Best Practices: Using Moodle for Corporate Training Initiatives

Using Moodle for Corporate Training Initiatives
By Rebecca DeSantis, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer


Moodle is frequently the LMS of choice for schools, but it is also a popular choice among corporations. These organizations may find themselves using Moodle quite differently than most schools. For example, courses might be primarily asynchronous and self-paced, with no instructor or facilitator. These organizations may use a variety of authoring tools and instructional strategies to reach their participants. In addition, the processes they use may vary because of the resources used to build these courses and the overall course design. In this post, I’m going to focus on ways corporate users can use Moodle.
 
Consider the following suggestions if you are a corporate Moodler:

1. If your organization is new to E-Learning, you’ll first need to make sure that you are ready to go online. If you haven’t done so already, hire/consult with an instructional designer who has online course development experience. 
2. Use the Lesson module to chunk your content, incorporate knowledge checks to reinforce key points, create branching scenarios/interactives, and award points to users. You can also use lesson to remediate users to previous content pages based on their response.
3. Use the Quiz module for pre- and post-tests. You can weight quiz questions within the question bank, shuffle distracters and questions, and provide question specific and overall feedback. You’ll most likely want to use the deferred feedback option for post-tests, and no feedback for pre-tests.
4. For Level 1 Evaluation, use the Feedback module. It allows you to create custom surveys to gain valuable information from your users.
5. Set up courses to use completion tracking, and add the Course Completion status block to your course. 
6. If your course design is to mandate users to progress through the course in a set/linear fashion, then use the restricted access settings found in the activity settings.
7. Use the Certificate module. You can customize the look and feel of certificates to match your organization’s branding. Make sure you tell employees to file certificates and provide a copy to Human Resources.
8. Use the SCORM module to upload content you create using other authoring tools (such as Articulate and Captivate) by publishing them as SCORM 1.2 conformant packages. Determine your best practices for displaying SCORM packages in your courses. 
9. Use the Glossary module to add definitions for key terms into a course. Configure the course and activity filters to link to these terms throughout the course and activities as desired.
10. Create a course template to reuse repeatedly for courses that will have the same general flow and layout. To create a template, create a new course. Then, create the overall flow and structure. When you are done, create a backup of that course. This backup will serve as the “template” for all new courses. To reuse, simply create a new course and restore the backup template.
11. Organize courses into categories with similar content subjects.
12. Create cohorts of users, based on job roles, to quickly enroll employees with the same job functionally into a course.
13. Create a parent role to assign managers to their employees, allowing them to review progress and completion status.
14. Use groups to customize training elements for different types of employees going through the same course.
15. Use the blog feature as a way to push information to employees.
16. Encourage managers to create a course with departmental onboarding information for new hires.
17. Consider creating a course for various knowledge domains (Communities of Practice) to allow employees to collaborate with each other. For example, you could use the Forum and Wiki modules. Forums are a great way to keep the conversation going after face-to-face sessions.

To learn how to build courses using these features, take our Course Building online courses, available in both a facilitated and non-facilitated format.
 
Thanks for reading! 
~Rebecca