11 Jun Designing for Real Learners: Practical Ways to Bridge the Hidden Learning Gap in Moodle
Designing for Real Learners:
Practical Ways to Bridge the Hidden Learning Gap in Moodle
On Monday, we talked about two learners. Same course, same morning, but completely different experiences.
One breezed through, but the other spent far too much time and energy figuring out where to go, what to do and when to submit the assignments!
The gap between access and readiness is critical.
Think of it like a road trip. The destination is the same for everyone, but some learners are in a car with GPS, a full tank, and a clear highway ahead. Others are navigating via a hand-drawn map, in a jalopy held together by tape and a prayer, with the fuel light flashing dangerously! It’s the same type of journey, but a very different experience.
When you are designing the learning journey for your next intake of learners, consider these easy-to-implement strategies that can potentially bridge the learning gap.
- Standardise the Course Flow Across Courses
Learners shouldn’t have to decode how a course works before they can start learning from it. A consistent layout, style and look-and-feel creates a predictable rhythm across courses. This may include a course introduction, content, activity, next step, all with clear navigation, easy to understand signs – “Start Here” beats “Week 1 Resources” every time! This removes that I-can’t-find-anything obstacle for most learners.
- Make the Next Step Embarrassingly Obvious
Uncertainty is a momentum killer. A learner who doesn’t know what to do next will either click around in the hope of finding something or close the tab and blame the LMS for their life choices.
Tell people explicitly what to do. “Start here.” “Watch the video, then complete the quiz below.” It may feel almost too simple to bother with, which is usually a sign it’s exactly right. Finish one thing, and the next thing appears. This way progress starts to ‘feel’ visible, which allows momentum to build. (It also removes some of the ‘blame-the-LMS-strategies’!)
- Design for the Worst-Possible-Improbably-Terrible-Very-Bad Connection
A course built entirely around video may sound fantastically logical and wonderfully simple. Then half your learners, who rely only on mobile data, start to run out mid-month, or repeatedly struggle to connect to watch your embedded video, and, growing sick of the buffering icon, they just stop trying.
In learning contexts across Africa connectivity is variable and unforgiving. Offering text alongside video, keeping file sizes lean, and building natively in Moodle rather than uploading large documents mean the course works even when conditions don’t cooperate. More importantly, use the Private Video option in YouTube for your videos. YouTube has done insanely awesome things to shape video viewing to the most diverse contexts – use it to share videos instead of embedding your videos directly in your Moodle LMS.
- Lower the Bar for Showing Up
Engagement isn’t a personality trait. It’s often just a reflection of how much effort participation requires.
It’s like the forum that demands a 300-word post before you can read anyone else’s, or the synchronous activity scheduled at a time that suits some and not others. These aren’t intentionally exclusionary, but they raise the cost of showing up until some learners decide it isn’t worth it.
- Make Every Course Feel Like It Belongs Together
Design an overall course presentation structure and stick to it. The hidden learning gap widens every time a learner has to relearn how the system works. Shared templates and consistent navigation across your Moodle site turn a collection of courses into an actual learning environment where learners can move around without losing their bearings every time they click into something new.
Use Moodle’s Flexibility on Purpose
Moodle can do a lot, as can your Microwave. If you’re anything like me you use about 3 buttons on the microwave despite the book and the pictures and the cheatsheet telling you that you can do much more! Then one day you watch a few YouTube videos and voila! Let’s try all the buttons and functions!
Moodle’s bells and whistles far exceed the simple Microwave’s but it’s also how you end up with a course that has twelve activity types, no clear sequence, and the navigational logic of an overgrown hedge maze. While it’s great to add more interactivity and functionality, to create more flexibility for learners and apply the awesome H5P plethora of activities, this flexibility comes at a cost.
Flexibility without direction is nothing more than chaos with more options. Use Moodle’s capability intentionally: the right activity to match the specific learning outcome. Choose wisely when to track learners’, which activities to include and the learning pathways that respond to quiz outcomes and completion. That way students feel the value these activities and tools add, rather than feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with more buttons to click and steps to toggle!
The Gap Closes One Decision at a Time
The hidden learning gap doesn’t disappear overnight. It narrows through many (small) consistent, accumulated decisions: clearer structure here, a simpler format there, and fewer assumptions about where learners are starting from.
In learning, good course design paves the way for successful learning journeys.
If you’d like to talk through how these ideas could apply within your own learning environment, you’re welcome to book a conversation with us.
By Chantal Tarling