Developing Moodle Content

I've been getting some great feedback on the English Composition course I posted and would love to hear what anyone else thinks about it. I've made some changes already and am planning some larger changes already.

On a related note, I've received some questions about the course design/layout that I wanted to address in a little more detail.

How long does developing a course like this take?

It depends. I had a loose framework in my head for a few years from a course I used to teach face-to-face and then on Blackboard and then in Moodle. It was really just the assignments themselves without any additional information. I had the luxury of relying on paper and in-person monitoring of students/work. I ended up not using anything from that course other than a few videos and organization of the units because it was just a bunch of PDF and DOC files. My thoughts on those are documented. 

I also think that adding the online context is important even if you have face-to-face interaction with students. This fits in with my whole Save Yourself Time meme. The more context you can add to your course/assignments/resources, the fewer potential questions you'll have to answer. You can use that saved time for more meaningful feedback. Looking back at that course I'm actually surprised just how little was in there. It was definitely not what I thought it was when I first opened it up.

Back to the question about 35-40 hours I'm guessing. I worked on it on weekends so had time during the week to think about how everything was going and any changes I wanted to make.

Do you have any tips for people developing courses like this?

Here are some of the biggest time savers I can think of to take what used to be a 60-80 hour course down to something that takes half the time.

1. Start out with very few specifics in mind. Things evolve so quickly and are driven by more than just the curriculum you'd like to offer.

2. Get rid of everything in your course and start with a blank slate.

3. Don't worry about course navigation quite yet. Just start making Web/Assignment/Forum and put them in order. This is just creating a web page, calling it unit 1 and moving on. For now these are just place holders for your actual content. As you start filling in specifics later things tend to evolve so you don't want to have to undo too much effort.

4. Put everything in topic 2. You're just going to close it off anyway so there's no sense in having to work with organizing content in the 10 topic boxes that is a default Moodle course (Even if you're developing a standard Moodle course, this can be helpful because you can just drop/drag your content around later).

5. If you use files, zip them and upload them all at once.

6. Copy/paste your text into the HTML mode and then copy/paste the line break code right there
. It saves time trying to lose the formatting from another page/source and it's really fast if you use keyboard shortcuts. (I actually rely quite a bit on keyboard functions to save time for copy/paste/bold/undo/find)

7. In my case, much of the design and layout evolves from the theme and images I find. It's worth taking some extra time here to search for the right images because that can help you decide how it's all going to fit together. (For example, I had no clue what English Composition was going to look like until I found those free clip art images on a creative commons site. http://openclipart.org, http://archive.org,http://wikipedia.com are all good sources for images in the public domain. This same thing happened with Web Tools and the Google Docs course I created. Once the I chose my images and design, things really took off.)

8. Use the tabs in your browser. I routinely have 4-5 tabs open at the same time so that I can jump back and forth grabbing links to pages and inserting them into other pages for ease of navigation. The other HUGE time saver is copy/pasting HTML code and not text. If I have a link back to the Home Page on most of my pages that includes an image and text, I would've spent over an hour re-creating that. I just copied the HTML code for the text/image/link once and pasted it right into all of the other pages and it took 5 min.

9. Group repetitive tasks together rather than working on one thing at a time. You'll get a routine and it actually becomes relatively mindless so that you can enjoy radio or television while you work.

10. Think of how you would want it to work if you were taking that course. Inter-linking content really doesn't take very long and it goes a long way to improve the usability of the class.

There might be more. Some of it just takes me less time because I've spent a lot of time up front learning how it all works. Being flexible during the creation process really helps it evolve as you develop. It can really take some cool detours if you're not locked into a specific plan.

Moodleshare

I posted a couple of my courses (Frank Herbert's Dune & The Hobbit) on MoodleShare a few days ago. Since then I've seen mention of it spread like wildfire across the Moodle community.  The site traffic on my Moodle page has greatly increased with hits from all over the world from people viewing and downloading the courses that I have shared.  I've checked out available resources on the various Moodle sharing sites and on MoodleShare (which I helped start) and there really aren't that many courses available for download.

Considering the number of worldwide Moodle users I find this a little frustrating.  I can think of a few reasons why teachers may not want to share their courses:

1. Proprietary content- Teachers like to "borrow" from all over the place so they may not want to open themselves up to any potential trouble by using content that doesn't fall under Fair Use. Solution: Make copies of your course where you delete questionable content and wherever possible you should create links and use embed code to outside content.  At this stage, any little bit helps.  Even the shell of a class could save a teacher out there hours of outlining/organization when developing their own Moodle course.
2. Embarrassment- Teachers may really like what they use in their classes, but are not quite so confident that other teachers will think it is quality as well. Solution: Get over it.  Your class will never be finished in the same way that no poem is ever finished.  Every time you look at it you will want to see something you'll wish was better or that you want to change. It may be that when others see the course they'll offer you feedback and resources of their own that you could include.
3. Too much trouble- Teachers are overworked.  Putting content into Moodle takes time, or taking your Moodle course to the world seems like a hassle.  Solution: Creating Moodle environments for your classroom is time-saving.  Every time you add something to your course you are saving yourself more time in the long -run.  If you have anything in your course then it's worth sharing with others.  If you don't want to write about it on a sharing site then send me the link and I'll promote it on MoodleShare for you.
4. Sense of ownership- Teachers like to get credit for what they have done and just giving their hard work away to someone who may be new to the field or doesn't work as hard just doesn't feel right. Solution: Consider creating a license to add to your course from the Creative Commons. Select a level of copyright that you are comfortable with.  I know that in Moodle it's possible to remove it, but we can't worry about that.  Let someone take what you have done and build upon it rather than constantly recreating the same thing each generation.  Since I first started teaching 10 years ago, I've heard the phrase Recreating the Wheel more times than I can recall. Enough already, it's time to do something about it.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but if every teacher just shared one course that they teach can you imagine how much time that would save thousands of educators around the world?  If you don't have an entire course share a unit; lesson or assignment.  Anything so we can start building up instead of sideways. I've put some courses where my mouth is; there will be more on the way. And if you're one of those who have seen and downloaded them for yourselves,  I can't wait to see what you come up with. I have no doubt they'll be even better than mine.