Start Here Button

    Recently, I took courses (online, of course) to become a Quality Matters peer reviewer.  (More about that in another post).  One of my classmates there, Mary Wells, talked about having a Start Here Button, a place for students to go for all those beginning-of-course matters – what to do when things go wrong, some information about your teacher, how to navigate the course, and so on.

    I loved the idea and am incorporating it into my courses for next year.  On my sample Moodle course (no student information on it), you can see what this looks like, and one way it can be set up in Moodle.  I put it in its own HTML block at the top, so students will always see it first.  http://tinyurl.com/3wzynwp

    The links in the Start Here block go to documents I stuck in the very last topic for the course.  Thanks to Moodle’s “scroll of death” (= it seems to take forever to get to the bottom), students are unlikely to go down there.  Mary Cooch, Moodle blogger extraordinaire, has come up with a more elegant solution here  http://www.moodleblog.net/?p=24 

    If you don’t already subscribe to Mary’s blog, you should; she is a fount of Moodle wisdom.  http://www.moodleblog.net

Student survey helps me improve

I surveyed my students at year-end and found:  For every student who liked something, there was another who didn’t.  Seems like this always happens because my students are individuals.  Some love school, some don’t.  Some love English, some don’t.  Some enjoy the work involved in learning, some don’t.

There were a sizable number who liked the Moodle (59%) and a smaller number who were frustrated by it (33%).  The frustrations came from problems logging in (forgot userid or forgot password), so I’ve added a big Help button to the login page that students can access even if they can’t login.  I also plan to create Jing videos showing some basic skills – navigation, adding images, posting to discussions.  Even though I demonstrate these skills F2F, students need access to this information when I’m not around to ask. 

Summer revamp

Now that summer is almost here, I’m thinking about how I’ll revamp my Moodle courses to make them more effective. Recently, I took classes to became a Quality Matters peer reviewer for K12, so naturally all the things missing from my courses have become glaringly apparent. I’ve always relied on being able to talk to my students, which overcomes a lot of online difficulties.

But when kids can’t talk to me – during snow days, at night, on weekends – that doesn’t work.

So this summer I plan to make Jing videos explaining how to do everything I can think of. Also, beef up my FAQs, and similar help documents. And add a Start Here button, with all the introductory information in one place.

And think about how to use the wiki this year, and… This is how we geeks play. ;-p