I’ve been participating in a number of workshops on Moodle lately, in conjunction with our Web Services team. These have been about giving staff a grounding in the use of the new VLE and it’s been interesting to see how the same plan has led to remarkably diverse workshops with the different groups. From time to time, variations of the same question, “What is this for?”, have arisen; I think this is a fundamentally good and a fundamentally important question for everyone building a course to ask, particularly if they are working with a campus-based cohort.
The answer is not necessarily immediately apparent, and I don’t think there’s an answer outside of the context of the individual course. It might be better to recast the question as “how can this help the students?” to help get a route into an answer. In many cases, the use of the VLE is not going to sit comfortably within a group’s face-to-face (usually face-to-many-faces) contact time (for this post, I’m going to assume we’re thinking about a campus-based course rather than a distance one), so the course team are likely to be looking primarily outside the traditional contact time, into the students’ overall course experience: their individual study time, semi-formal collaboration (group study, chatting with course peers) and interactions with other parts of the University (such as library, guidance and careers teams). The uses could be aimed at helping people manage the course, or could be aimed at stimulating learning in their own right (the two main functions of a VLE I’ve discussed elsewhere).
The course team may want the learners to carry out activities between face-to-face sessions: either activities that
- extend the previous session
- prepare for the following session
- act as a bridge between last and next face-to-face session
- possibly (but probably unlikely) are completely separate from the face-to-face sessions and constitute a separate stream of work
All of these are going to hinge on the course team having some kind of participation, from simply assessing at one end of the spectrum to active collaboration with students at the other. Essentially, if you’re not involved, the students will get the message that the activity doesn’t carry that much weight and will most likely choose to prioritise their time and efforts into something else. Of course this raises the issue of how the time a team put into these activities (I mean their involvement during them, not the time to set them up) gets credited – which is a whole new discussion, but hopefully one our Schools have gone some way with.
The second broad area in which VLE use might benefit students is by providing extended contact, both with each other and the course team (or, for that matter, as a doorway into contact with groups outside the course cohort). The VLE is never going to replace in-person contact and discussion, nor should it. But it can add something extra, with the same caveats around course team involvement and the recognition of this mentioned above. Wherever the course team are involved (and especially given the implied 24-7 availability), it will really help to give students a clear idea of when, how often and for how long they can expect to find staff online.
Getting more squarely into the management of the course is the whole area of online submission of work for assessment (of whatever kind). Then, at a basic level, the commonest benefit offered to students is the ability to access either core course or specific subject/topic/supporting materials wherever they have internet access, removing the office hours limitations of sourcing them from someone in person. We know, from student feedback, that this is something they value, so shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s important, though, to make sure such materials are not just available but also easy to find and identify. Another benefit, assuming these resources are static documents, is that their provision should need no ongoing work from the course team once they have been made available, until they are revised.
I’ve summarised these in the following diagram (you’re welcome to download and use this, if it’s helpful)
I suppose my main suggestion is that teams try to visualise how students might really use the VLE to bring an authentic benefit within the context of their whole experience of the course. The challenge then is to design online activities and lay out the course area in a way that makes these uses as intuitive and straightforward as possible… but that’s for another post.