Hands-on Driving

NOTHING BEATS THE FEEDBACK you can get from hands-on driving and that holds true for a car, a plane, or our Moodle. While waiting for car repairs in a BMW garage, a friendly salesman invited Ruth to drive a few models (see left). Following less than 10 minutes in a four-year-old car used car from the lot outside, we were on our way to buying it. The test drive was part of the sales pitch and as anyone in the business knows, those tests often get prospects to qualify themselves as customers. The same kind of consumer psychology holds true in my work with our Moodle virtual learning system. I have set a considerable number of writing assignments on Moodle, in the belief that the only way you learn to write well is to write often. The frequency of the assignments also induces a bit of stress in students, causing most of them to hunker down and actually do the work in an organised way. However, the bottom third show a tendency that recurs year after year. They are slow to take up on the VLE, claiming they don't know where to start or they don't understand what to do. We normally work around these twin hesitations in an open setting like the campus canteen or even outside in a field of grass sprayed by the free and open campus wifi network. It takes less than five minutes to test drive Moodle and for new students to think they can proceed on their own. It's a student behavior I saw while an instructor pilot as well in flight simulators. You needed to just get the show on the road, share a few demonstrations, and everything would rock on from there.

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Have a poke around Media Writing if you like, and see how it's possible to earn more than 100% of the continuous assessment marks available.

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