Tips for teaching

[wtnhighlander]

Any of you seasoned teacher / professor types have tips to help a noob?

I am developing an ' Education Portal' for work. Essentially a repository for training materials, along with tracking of student progress. Based on the Moodle course management platform, if that rings a bell.

I have the IT knowledge to set up the software, but when it comes to organizing effective course work, I'm a bit out of my league. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Tpt life]

What support do you want R? Are you wanting to look through someone else’s course to see formatting ideas?

[wtnhighlander]

Tips on how to organize, format, and present the material most effectively.

I've created a couple of courses already, but have more in the pipeline that will be more than a couple hours worth of study. Bear in mind, this is for adults, almost 100% male, with background education ranging from GED to Masters Degrees. And I will not be solely responsible for creating (all) the content.

The Moodle platform provides many options for storing content of any media type. It is also able to track progress of external coursework, like one on one, or classroom sessions.

[Tpt life]

Based on your current video offerings...links to YouTube work well. Your dado video could be more polished with some synchronizing of the images with your speech, but hot linking to that kind of vid in a digital text is currently going over well. Text should be paged, if you can, for better comprehension. Scrolling cuts into retention and ability to refer back to confusing elements. Modules are a great way to limit to similar thoughts or individual streams. I will need to look at Moodle a bit. That’s not the data system we use here. Hope that gives you a couple of ideas to chew on. 

[wtnhighlander]

Thanks! 

Moodle embeds video quite well, locally or through external links. I haven't produced any vids for work (yet), but we do have a nice camera for such. I even borrowed it to make the dado video, but the mic gave me trouble, so the audio was recorded seperately, hence it being slightly out of sync. Unfortunately, my home PC is a bit on the meager side for video editing, so I gave up at "good enough". Resources at work are much better.

My courses so far have been slide-show oriented, one per page (no scrolling, glad to hear that is a good thing). I sometimes add a voice track to help learners that do better listening than reading. I'm unsure if it is better to play the audio on page load, or leave it up to student choice.

Review quizzes / questions are easy to do in Moodle, but I'm not certain about how and when to implement them most effectively. Is it best to sprinkle random (ungraded) questions throughout the study material, or just keep the lesson compact and add a review quiz (gradable) at the end?

[Mark J]

7 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

I'm unsure if it is better to play the audio on page load, or leave it up to student choice.

Make it an option that is clearly available, but off by default.  

[Tpt life]

R, do you have an Apple account or device? If not, borrow somewhere and look in iBooks for a rich digital text in the One Best Thing series. They are free. Please don’t see me as an Apple fan boy. That just happens to be what I own and what my district provides. Maybe someone can chime in with like Google formats. What you find is a mixed variety is being considered best practice. Text, static image, and video are being integrated within a “text.” Don’t remake data tables, link to or embed them. Let your student be the active chaser to keep them engaged. Make it easy...but make them click. If Moodle allows it, it is nice to be able to track hits.

[wtnhighlander]

Thanks. Not an Apple user myself, but the company issues Apple devices. If IT doesn't have them locked down too tightly, maybe I can look that up when I get back to the office on Monday.