The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has used Moodle to manage its elearning for a number of years. Other Departments, Revenue Commissioners \u2013 Social Protections \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Other attractions of Moodle is that unlike other LMSs it is free to use, it is that it is an Open Source application and\u00a0it has\u00a0a 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<\/em> as the pedagogy on which it is based (\u2018Moodle Documents: About Moodle, Pedagogy\u2019, n.d.) which fits with my research methodology.<\/p>\n Social constructivism in the educational setting is about active meaning making<\/em> (Jordan, 2008) and the social component is derived from interaction between peers and teachers (Huang, 2002). Jordan (2008) also tells us that \u2018knowledge is constructed in the context of the environment in which it is encountered\u2019 (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.<\/p>\n Moodle actively promotes\u00a0active collaboration, reflection, interaction and self-direction\u00a0which are\u00a0the 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).<\/p>\n As a trainer in a large Government Department\u00a0the notion of self-directed, empowered, \u00a0interacting, self reflective learners is very attractive and new. The use of technology, ie Moodle, which purports to support this is intuitive.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Other Posts<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Huang, H.-M. (2002). Toward constructivism for adult learners in online learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology<\/em>, 33<\/em>(1), 27\u201337. doi:10.1111\/1467-8535.00236<\/p>\n Jordan, A. (2008). Approaches to learning\u202f: a guide for teachers<\/em>. Maidenhead: Open University Press.<\/p>\n\n