Stage 2

Introduction

Now that the environment had been created and agreed upon, the next stage in the development of the LPS Moodle system was to develop a course based around the CBSE Board Set Assignment for use by the current Year students.

Course Structure

The AA Board Set Assignment consists of four major tasks based around a fictitious sandwich vendor that must be attempted during the CBSE course by all students. These tasks are:

• Create a promotional leaflet for the sandwich vendor based around requirements.
• Create a system for calculating the production cost of sandwiches.
• Create a website to advertise the sandwich vendor based around provided requirement.
• Create a system for generating sandwich labels.

For each of these tasks a set of resources (images, data files etc.) are provided by the AA for use within the final deliverables.

Moodle allows courses to be presented in three ways. Firstly they can be presented using a weekly structure, whereby the resources and activities are structured into the relevant week in the course where they are used. Alternatively courses can be structure using a very minimal structure whereby all resources are located in a single area. Finally courses can be structured by topics where areas containing the used resources are created for each individual topic. As the AA Board Set Assignment is structured around four key elements, the topic based structure was deemed most appropriate with an area created for each individual topic and an area for resources that are more global than topic specific. Under the supervision of the Head of ICT, the relevant resources for each topic were added into the course structure and forums were added to allow students and teachers to communicate outside of usual classroom hours and to allow students to report bugs and make suggestions about the environment.

Moodle Blocks

Along with the course resources and forums, several Moodle blocks were included in the environment to accommodate the requirements for specific functionality. The Calendar block was added to provide the ability to maintain a course and individual calendars. The Recent Activity block was added to allow students and teachers to be alerted to new content and forum postings.