Moodle courses - eLearning asynchronous solution for an EFL school
A series of courses were developed to cover the needs of an EFL school due to the COVID19 restrictions. Therefore, this end-to-end solution included LMS setup, Courses setup as well as a series of webinars to train the school’s teachers in content creation and LMS management
ClientVassalou Tsakalaki School of foreign LanguagesServiceseLearning development, Insutrctional Design, Learning DesignSoftwareMoodle LMS, Photoshop online, HTML 5, BootstrapYear2020
Needs Analysis & Case Study
This particular course was designed on behalf of Vassalou Tsakalaki School of Foreign Languages to fulfil the needs of their EFL teachers & students who needed a solution for distance learning due to the COVID19 restrictions. The school had already been using an LMS for its students, so the needs analysis that was conducted concluded with the assumption that there was an urgency to provide distance learning courses that would be updated by the school’s teachers regularly, without the need for outsourcing an eLearning developer. So instead of one-time courses, they wanted courses that could be enhanced whenever needed, mirroring a traditional class, and at the same time keeping the cost low. This meant that pricy authoring tools could not be used.
So the solution to the needs analysis involved two parts:
- Creation of the course’s framework and layout using free or cheap software tools.
- Training the school’s teachers in elearning development to educate them on how to develop their activities using free authoring tools and how these development products could then be uploaded to the school’s LMS (Moodle), which meant that extra training had to be done in course management. Besides, the training process also focused on instructional design principles based on the particular needs of the school’s students and their demands.
Development
The development phase included using custom plugins and coding to create Bootstrap elements that would make the course look and feel better. Then the teachers of the course were assigned and given their custom roles, which included creating the activities but in a limited way to not interact with the course’s layout to prevent potentially fatal mistakes. Next, the grade book was set up as well as the gamification elements to improve student engagement and commitment. After that, four webinars were conducted to train the teachers on how to use the course and create their assignments. Finally, the course was optimised to work seamlessly not only on PCs but also on mobile devices.