I have almost finished up my first Moodle site for one of the courses I am coordinating next year. I have to admit, despite hours of work, it doesn’t look like much when you go into it. Maybe I was expecting this to be somehow more flashy than the Blackboard sites I have worked on over the past few years.
What struck me as I was thinking about this site is that I have spent so much time thinking about different aspects and trying to balance the various requirements – you should teach history x way, you need to consider y when dealing with online courses, you have to take into account z for first year students etc – and yet none of this is really evident to any of the students. They simply see a few lines of words, a number of tasks (hopefully they see there is some relevance to these tasks), links to other bits and pieces. It really does remind me of a duck swimming on water – serene on the surface but working like mad under the water line. Maybe that is how good teaching should be – invisible, seamless – like good health and not noticed until it isn’t working as expected. Hopefully all the thinking time and reading and reflection that I have been doing over the years has contributed to more efficient and effective webbed feet.
Ah, now to swim onto the other course site….
