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Week 1 Notes - FDO: The Big Picture

Your Technical Skills

Learning Management System (LMS)

You need to be comfortable editing in the LMS (we use Moodle). Part of your job is about mentoring others in creating and managing their own online environments, and so relying on others for these skills gives an impression that it's not important, and is also inefficient if you have to go back and forth with someone else about "how tos". 

The Least You Need to Know...

You should be comfortable setting up tools to support any mini-session design your participants dream up. In our experience, the most common are:

  • Forums - both classwide and (sometimes complicated) team set up. You should be able to set up multiple sets of separate teams using groups and groupings in Moodle. We tend to go with open forums, but there are actually a lot of settings that can create new possibilities for structuring activities.

  • Polls - the Moodle term is "Choice". This is handy for any time you want people to indicate a preference (e.g., "what time should we meet in Collaborate?", or vote on a single question.

  • Wikis - you need to know how to create additional pages - add square brackets around a page name to create and name subsequent pages, like this: [[Page 2: Use a Good Title for Pages]]. You'll also probably need to coach your participants toward articulating their intentions - wiki is not always the best tool.

Need to learn more Moodle?

  • moodle.org offers moodledocs - heaps of "how-to" information, right from the source
  • FLO Sandbox  - set up as a companion site to the FDO - this is a place for you to play around in "edit" mode and try things out that you'll need to do as a facilitator (e.g., hide/reveal units, create polls, edit activities and resources, etc.)
  • Moodle - Editing & Enhancing is a self study resource at RRU
  • Learn Moodle is a free four week course for ``...anybody who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether it be in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest!` You can sign up for notification of the next offering.