How to enhance your Moodle courses.
Now unless you don’t like your learners, nobody aims to make boring courses. Lack of time and competing priorities makes it hard for you to give your courses the attention you would like. Good news, there are some very simple steps you can take to enhance your Moodle courses. Ask yourself these questions to level up your courses.
Are your learners viewing or doing?
Learning is improved when the learner is doing rather than merely passively viewing content. Consider what you want the learner to be able to do or understand and help them find ways to do this.
Could you create an activity rather than merely adding a resource? The truth is it is quicker for us to simply add a resource rather than a build an activity, but activities allow learners to explore and be challenged in a safe space. Even the simplest of activities will keep a learner more accountable than merely viewing.
Is your content interactive?
Moodle has an interactive content authoring tool baked in! This tool is called H5P and it is a great way to add interaction and activities throughout your Moodle course. Allow learners to explore and master concepts without adding grading to your workload.
You can make books, text, images and videos interactive. H5P can be added as a separate activity or embed it anywhere you see the text editor to add interaction anywhere you like.
Can learners snack on your courses?
Learners want to easily find what they need when they need it. Breaking content into bite sized smaller pieces helps learners make progress and easily learn ‘just in time’ to meet their needs.
Smaller pieces helps reduce learners feeling overwhelmed and challenges you to ensure your course only contains what learners actually need. Remove the ‘nice to know’ and break larger items into bite sized pieces. Less is more!
Are learners on track?
A really simple way to improve engagement is to help learners feel they are making progress. Learners are motivated by seeing items marked off as complete. Make it easy for learners to see progress and to know what to do next.
Moodle has some really simple ways to help with this. Explore how well you have used activity completion on each activity and resource. You could also set up restrictions on sections or content to release items as they progress. Ensure you have set up course completion requirements so Moodle and your learners know what they must complete.
Are your learners excited?
Creating excitement can be as simple as creating a journey to be immersed in rather than merely a repository of content. You could even use restrictions to include hidden items to be discovered throughout your course which will encourage exploration.
You could add storytelling and use more personable language. Remember to bring personality to your course. You could also add communication and collaboration opportunities to your course. These techniques can help to create a sense of FOMO.
Now to get Moodling…
Now you probably agree with most of the ideas you just explored, but will you implement them? We can get overwhelmed very quickly and easily these days with so much going on. We want to make better courses but struggle with time.
Remember you don’t have to reinvent or completely overhaul your courses. Better learning experience design is about progress not perfection. Every little improvement you make moves you closer to where you want your courses to be.
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