Moodle is used by a variety of professors at Concordia and many other universities and colleges worldwide. Lately, it has been facing major technical difficulties that have caused teachers and students problems accessing, submitting, and grading assignments.
Tracy Briggs Jensen has been teaching on and off at Concordia since 2010. She teaches Broadcast Writing, Broadcast Performance and Communicating to Engage and has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead.
Briggs Jensen mentions one recent issue in mid-November when her Communicating to Engage Students turned in assignments on PDFs. As she tried to open them, she received an error message.
“More than anything it was just kind of frustrating, since it delayed me getting these papers graded and back to the students in a timely fashion. However, after a few days, when I clicked on the PDF the error message was not there and I was able to access the PDFs and grade the assignment. So it was okay,” she says.
According to their website, Moodle is described as a “Learning Management System (LMS) designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments.”
The site also mentions putting “over 20 years of development guided by social constructionist pedagogy” into the platform, and pride themselves on the widespread, free usage of the website to all.
The site has multilingual capabilities and “powers hundreds of thousands of learning environments globally.” The platform claims that it “meets the highest standards of social and environmental impact.”
Briggs Jensen notes that she has used Moodle for every class she has taught at Concordia and used a similar one when working at Minnesota State University Moorhead. She states that she preferred Moodle, as she had more experience with it
“Most of the time, Moodle has been okay. Since I’m not a full-time professor, I don’t spend a lot of time working with it on a daily basis, so any problems with the platform are definitely user errors! It’s up to me to learn how to use it more effectively. Sometimes, in my opinion, it’s not as user-friendly as I think it could be,” she said.
Joeseph Kennedy is Concordia College’s academic technologist and instructional design coordinator. Kennedy has been one of the staff helping professors with the Moodle issues.
“We are so lucky at Concordia to have people like Joe Kennedy, who is there right away to answer questions and help me navigate any questions or problems I face while trying to build and conduct my classes in Moodle. He’s a gem!” she continued.
Briggs Jensen is sure to mention that she is not an expert as Moodle and praises it for helping her run her classes as well as people like Kennedy who are able to fix any issues or bugs that arise.
“I would hate for him or anyone at CC to think we’re just complaining. It’s not their fault. It’s the software,” Briggs Jensen states.
Briggs Jensen remarks how most issues she came across surrounded her lack of experience with the platform.
“Like all technology, it’s not perfect, but I think overall Moodle has made running my classes pretty efficient,” she said. “I hope as I keep teaching and getting more experience with it, I’ll get better at using Moodle. But I’d also love for Moodle to be more user-friendly and intuitive about how a class works,” Briggs Jensen says as a final note.
