Moodle For Learning

Moodle - the LSE’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

Moodle can be used to:

• accentuate communication between participants;

• support

  • independent learning,

  • collaboration and

  • student creativity;

• facilitate peer learning and peer assessment;

• deliver ongoing, two-way feedback opportunities;

• enhance digital literacy skills, and

• support the administration of learning.

Your Moodle space is a classroom

In any classroom students read, listen, perform tasks, do experiments, ask and answer questions, discuss issues with each other, take tests, submit essays, create knowledge together, create artefacts together… all of this can happen in a Moodle classroom. Like any classroom, a Moodle classroom should be designed accessibly, well organised, usable and with the student in mind.

• Moodle courses are spaces, albeit virtual ones, and aesthetics, tidiness, logical arrangement and clearly outlined expectations matter here as much as they do in physical spaces and interactions.

• Principles of good teaching are the same, regardless of setting (face to face, hybrid or online). You may not be sure how to do what you do face to face in a virtual setting. It is easy to be tempted to re-create your physical practice virtually ‘step-by-step’, ie replicate or transpose. This will lead to the virtual experience being inferior to the physical.

• Instead, think: how can you translate that into moodle? How can Moodle help you scaffold and augment student learning?

• Contact your departmental eden.digital Learning Technologist for discussion and advice. We are your translators.

Moodle Use at the LSE

Every course taught at the LSE has a corresponding space on Moodle, and we keep a read-only archive of past Moodle’s for three years for students studying for resits. Other eLearning systems are well integrated into Moodle, e.g. lecture recording (Echo360), reading lists (Talis), Text matching service (Turnitin). There are many brilliant uses of Moodle features across the School, and many very well organised and well designed ones. We are developing more Moodle exemplar courses as well as departmental templates, in the meantime, our Moodle Basics Course is available to all LSE users, both in grid format and collapsed topics format, for you to view the difference. More on formats and what we recommend available on the Moodle Course Design Baseline page.

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