I strongly believe that modern education must have the on-line component. I am lucky to work for a school which is trying to implement Moodle in the curriculum. I am describing my experience, problems and suggested solutions here.
1. Problem: the students do not do the activities
Some of them do not even enter the system. They explain that by the lack of time.
Suggested solution:
a. to set the students' mind before the course - explain that there is some extra workload in the course which is done on-line. It's like a hometask - should be done to benefit most of the course. Exact time may be notified - 'you will spend 1-3 hours a week on homework, partly on-line'
b. to motivate the ss by issuing an extra certificate about completing the on-line part of the course
2. Problem: the students can't record their voice
Teaching a language we assume doing a lot of speaking activities and Moodle has that feature - to record student's voice with Poodll plugin. Unfortunately the only two of my students who tackled the activity failed to do that.
Possible reason: they didn't allow their browser to use the microphone
Suggested solution:
to write and send a detailed tutorial how to do the activities with all possible technical problems
3. Problem: preparing tasks is really time-consuming
Teachers are used to get prepared for their lessons just before ones by copying the materials from SBs, TBs etc. The average time spent is 10-30 minutes. Now let's imagine a teacher who has 4-8 lessons a day with 15 minutes breaks between them when the teacher usually makes copies and drinks coffee - what can make her spend 2-3 extra hours (and much more at the beginning) daily to support on-line part of the teaching? I like the idea about becoming a better professional but what choice a teacher would make in real life - to take one more student for 20$ or to struggle with Moodle (or any LMS) for free especially if then her students don't even enter the system?
Suggested solutions:
a. more training for teachers to cut their time to get to know the platform
b. extra pay
c. creating the bank of reusable materials which is accessible by all the school teachers - just as we have a library and make copies in the office. Training the teachers how to use it.
d. making the work rewarding by helping the students use the system - then the teachers' efforts are not useless
e. positive experience sharing from LP teachers who used the platform
How do you or your school solve that? Please comment.
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