This is the first in a series of blog posts which looks at my experiences of building digital online courses.

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From February to June of this year, I spent half my working week building a series of Moodle courses for summer school employees. If you’re not familiar with Moodle, it’s a Learning Management System, or LMS, – a software application which administers and delivers courses.

I chose this LMS because I’ve been a participant on a series of short courses using Moodle as the medium of delivery. Having some familiarity with this program guided my choice. Of course there are other LMSes but I wasn’t afforded time to compare products.

The need for an LMS stems from a time when I experimented with creating animated explainer videos on YouTube for teachers to watch prior to them coming into summer school. It wasn’t compulsory even though all participants were encouraged to engage with the content as it served to support the understanding of key features of their role prior to the face-to-face induction everyone received on their arrival.

It wasn’t long before I wanted to add further details to complement the information in each video. A link here, a document there- these items could, and were, added to the same email with the YouTube links. However, I was conscious that if everything was brought together as one resource, on something like a platform, it would be more accessible and made to look more coherent.

The first question is, why do we need pre-arrival training? We’ve never had compulsory structured training before, so why now? There’s a general consensus that summer school roles are more complicated now than they have ever been. Feeding some fundamental principles which underpin each role is a good idea as it allows employees to absorb, question, and communicate ideas prior to starting work.

Given how complex some of these roles are, training should come in the form of pre-arrival, face-to-face, and on the job monitoring and retraining. Therefore, any pre-arrival training should only be providing a foundational understanding. Fundamentally, we don’t want anyone arriving to start work knowing nothing. Those who have little to no understanding of the product and their role are easily overloaded, require much more handholding, and take longer to find their feet. Giving everyone a foundational understanding of summer school and what their role is, provides scaffolding and fosters understanding prior to face-to-face training. It’s worth noting that we do provide staff with job manuals, but this does not compare to structured multi-modal and collaborative input.

As you may imagine, being a participant is not the same as designing and building courses, especially when the backend is completely unfamiliar. My first point of entry was using Youtube to search for tutorials on creating Moodle courses from scratch. By this point, I had created an account with Moodle but didn’t want to start tinkering until I had some direction of travel. I found this channel extremely useful in helping me get started, and later on, I found Moodle’s official YouTube channel an excellent resource, especially when accompanied with their Wiki pages.

Once I had a basic idea of what was feasible, I proposed which courses needed to be built and a general timeline of completion to my team. Although I was essentially working on this alone, I needed feedback on my proposal and permission, especially as there were costs involved.

Over the next four months, I built four courses. The progress was very slow to start with and although I became more skilled as the process went on, I was, and still am, far from proficient in building courses like these. I was very clear from the beginning, I wanted to have a product that participants could access and complete without intervention from an instructor. It didn’t need to be polished but it had to be a point of learning.

Click here to read the next part in this series: Moodle: Summer school pre-service training. An introduction to summer school

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