Creating an Engaging Moodle Site

As Covid has forced teaching online it seemed a great time to really update my module on data visualisation. This module has always suffered from bad feedback, predominantly because it challenges students across their whole skillset (these are Digital Media students) from coding to creativity to user experience, design and use of multimedia. It is a Level 5 module where the students don’t always engage well, perhaps because it is challenging, which plays out in the results with a very wide standard deviation.

Given my research focus on creating environments that engage and support students, I figured this was an ideal time to put some ideas into practice and see if I could create an online version that:

Had better-engaged students.

Brought the overall standard up (reducing standard deviation)

Improved the feedback for the module.

I am confident that with engagement then the other two elements will follow.

Developing the content

The process I went through was to take a hard look at the content and thin out some that really wasn’t critical to the module and the learning objectives. This is from when I was Course Leader for Digital Media and this was the only module where I taught all the DM students without any other courses so I kind of threw the kitchen sink at it in trying to cover everything I wanted them to be aware of!

Then I knew I needed to carefully scaffold the learning, and also ensure that the students were internalising it. This meant being very specific about the different strands of learning and breaking those down into core content and then content that was useful but not core, and was more difficult. This was clearly labeled stretch content. Further breaking down of this into bite-size chunks took 50-minute lectures down to 2 or 3 10 minute videos.

Conditional Release; A critical element for engagement was that a self-check exercise has to be completed to release the next video in a sequence. This is to check the base level comprehension of the learning material. These exercises were generally just 4-5 questions but would ensure that someone cannot passively work their way through the content. It also means it will be easy to track the progress of students. Completing these will also give a sense of progress to the students which will help support them and encourage their further engagement.

The content was also structured so that students could work their way through at their own pace for all the asynchronous content (although some was aligned to some synchronous sessions so there is a requirement for students to ensure they had covered what was required for that session).

The final element was spicing up the content (with a very loose association to positive psychology) by including inspirational and hopefully thought-provoking quotes that would appear as students were completing content. To get a sense of the student’s wellbeing I have used the Flourishing Scale survey at the start and end of the module.

Example of a typical moodle topic block in the module:

So checking off my own checklist from a previous post:

• Clarity and language – all content clearly signposted ad labelled
• Linking to relevant support – embedded links to furthger reosurces like linkedin learning.
• What other information/systems might be relevant to a student in the current context – link to woebot
• Adding real human touch by being able to chat synchronously online with someone if help is needed – there are synchronous sessions online each week.
• Maybe images of the people that are on the other end of the process – mugshot on moodle
• The colours and fonts used – used the standard template so some work could be done here.
• Simple, almost inconsequential ‘nudges’…like a background image. I thought about adding some images, but moodle is quite busy already and there is a lot of content and I didn’t want to detract from the focus on the learning materials.