Moodle Blended Course Design Book

Introduction

Bismarck Public School District is using Moodle to develop master courses collaboratively in subject-alike courses. The

E-Learning

What is E-Learning

What is Blended Learning?

A blended learning approach combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach. In the past, digital materials have served in a supplementary role, helping to support face to face instruction.

Models

5 types

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Why Blended

The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face to face and online instruction. Classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced interactive experiences. Meanwhile, the online portion of the course can provide students with multimedia-rich content at any time of day, anywhere the student has internet access, from school computer labs, the classroom netbooks, or the students’ mobile devices. This allows for an increase in scheduling flexibility for students.

Moodle

Moodle Chapter to explain why what and how

Moodle in 3 paragraphs

The heart of Moodle is courses that contain activities and resources. There are about 20 different types of activities available (forums, glossaries, wikis, assignments, quizzes, choices (polls), scorm players, databases etc) and each can be customised quite a lot. The main power of this activity-based model comes in combining the activities into sequences and groups, which can help you guide participants through learning paths. Thus, each activity can build on the outcomes of previous ones.

There are a number of other tools that make it easier to build communities of learners, including blogs, messaging, participant lists etc, as well useful tools like grading, reports, integration with other systems and so on.

For more about Moodle, see http://moodle.org, and particularly the main community “course” called Using Moodle. It's crowded and busy these days, but jump in and you'll soon find interesting stuff I'm sure. The developers and the users are deliberately forced to mix in the same forums. The other great place to start is our online documentation which is a community-developed wiki site.