Monday, August 29, 2011

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.

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