Honestly I’ve found Moodle to be a very difficult platform to work from. It is certainly not as easy as I thought it would be and looks nothing like the SLN platform I’m used to from past online classes. I at first had a lot of trouble with the placement of the course documents, but the Jing demonstration helped me out a lot with that part and introduced me to a tool I need for my introduction module. I can only hope that I will be able to create the rest after overcoming these initial problems.
What I’ve began to do is simplify the structure of my course. I figured I’d have to do this so I was over ambitious at first on purpose so that I could cut the fat later. Although I believe I’m cutting more fat than I ever dreamed. For one thing I’m cutting the course in half so that it only encompasses half the material I originally planned. I’ve changed the blog from one that was to be content based to a reflection blog and I’ve also cut down the number of projects, so that my course could focus on the more important regents tasks of the course.
I believe there will be many more changes to my course. For one thing I’m re-thinking my original theme based history course to perhaps something more traditional linear (time-line based) course. This way I can chunk the content in a way that is not too spread out and make the course more practical for someone with a limited history, well in history.

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July 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
hey jarrod… great post. Thanks for sharing your reflections on moodle, and on your course development thus far. I am very interested in “seeing” what you are thinking about and being privy to your design process. Thanks.
Please be sure to review the blogging assignment instructions. You need to rate your posts, and there are some guiding questions each module that i want to be sure you get in there. Also, there are 2 blog posts due per module, one per week toward the end of each week…