Unit Notes - FDWO Week 1: The Big Picture

You definitely 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 possiblilities 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 - particularly after the wiki activity, you will probably find a lot of people will want to try a wiki in their activity design. 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 them toward articulating their intentions - wiki is not always the best tool.

Need to learn more Moodle?

• moodle.org offers moodledocs - TON of "how-to" information, right from the source
• ISWO Sandbox - a course set up as a companion site to the FDWO - it 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.)
• Mastering Moodle is a course at RRU that we have made available as an OER - it has a lot of "how to's" for editors.