Phased Moodle training

If you have been following this blog, then you will have read that last year marked the start of a new rollout strategy for our Moodle vle to staff at the college. While there has always been a steady though often less than regular stream of staff attending my training sessions, the strategy this time around has been more of a drip feed approach rather than the former one of empowerment. In past years the training course has been delivered over a three-hour session that covers a whole raft of exercises accompanied by a substantial user guide. Looking at the resource take-up however proved that in the main, teachers while being prepared to utilise the system for assignment hand-ins and uploading of content for distribution, and in so doing removing much of the need for printing, little use has been made of facilities such a forums, glossaries, quizzes etc. The core of our new phased approach, has been to offer in the first instance a shorter training session covering those more popular practices, with other more ambitious uses becoming the domain of later phases. Of course we shall always need to retain an introductory course for new staff, but this will now be running in parallel with our phase 2 course.

The new course includes some features such as forums, chat and glossaries that have been removed from the introductory session, but includes new training on the setting up and use of blogs and RSS feeds. My first phase 2 training session is due to start this next coming week and it will be interesting to see if resource utilisation in the specific areas finally starts to lift off. Please stay in touch for updates on this one.