Matters India Reporter
Darjeeling, April 10, 2020 — For almost 3 weeks now, Salesian College Sonada and its Siliguri Campus have been using on-line facility for teaching-learning as well as research.
An on-line Longitudinal Study on the Attitudinal Changes to the Covid -19 lockdown both for students and faculty is into its 3rd week. The Google Form containing 20 questions is send out each week, to both students and faculty to assess attitudinal changes caused by Covid 19 related lockdown.
Using Open Source Moodle platform (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) the faculty is able to reach out to some 1,900 students in both campuses for teaching-learning activities.
Founded and developed by Martin Dougiamas in 2002, Moodle was designed to provide educators, administrators, and learners with an open, robust, secure and free platform to create and deliver personalized learning environments.
“Moodle enables you to create a private learning space online full of engaging activities and teaching-learning material. You will always have full control of all your data and the way your staff, students and clients are on-boarded into the system,” says Principal Dr George Thadathil who is also president of All India Association of Christian Higher Education.
“As soon as the first phase of lockdown was imposed by the government (16 March), our computer science departments in both campuses swung into action to facilitate both faculty and students to make use of digital platform for on-line teaching-learning,” said principal Thadathil.
The Moodle platform allows uploading of lessons for each course in a variety of formats (DOC, PDF, PPT) including video links. It also monitors student access as well as receive and evaluate their assignments. The platform also allows keeping of grade records.
Through the BigBlueButton open source conferencing system launched last month (March 2020) in the Moodle platform offers professional solution which helps teach students online. BBB also provides real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, chat, and screen.
BigBlueButton allows principal to coordinate inter-college and inter-departmental faculty meets as well as video conferencing. It also allows audio or video recording of real-time teaching and share link with students.
The Moodle Learning Management System allows managing users, courses, roles, and generating reports. It also allows making a course calendar, messaging and notifications, assessments that can handle pre/post testing, certification and display score and transcripts.