Why Moodle?
The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has used Moodle to manage its elearning for a number of years. Other Departments, Revenue Commissioners – Social Protections – Defence, also use Moodle. To ensure consistency and to enable sharing of courses I was informed that Moodle would be the Learning Management System (LMS) of choice for my Department.
With Moodle the role of the teacher changes from that of the expert imparting knowledge to that of a facilitator (Huang, 2002; Murphy et al., 2005). The role of the learner also evolves from that of an inactive receiver of information to an active creator of knowledge with the learner becoming more self-disciplined and responsible (Ruey, 2010).
Other attractions of Moodle is that unlike other LMSs it is free to use, it is that it is an Open Source application and it has a huge community constantly updating and improving the offering and making it hugely dynamic giving huge support. It has an explicit and important educational bias citing social constructionism as the pedagogy on which it is based (‘Moodle Documents: About Moodle, Pedagogy’, n.d.) which fits with my research methodology.
Social constructivism in the educational setting is about active meaning making (Jordan, 2008) and the social component is derived from interaction between peers and teachers (Huang, 2002). Jordan (2008) also tells us that ‘knowledge is constructed in the context of the environment in which it is encountered’ (p. 59) which indicates that learning has a strong contextual nature and promotes authentic learning (Murphy et al, 2005; Ruey, 2010). I believe that this is also relevant in the training setting.
Moodle actively promotes active collaboration, reflection, interaction and self-direction which are the fundamentals of social constructivist learning (Huang, 2002; Maor, 2001). The themes of collaboration, collective goal setting, student empowerment and self-direction matched with strong facilitation are widespread in the literature (Ruey, 2010).
As a trainer in a large Government Department the notion of self-directed, empowered, interacting, self reflective learners is very attractive and new. The use of technology, ie Moodle, which purports to support this is intuitive.
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References
Huang, H.-M. (2002). Toward constructivism for adult learners in online learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 33(1), 27–37. doi:10.1111/1467-8535.00236
Jordan, A. (2008). Approaches to learning : a guide for teachers. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Maor, D. (2001). The Teacher’s Role in Developing Interaction and Reflection in an Online Learning Community.Educational Media International, 40(1), 127–138. doi:10.1080/0952398032000092170
MoodleDocuments, https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Pedagogy, accessed on several occasions.
Murphy, K., Mahoney, S., Chen, C., Mendoza‐Diaz, N., & Yang, X. (2005). A Constructivist Model of Mentoring, Coaching, and Facilitating Online Discussions. Distance Education, 26(3), 341–366. doi:10.1080/01587910500291454
Ruey, S. (2010). A case study of constructivist instructional strategies for adult online learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(5), 706–720. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00965.x
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