Interview with David Cropley, Associate Professor in Engineering Innovation, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia.
Assoc. Prof. David Cropley has been using Moodle for one of his Masters Degree in Military System’s courses this year and has given Moodle two thumbs up. He was one of the first at UniSA to use Moodle and began exploring the software on the recommendation of a colleague who had experienced success with Moodle. Whilst discovering what Moodle could do for his students and colleagues, Assoc. Prof. Cropley learned that UniSA were also looking at Moodle to replace the current, yet ageing, UniSAnet.
His decision to use Moodle was based on a colleague’s suggestion that it seemed to do a good job. “Once I started to look into it a little bit more, I found it certainly offered more useful features compared to UniSAnet that would help to meet our goals. It probably does a better job than UniSAnet in facilitating the student interaction and getting them to be more involved in participating in the things that are going on each week.”Assoc. Prof. David Cropley currently has completed one delivery on his first Moodle course, with a second course now underway. Development of further courses is ongoing with two more coming on board next year. Twelve months from now the full complement of eight courses should have a Moodle homepage.
“I certainly think it is easier to use than UniSAnet and it is more user-friendly from my point of view. It is easier to sit down, log on to it and do the things I need to do in terms of looking at the discussion forums and quizzes. It is certainly straight forward to use and did not take a lot of time to become reasonably conversant with Moodle. It has not created such an overhead that you think that it is too hard to use. It has always been easy enough to use or quick and easy enough to work out problems, so I have always been encouraged to keep using it.”
When quizzed about his top five features of Moodle, Assoc. Prof. David Cropley suggested the calendar was particularly useful for keeping students organised and on track. “The calendar feature alerts the students to milestones during the course. I think it can result in better learning outcomes if you give the students a slightly rigid structure.” Additionally he liked the quizzes and forums as these provided formative assessment which could be recorded in the Grade Book. “I could just leave it and then wait for the end of semester to tally it all up.”
He found the groups and groupings somewhat tricky to use but thought it was very useful as course participants included not only award students but also a small number of professional development people and it made it possible to create two views of the homepage. “It proved to be fantastically useful because we created one website and the users did not know that they were seeing something different from other people. Once I had worked out the structure of the groups and groupings it made it very easy to have two very separate customers but one webpage. That was very efficient for us.”
Assoc. Prof. David Cropley believed that it was a bit early to assess the success of the introduction of Moodle to his Masters Degree courses but believed that results he had seen so far were encouraging and that the students’ reactions had been very positive. “I would say that the comments that I have had from the students have endorsed the fact that they have found this flexible and they are able to fit it around their full time work”.
He is looking forward to continuing his association with Moodle over the next twelve months as he and his colleagues develop Moodle homepages for all eight courses. “The more I have used it, the happier I have become with it. It is proving to be flexible and doing everything we want it to do. I can’t say anything bad about it”.
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