The Good
- Intuitive and more user friendly for all users - less clicks to get where you’re going
- Cleaner layout (provided it’s set up sensibly and concisely, avoiding the “scroll of death”)
- Students like it better than Blackboard
- The ability to change view
- Easier to use - even self-taught; picture icons are very helpful e.g. open/closed eye
- Cross browser support - doesn’t seem to cause as many issues as Blackboard
- More locally-available technical support
- Digitised readings on Moodle have worked well
- Moodle 2 file upload is much easier than 1.9
- good tool-set (activities) (more than just forums)
- Better than Blackboard
- chat-rooms (could be used for online office hours, library helpdesk, surgeries, etc)
- more control over design
- flat structure (everything visible)
- conditions and completion tracking
- Visually pleasing; more visual than text based
- Integration of images and videos
- The ability to see which participants are online
- Editing all appears on one page
- Accessible
- Supports opportunities to teach in modules, blocks, topics
- Forces academics to re-think course design
- Good controlling and adaptive release features
The Bad (and Ugly)
- Issues with the Discussion Forum
- Would like to set up groups and use it for mailing lists
- unclear which forum within a module you are getting an email from
- you end up emailing separately as well as posting in Moodle
- Navigation menu - expanding and collapsing, docking - seems like it’s not very clear how to do these
- Finding the right module - how will they be categorised? It needs to be easy to find the current year’s modules but still have archive of previous year’s
- Course format lends itself to clutter/scroll of death -> users need to understand how to expand and collapse topics
- Can students update their own email address (they don’t like to check institutional email accounts)
- Exporting a list of participants into .xls, etc - just having on screen is not so useful
- Very first contact not too intuitive - rather technical language that you have to know e.g. “labels”
- Worse than Blackboard
- Quizzes
- Some initial learning required
- Pre-course access not really possible
- Course list can become too long
- Would like to log in first and then browse the list of courses (this is to do with how the institutional instance is set up)
- Adding files is more complicated than Blackboard due to many more options and not enough explanation.
- An issue with blog posts appearing on the site-wide block instead of just within the course
- Where are user stats?
- Audio and video files needs to be stored externally
- Groups and Groupings is confusing
Issues
- Unclear support for Moodle
- Training required
- Suggestion re icon and terminology
- explanation; screenshots, screen recordings, text instructions - mixed approach
- Vital to have fast registration - VLE access from Day 1
- Support site within Moodle for
- FAQs, Mini-Guides, etc
- Link to webmail and other IT provisions
- Difficult to get information architecture right
- How do we get students to find and read all relevant info?
- Quality Control? How?
- Moodle offers more scope for improved communications, but it needs training
- Would like to know how to easily combine links to readings with files containing digitised readings into one viewable place.
- Increased flexibility of Moodle causes additional/new issues!
- Course default settings need to be carefully selected
- Use of WordPress inside Moodle would be good as a blogging tool
- Batch uploading and the ability to move blocks of courseware around between modules on a programme would be good
Wants
- Let us enrol staff in our courses
- student access until a cut-off date (e.g. 3rd week)
- “Pre-Module lobby area”
- Export calendar to Outlook and Google; better: live sync
- Assessment handling: bulk multiple file downloads, grade management
- Would have liked to have had contact with more experienced users -> Faculty/departmental “champions”
