Topic outline

  • General

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    Course Overview

    This online course is part of the Course Makeover that will help you transform your online teaching into more interactive, captivating and interesting experience. I know most of you have had an experience in using Moodle basic features but have been wondering what else Moodle can do for you. It is my most sincere hope that we will together work through this course and make Moodle do more for us.

    This online course focuses on using advanced Moodle features for designing online activities. It is therefore intended for lecturers who have used Moodle basic features and are familiar with the platform. The course gives a quick overview of Moodle advanced tools/features and demonstrate some of the several tool features so you can appreciate how Moodle tools can transform your teaching experience.

    Purpose: The purpose of this course is to:

    • develop Knowledge and understanding of Moodle advanced tools helping participants identify and integrate tools for specific content and design learning accordingly
    • develop Cognitive skills that will help the participants to analyse and assess usability and affordances of the Moodle tools - influencing their choice, attitudes, values and interaction with such tools;
    • develop practical and professional skills to empower the participants with best practices and use of chosen tools to design, build , evaluate and test online activities;
    • Transferable skills that encourage application in different, real-life situations in participants' career as educators.

    On completion of the course, you should be able to:

    • Design and adapt short online activities using a whole range of Moodle advanced tools appropriately.
    • Demonstrate knowledge of Moodle features and their affordances for online learning

    Specific course outcomes will be given as we move from topic to topic. You are encouraged to contact your facilitators on the following address uchipunza@buse.ac.zw if you have any problems/queries regarding the course content and course activities. You can also post your questions on the discussion forums in this course.

    As we prepare for the course, please take the "Tell-it-Yourself" precourse activity.

  • Topic Overview

    The following series of activities give a quick overview of Moodle "Lesson" tool and demonstrates some of the several lesson features so you can appreciate how the lesson tool can transform your teaching experience. The "Building a Moodle Lesson" activities include:

    • A 1-hour Introductory Lecture (offered face-to-face, is recorded and made available online)
    • Online lessons (developed using the lesson tool)
    • A Group "Try-it-out exercise" (Using lesson tool and Wiki tool)
    • A "Best Practices forum".
    • A "Teaching with Technology Pros" forum.

    By the end of this topic you should be able to:

    1. articulate and appreciate affordances provided by the lesson tool and strategies for using it as an online teaching and learning tool;
    2. articulate appropriate group dynamics for productive online collaboration through developing a knowledge resource collaboratively;
    3. participate in a social networking environment to technically support peer participants (reading and responding to issues raised in forums, writing consisely and clearly);
    4. use wikis as information sharing and collaboration tools;
    5. make meanings and summarise online discussions and contributions;
    6. Design and adapt an online lesson/activity for use in own context

    Now let us get to the lesson:

  • COURSE ACTIVITIES:

    These are ongoing collaborative tasks that you have to complete by the end of the Course Makeover project.

    Group Task: You are grouped according to your disciplines and each group will do a separate task, e.g., group task: Physics and Group Task: FS. Each group member is to make contributions on their group activity. You are able to see what the other group is doing but you can only edit the content in your group wiki.

    Best Practices Forum: Here you are allowed to post articles, posters, links, photos, cartoons, quotable quotes, anything that illustrates best practices for online teaching and learning.

    Teaching with Technology Pros: This is a space to meet campus-wide and external experts in the teaching with technology field aimed at providing quick responses to queries, advice and more insights on a variety of related topics.

  • Topic 3