This week the Big Move talked to Richard Layden – Moodle Manager and strong advocate for innovative teaching and learning, he gave us some key insights into the Moodle platform and told us how, through adding Moodle to your teaching you can make learning more effective and enjoyable for your learners.
Richard set up the Bradford College Moodle in 2007 and has watched it grow and develop into a key component of the teaching, learning and assessment experience.
Richard explained first the roles he and his team (Tim and Gillie) played:
“It’s our role to look after the technical side of things so we make sure that the server’s up and running; we make sure its backed-up and all the other dry technical things. But then we also make sure it’s working as teachers and students want it to and that it looks pretty.”
“We also have a consultancy role where staff can come to us with ideas about what they want Moodle to do so we can implement and develop these ideas. We also provide training for staff”
Richard also made the point that Moodle is open source which means it is free to use and free to make changes to how we can develop it further -an important feature.
We then asked Richard what was the best thing about Moodle:
“In terms of the best thing for teachers I think it gives them a central place to put all their resources. Some teachers use Moodle to organise their scheme of work… they can actually structure the Moodle page to look like a scheme of work so this helps students know where they are.”
Once Richard got started his enthusiasm was obvious...
”Other great things – it allows us to put different forms of assessment and feedback in…there’s great opportunity to put formative feedback in there and formative assessment like quizzes – its only limited by what we can throw at it.”
Richard’s view that the Moodle portal is well developed is supported by this quote from our 2010 HE IQER review:
"The College's learning portal has had significant investment and development, hosting a wide variety of information and encouraging wider use, such as discussion forums, both within the student and staff subject groupings.”
Magical Moodle - perfect for all types of learning...