Moodle 2.0 Training

Julian Ridden

http://training.moodle.com.au/20/

Demo Tour

Profile page has:

• Calendar so students can see all due dates

the little three bar grey symbol on top right of each gadget will "move this to the dock"... very cool

Survey tool
Collates feedback and creates graphs

Questions:

Can students be automatically enrolled in course, or do teachers have to enrol individual students??
Can I embed a google map?
Can I embed other web apps?

Things I don't like:

• page editors default to double spacing... very annoying
• "Moodle" has decided that I must have certain features, like page descritpions, but then it gives the option to not display the description... 
• When adding and removing content files, I have to save the whole page in order for that to take effect!
• When I'm in my course, why can't I click on the "bread crumb" to go back to my list of courses?
• When trying to add a gadget, the search box doesn't stay at the top and you can't modify your search without starting the search again
• Takes about 3 times as long to embed a YouTube vid.  
• I can't seem to format the layout of my text on a page.  It centers stuff when I think it looks dumb to be centered.
• I really really hate the double spacing!!!
• I would really like to be able to move my navigation blocks around, but no
• It is really not easy to see how to add stuff and edit it.  E.g. how do you add a page in the "Wiki" function????
• there seems to be strange places for things
• Wiki pages don't connect!!  Therefore, it's not a wiki
• And pages in wikis can't be deleted
• I don't like having to scroll back up to the top of the page to turn on editing.  The top menu stuff should freeze in place so it can be used further down without scrolling.
• All menus and set up pages seem overly confusing - too many boxes that aren't necessarily labeled logically
• It seems to be a kingdom of control, rather than allowing students to gain knowledge and understanding logically and in a modern context (We must put a time frame on quizzes so students don't go out to net to find answers) If it is formal assessment where it is not open book, is it good practice for them to be completing it online?  How can we maintain good assessment practices?  Surely formative assessment or general classroom learning can be flexible enough to allow open book use of net.
• This isn't built for efficient use of teacher preparation time.

I feel like I need to acknowledge some positives.

Some cool tools, like wikis (although these don't work), surveys could be really cool - esp. as data gathering, quizzes/

However, these seem like they would take ages to set up. 

Big Brother functionality seems good - seeing who is doing what, how long it is taking them, how many times they are adapting their answers...  However, how much of my time will be taken up with taking advantage of these tools?  Do I have time to read and check all this analysis???
Or- is it just "Big Brother" for the sake of it?

Undecided.

julian@moodle.com.au