I’m a week into my online Moodle course now. I’ve actually learned some things, and had a highly productive session involving the built-in chat and a wiki. It worked out really well–three of us worked together in the chat room, and plugged in content in a wiki-based rubric. It’s great because it gives me a real-world example of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to solve a problem.
I just have one issue with the course: I’m pretty sure everyone else in the course has a K-12 focus, and being designed in a constructivist nature, I worry that this focus will drive what we learn over the remaining two weeks. Where are all the corporate training* people? I kind of figure it’s because K-12 people have more time to kill in June than the corporate-types, but it’d still be nice to not be the only one thinking about adult ed.
But it got me thinking about whether Moodle is really ready for professional development, or at least ready for professional development as I think of it. I don’t care about grades, or a top-down, instructor-oriented approach–I want to foster community and mentorship. My research at school is going to focus on this, probably using Ning, but I’m going to give Elgg a closer look shortly. Hell, I may even consider Facebook; everyone’s got an account there nowadays anyway.
* I consider myself closer to this group than the K-12 people in my program, primarily because I’m more interested in working with grownups than kids.
