Moodle

For over a year now my dear host Christian has put up with my Moodle platform. You’ll remember, I ran a few courses on it and did something for the LMU and for the VHS, and I was intending to run a train-the-trainer session for MELTA. But being hacked has come as a shock and is just really the last straw in a process that has turned me off to Moodle.

The problem with my Moodle is, frankly, that my business clients will always get in touch with me using their preferred means, their messaging systems, not following some unique rules that a Moodle course sets up for them. Moodle is good for schools and universities that need to manage complicated distance learning setups, because teachers need to impose discipline to manage the large number of people and tasks involved. That’s why Open University and the Fachhochschule für angewandtes Management use it successfully. But in adult education as a platform for blended learning providing space for projects? I think using other applications, such as a proper wiki, is probably better.

It’s been kind of cool to be able to show my Moodle site to people. It used to frustrate me at teachers’ conferences, when techie teachers talked about what they were doing and how they were doing it, to notice that they knew how, theoretically, but they weren’t really applying it because there wasn’t much demand, or because, frankly, it didn’t work all that well and the content and didactics were slave to the technology. I’m a very practical person, and the only way to find out whether something is good is to work with it, intensively and extensively, with different types of users or learners.  Since I’m not afraid to make a fool of myself, I was able to show my Moodle stuff for what it really was.

Right now there is other work to be done, so I don’t know how the saga will continue. Maybe this is the final curtain for my Moodle. Christian has offered to have a second look. So maybe not. But as far as my interest in online learning is concerned, this is most definitely not, as the Germans say, das Ende vom Lied 🙂 !