ELECTRONIC ENABLED TRAINING OFFICE AND ADMINISTRATION

What is the impact of these technologies on the training and development function
in your organization?

I work for an educational institution and therefore the main performance management is
for students. My organization uses MOODLE as a web based technology for managing
performance of students and that of the training programs carried out here. It is two years
since the implementation of MOODLE in our organization.

The following are the impact of implementing MOODLE in our organization :

The stated philosophy of Moodle includes a constructivist and social constructionist

approach to education, emphasizing that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to
the educational experience in many ways. Moodle's features reflect this in various design
aspects, such as making it possible for students to comment on entries in a database (or
even to contribute entries themselves), or to work collaboratively in a wiki.

Having said this, Moodle is flexible enough to allow for a full range of modes of
teaching. It can be used for both introductory and advanced delivery of content (e.g.
HTML pages) or assessment, and does not necessitate a constructivist teaching approach.
Moodle is also useful in an outcomes-oriented classroom environment because of its
flexibility.

The following were the major advantages we had because of MOODLE:

• Authentication
• Enrollment, using IMS Enterprise among other standard methods, or by direct
interaction with an external database
• Quizzes and quiz questions, allowing import/export in a number of formats
• Resources
• Integration with other Content Management Systems
• Syndication- external newsfeeds can be displayed in a course, and forums, blogs,
and other features can be made available to others as newsfeeds.
• “Open source” (free!) Learning Management System (LMS) software
• Customizable by programming staff
• Flexible for the instructor and developer
• Supported by programmers world-wide
• Electronic assignment submissions
• Virtual areas for group work
• Self-assessment quizzes and online testing
• Sequential learning objects (Moodle only)
• Embedded ShockWave Flash (.swf) files
• Tracked specific student activity (Moodle only)
• Poll (Moodle only)
• Glossary (Moodle only)

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 • Survey
• Discussion forums
• Links to external Web pages

Moodle encourages collaboration among students, and allows for students to use the
target language in many ways, whether they are replying to a debate on the forum,
chatting with a classmate about a project, or brainstorming in a wiki. Furthermore,
students are able to see the work of each other, allowing for many occurrences of
negotiated meaning as well as vast amounts of input and opportunities for output. In the
Moodle used for our Introduction to CALL course, there have been several opportunities
to negotiate meaning in class forums about the following topics: teachers: educators or
hi-tech entertainers; determining criteria for webpages; what is sound pedagogy, and can
it be reached by implementing various forms of technology (corpus, skype, ipod, e-mail,
and chat); how appropriate is computer-based testing; and what is considered to be
ethical and socially just in the realm of CALL? The fact that every student is responsible
for responding to each new forum topic, and does so by interacting with previous
postings by commenting, asking questions, or debating, negotiation of meaning naturally
occurs

The result and the success of MOODLE implementation has motivated us to follow
this in our sister institutions too. This was the major impact.
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