Laatikainen J (University of the Arts Helsinki)
27.5.2024, 15:00–15:20, Small Hall (F4050)
The development of Moodle at the University of the Arts is defined directly from the teaching. Unlike the delivery of a finished product, Moodle was introduced as a technical platform, with an emphasis on collaborative development with teaching professionals. Behind this is Moodle Support Service – a Trojan Horse that helps teachers and academic staff in designing and implementing digitally supported learning and providing the bottom-up feeds for the development of Moodle. This development has been guided by the specific nature of arts pedagogy, where artistic process and medium (instrument, visual arts technique or dance, for example) must be taken into account in all instructional design. One cannot expect Moodle to provide generic tools for this kind of teaching. Moodle support has worked to identify and, where necessary, develop workflows that can be used to meet very specific needs in arts education. In the development of Moodle, it has been important to find those specific needs generic enough to be brought step by step into the whole Moodle environment. Transferring workflow from an individual teacher to a department is often useful, but from a department to the entire university Moodle is rarely justified. As we try to create practices for development, I find myself frequently thinking about the scalability and adaptability of a single solution without it becoming a tool to do many things barely. In development maintaining focus requires the right grain size.
Recording coming in late July.