directly. Perhaps there is little difference in the too as long as appropriate records are kept. Or perhaps as a teacher I will learn why the submissions feature is important and feel obliged to email my tutors and beg forgiveness for my belligerence. One of my concerns regarding attaching an assignment to every unit is the worry that I will create a scroll of death (see LTC moodle) which will be hard for students to navigate. My second concern, or problem, is one of clear instructions and how to direct students from the .pdf document where the assignment is given to them to the relevant page in moodle for submission. I suspect that this is merely semantics and will be worked out fairly easily in the process of course compilation. Although method of instructions generally is an important point to consider as, mentioned above, students may be covering a wide range of abilities so instructions need to be kept to a level of the lowest students.

The Format

There are four topics, listening, academic reading, academic writing and speaking. In each topic there are units which correspond to the task types that will be presented during the exam. There is also an overview of each paper outlining timing, marking and what types of questions you are likely to face in that section as well as some general information for the paper. Each task unit is also started with basic information about the questions and what the examiners are looking for. This is then followed by tips and suggestion for approaching the task practice material and vocabulary and language which might be useful for the task. I have also, based on suggestions from colleagues, tried to give each type of information/practice a colour code. For example, sample questions are in yellow, tasks which need to be completed in blue, grammar point in green.
I am yet to decide if this format will stay, student opinion will ultimately be the deciding factor, but that is how it stands at this moment.

The greatest problem I have had with formatting is working remotely and is a problem I also had as a students. There are times when feedback is so much more useful when you can engage in active discussion with colleagues and peers. I will get around this by spending a day in Milton Keynes with colleagues however students on the course may not have this luxury and it is a point that needs to be carefully considered when laying out the course.

IELTS

The task

To create an IELTS exam course to be presented through moodle and 'taught' or supported through the same means. I am creating this course for MKLC the same on-line school I studied at for my DTLLS.

The Course

I have spent several months collecting web resources and using text books, namely 'IELTS Graduation' Mark Allen, Debra Powell and Dickie Dolby (Macmillan) and 'Improve your IELTS reading skills' Sam McCarter and Norman Whitby (Macmillan). Web resources that are particularly worth mentioning are The British Council IELTS , Cambridge ESOL IELTS, Dominic Cole's IELTS blog and IpassIELTS. These sites and books (amongst others) have provided me with a lot of ideas and most importantly practice material to base a course around. The course itself is based around giving students the skills to approach the different types of questions that may be asked. The rationale behind this approach being that students could be from anywhere between level 4 and level 9 but exam technician is a ubiquitous skill that is required at all levels. Within each course there are suggestions for grammar and vocabulary and where possible I have tried to provide a range of levels but it is also stated in the course preview that the course tutor (hopefully me) will be on hand to suggest extra materials for practice based on individual student needs. I have also tried to find as much exam style practice as possible from the internet which of course was easier for some skills than others. The major hurdle was always going to be how to provide speaking practice through an on-line portal but I will come to that later.