After reading the chapters of Claire’s major, I found that different forms of open learning have been popular since long ago. Based on the five different online learning mentioned in Claire’s major chapters, I will introduce two of the online learning tools that I am most interested in.

The first is Moodle, described by Lisa Lane. The Moodle is a learning management system with a simple, sophisticated platform interface. Through Lisa’s description and my own experience, as a student, I think that the main functions of Moodle can be divided into the following five categories: course management, homework module, chat module, forum module, test module. The teacher has full control over all the settings of the course, including setting up a syllabus online, browsing the student’s login status, and freely sending information about the course. Regarding the work mode, the teacher can set the deadline for the job to find the highest score and the lowest score. The student can automatically upload the job in any format, and at the same time, the submission time is recorded, and the will send people an email to inform the submission success. The settings of the chat mode can include emoticons, pictures, and files, just as easy as normal online chat. With regard to the setting of the forum module, the teacher and the student’s notes are shared. The classmates who attend the class can post their own notes on the Internet for the reference of the students who are unable to attend the class，I believe this will achieve a win-win situation. Teachers can open forum permissions to facilitate communication between teachers and students, just like face-to-face group work. The teacher can define the question bank in the test module, and the questions can be automatically scored, the open time and the due date can be defined, and multiple attempts can be set. Based on these five points, I think that the role of Moodle coincides with the course space used by our school in a certain sense. At the same time, I also found that the software of Moodle is also used in Selkirk’s online class. It is clear to see that the tasks that need to be completed every day and not confusing. At the same time, because it contains the above five points, Moodle is considered to be a very mature learning system. I believe Moodle will be more widely used in the future.

The second is an online course designed by David Evans for computer science. This type of course is aimed at people who don’t have a computer background but want to learn about computer basics or learn programming. What’s even more fascinating is that these courses are free to register and open to everyone on the Internet. The main decisions of this type of course are: “(1) focus the course around a motivating project that would be used as a vehicle for introducing the computing concepts throughout the course; and (2) designing the lectures to be primarily centered on exercises students would do and for which they would receive automated feedback, on rather than long, non- interactive lectures”（David). The course is offered for the first time in 2012 for a seven-week course. Each week, there is a lecture unit with video and then a test. Students can submit multiple times for the tests. Similar to Moodle, online discussion is an important part of this lesson, which is a very active environment that helps students learn. At the same time, students can complete their studies at their own pace, without a deadline, finally，students can pass the final exam and get a certificate.

Reference

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online: A guide to theory, research, and practice. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.