Nothing Personal - Why Moodle didn't work out for our homeschool

I really liked Moodle. It was highly organized and powerful; but it just wasn't for us. I found my son still wanting a paper planner. He was going into Moodle and printing out his calendar daily which seemed like a complete waste. Since most of our assignments were offline (with the exception of the Science Wiki that we collaborated on in Moodle), he just would not get in the groove of going to Moodle to check his assignments.

What I can see from our Moodle experiment is a sense of the real challenges of classroom management. As homeschoolers who live and work with our students 24/7, I think we often poo-poo the amount of work it really takes to be a teacher in this age. The amount of work that went into designing the course, making the assignments, setting up the quizzes, then recording all the grades was overwhelming with just one student - I really couldn't imagine 25 students of varying abilities all needing this level of attention. I see now why Moodle is used heavily at the university and high school levels, but rarely earlier - to design and maintain 6 courses yourself in the online environment is nearly impossible.

I am glad I did the Moodle thing for a while. I enjoy learning new things and I can see uses for Moodle beyond the classroom - I can imagine offices using the powerful Moodle elements to set their Employment Handbooks and Continuing Education in an internal server. I plan to revisit Moodle, deploying in an external server, with some of my math tutor students; but, for now, this homeschool is going back to the paper planner in hopes of finding something simpler to administer for the single teacher/student.

Using Moodle in the Homeschool Environment Part 1: Installing Moodle

The new school year is upon us and I am always trying some new trick to get organized and get my son working more independently. Recently, some of his homeschooled friends have switched to the online public charter school K12. While that environment is not for us, I do see some advantages in the child's ability to work at their own pace but still have obvious assignments and deadlines.

What Moodle can Provide:

1. A detailed schedule (even for the whole year)

2. Deliver online content (videos, webpages, worksheets) all in one place

3. Record the student's activity and progress.

4. Exposure to the system that most colleges use for their online content delivery.

What Moodle won't do:

1. Plan the classes for you. For most homeschoolers this amount of planning may feel labor-intensive unless you'll have more than one student in a class.

Step One will be to install Moodle on a computer connected to your home network. I installed on an older machine running WinXP Professional. I will likely migrate to a Ubuntu server later and I'll let you know how that goes when we get there.

1. Point your browser to http://moodle.org/.

2. Click the Downloads icon (lower right hand side).

3. Download the appropriate packages. In this case, Moodle for Windows.

4. Follow the standard download instructions.

5. Extract your packages someplace easy to remember (the Desktop or My Documents perhaps)

6. Within the extracted folder double-click the icon labeled "Start Moodle"

7. Follow the initial set-up instructions, usernames/password assignments etc.

8. Open your web browser and type http://localhost, again follow any set up instructions.

9. Now you have your Moodle Server. From the local machine you will be able to type "http://localhost", from remote computers it will be the IP address of that machine (in my case 10.181.46.102 - yours will be different).

10. Start customizing your experience. There are lots of links to the left - Appearance, Accounts, Courses - start experimenting and have fun.

I think that most of the controls are fairly easy to understand and inputting the course information is relatively simple; however, there is a lot of planning to be done. So, crack open your child's textbooks and think about how you want the school year to be divided. All of our courses have been assigned a weekly period so far, but I may change to "by lesson" for Math in particular.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 - The Student Experience.