What are we trying to do in an online course?
In order to make the most of Moodle, it's useful to look at our overall instructional strategy. It's easy to get very excited about all the tools and activities that Moodle offers and then try to incorporate all of them. How do you decide which activities to use and how to organize the course?
The best approach is to start with your overall learning objectives. Ask a few simple questions: what do you want students to be able to do at the end of the course? How and what is the best way for them to demonstrate what they've learned in a way that is measurable?
As you answer the questions, identify five or six of your most important learning outcomes. Those will be your learning objectives.
For example, if you are teaching a course in Introduction to Geology, one of the outcomes might be for students to be able to identify three major rock types. As you state this objective, you can start thinking about how you'll have them demonstrate the fact that they can identify these major rock types. Thinking ahead to Moodle, you might have them take a quiz that requires them to recognize rock types. Or, you may ask them to post photos from their field trips with descriptive labels.
You'll find that, in Moodle, learning objectives (LOs for short) will soon become your best friends. They will help you determine how to organize the course, select course content, and create assessments.
Here are a few key points in developing learning objectives:
- Make sure that you do not have too many learning objectives. Limit them to five or six. Too many learning objectives will result in repetition and a muddy focus.
- Use active verbs that lead to measurable outcomes. One of the most important elements of course design is developing activities and instructional content that enable students to engage in tasks that can be assessed in a measurable way. Thus, it's good to avoid such fuzzy phrases such as "understand a concept" or "believe in a concept." Instead, verbs should be active with measurable outcomes. Examples of these are "describe", "list", or "create."
- Use Bloom's Taxonomy to help develop your learning objectives. Bloom's Taxonomy is a framework that was first developed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and other collaborators, who sought to develop categories of learning levels. Their goal was to help teachers and instructional designers plan and develop appropriate instructions, design-appropriate assessments, and align instructions and assessments with learning objectives. They did so by identifying six cognitive processes, from the most basic (on the base of a triangle) to the most complex. There are six categories (in the 2001 update), each with associated action verbs, which help teachers and designers organize instructions, from the most basic to most complex, and design effective assessments.
Here is a diagram that shows levels and then includes cognitive processes. It also includes basic verbs that you can use in designing and developing your course. You can also refer to https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/#why for more information.
As you progress through this book, you'll find that we'll be using Bloom's Taxonomy and learning objectives to make sure that we're selecting the right materials, putting them in the right places, and also developing the right kind of assessment strategy.