Now that we’ve taken a look at all the tools available in Moodle, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. Moodle has a lot of nifty capabilities, but they are only useful if they are applied in the service of effective course design.
If you are a professor in higher education, you are an expert in your field. You know more about your discipline than 99 percent of the rest of humanity. Universities do a great job helping people become domain experts and researchers. They do a poor job of teaching those experts how to teach. Unfortunately, the very process of becoming an expert makes it more difficult to teach novices. Cognitive research has shown that as people become more expert, they lose the ability to explain why and how they do certain basic tasks. The higher the level of expertise, the less conscious access you tend to have to the fundamentals of what you do. To achieve expertise, you need to develop a level of automatic performance for basic skills so you can concentrate your mental resources on the more difficult tasks.
Much of our preparation of teachers assumes teaching comes naturally. Since we’ve all been to school, we must know how to teach. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Creating effective learning environments requires training and careful preparation.
In this chapter, we hope to give you some ideas and background from which you can develop your courses. We’ll spend some time talking about learning environments in general, then we’ll talk about how to apply everything you’ve learned so far to your courses. We’ll also provide some design patterns for different types of courses that research and experience have shown to be successful.
Since we’re developing an instructional environment, it would be a good idea to have a definition of what we’re hoping to develop. What makes a web-based learning environment different from a web site? How is a web learning environment different from Amazon or Wikipedia?
The answer is: learning goals and feedback.
Learning environments have very specific goals for students. Most other web environments are there for users to achieve their own goals. They provide information, a way to buy things, or a way to connect with other people. People come to these environments of their own volition and can participate at whatever level they choose.
Learning environments are unique because they provide goals for students to achieve, goals they are currently unable to meet on their own. Your course objectives define a set of goals for students, goals they would not normally set for themselves. These goals define how students will interact with the material, other students, and you.
For example, if you are teaching a large survey course, the course goal will be to introduce the main concepts of the field to your students. In an advanced theory course, you will want students to demonstrate the ability to reason critically about advanced topics, and possibly synthesize their own ideas. These goals should be just beyond what your students can achieve right now. They may not even know what goals to set for themselves, so you need to at least suggest goals and performance levels for them.
The second defining feature of learning environments is feedback. Feedback is critical for students to monitor their progress as they pursue the course goals. Goal-oriented feedback is one of the critical defining aspects of a learning environment. If a student doesn’t receive feedback, he has no way of knowing if he is closer to achieving the goals of the class or not. Other types of information environments can’t provide feedback to their users because the users, not the environment, define their own goals. The only exception is an online game, which defines external goals and measures the player’s progress toward them.
Feedback in a learning environment can take many forms. Tests and quizzes are frequently used tools for measuring student progress. They can provide feedback to students in the form of right and wrong answers or a percentage score. Homework can also provide feedback to students about their understanding of the materials. Less formal feedback might include interaction with students in class, conversations with experts, or applying new knowledge in a work setting. The key is to structure the feedback in useful ways so students can measure themselves against the course goals.
These two features make learning environments unique. Moodle provides you with tools to implement these ideas in unique ways. Moodle’s educational philosophy guides how those tools are designed and can influence how you structure your learning environment.