Moodle: A fantastic tool for informal learning - and not just “e-learning”
Last week I hosted a webinar called “Come Moodle with Us: Straight Talk on Moodle as an LMS Solution.” Along with two of my colleagues at BLP, we showed attendees OUR Moodle site - and attempted to illustrate many of the cool features Moodle provides and how Moodle facilitates informal learning and not just functions as a place to house and track e-learning. If you’d like a copy of our session slides - or a link to our Moodle site, please feel free to sownload my notes: moodle_08272009_sessionnotes.
A few “highlights” that I want to share:
1) Moodle is about creating a learning community. Those who want to use it just to track learning are missing its point. In our case, it connects all the employees in our organization to each other. Our employees can now easily locate other resources inside the organization who can help them with a variety of things such as instructional design, Flash development, game design, simulations, etc.
2) Moodle CAN host e-learning courses….but it can do so much more. Example: I created a “course” in Moodle called Adobe Max. Six of our employees are going to the Adobe Max conference in October; by creating a course using the “social” format in Moodle, I am setting up a way for them to share learning on specific topics (i.e. After Effects, Acrobat, CS4, etc). Also - I can give many, many people the ability to become course creators. If you have something you want to teach someone else, Moodle can let you set up a course and do it!
3) Moodle can provide a company-wide calendar of learning events that everyone can see. This is a simple feature…and yet one we didn’t have before.
4) Moodle can make it easy for me to post links to great blogs - and to get everyone in our organization blogging. Even better, I can create assignments within courses to blog on specific topics (such as learning to work in a virtual environment.) The blogger can create tags that make it very easy for other employees to find posts on topics of interest (such as working in a virtual environment).
5) Moodle makes it super-easy to share rich media. Links to our YouTube channel are embedded on our company’s front page. I can share any video from YouTube…or other video-sharing sites. I could also share photos from Flicker, etc.
6) I can help people acquire our BLP lingo by setting up a glossary. Our glossary lets people rate the entries for their value. Employees can also add to or edit glossary entries. Even better, the posts show the author’s picture and provide a link to the author so people can get in touch with the author if they’d like.
Moodle is going to be a major help to us in developing employees and fostering informal learning. I think many organizations could find it to be an answer to their quest for facilitating learning throughout their organizaton. My goal is to help people “discover” Moodle.
Tags: e-learning, informal learning, Moodle
November 6th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
hey, I can’t find your contact information but your layout looked rearranged on internet explorer and firefox. Anyways, i just suscribd to your rss.