Course Management Software for your Coop

Many homeschool families (like ours) belong to a coop. It can be great to be part of a group, sharing your teaching gifts and working with other homeschool families. Our kids are in great classes we could not teach ourselves, and we can share our gifts. I teach a (surprise) computing class in our co-op.

If your coop is like ours, there's a lot of information flying around. Every teacher has a set of assignments due each week, and it can be very hard to keep track of everything. Fortunately, there are some really great tools for managing classes. This month I explain two such tools, Moodle and Engrade.

Getting Started with Moodle

Moodle is an example of 'Course Management System' software. A CMS can be a helpful tool for managing a school, but the commercial CMS systems are complicated and expensive. Moodle is a free and open-source alternative that you can use for your coop. It is available at http://moodle.org

Moodle is a special kind of software meant to run on a web server. If your coop already has a web page, you probably already have everything you need to get started, but

you'll probably need to talk to your local web geek to get it installed. (If you are the web geek, most servers have auto-install scripts for installing Moodle. If you need more help, just email me and I'll help you set it up.)

Once Moodle is up and running, it acts like a customized Facebook aimed squarely at education problems. Each teacher and student (and parents if you wish) has an account. Students can see their own classes, and have a custom calendar created showing all assignments due in all their assigned classes. Teachers can add assignments, projects, quizzes, and resources to the course page.

Everyone in the coop can reach the software through a web browser. It doesn't matter which computer people use. It works fine on Windows, Macs, and even tablets and smart phones. However, you will need to get online to use the system, so if you have people in your coop who do not have access to the Internet, this could be an issue.

As a teacher, I like being able to organize my course in a single place. I add all my resources and assignments online so I never have to use paper printouts. I especially like having assignments online. I can explain my assignment online and have students submit a file or type answers directly into a text box. I can also create tests and quizzes that grade automatically, or add interactive features like chat sessions, collaborative databases, and many other types of projects.

If you have students turn projects in online, you can have great control over how those materials are turned in. You can specify exactly when the project will be accepted, and you can have late submissions either marked or rejected. (The exact submission date and time is marked, so you'll never argue about when something was turned in.)

Perhaps the best thing about using a CMS is how you can use it to extend the coop throughout the week. If our students forget to write down an assignment, it's online. If we want to have a week-long discussion, we can do it. One writing teacher in our coop prefers small daily assignments rather than a large weekly assignment, and she can do it through our CMS system.

The best thing about Moodle is its customization. If you know what you're doing, you can make it do anything. However, all this power does come with a certain amount of complexity. If you want to run Moodle in your coop, you'll need someone technical to set it up, and someone will also need to put a little time into training your teachers and students on how to use the software. Moodle is sophisticated enough to be used by hundreds of schools. I’ve even used it to manage a course in China!

I can create an online training session if people are interested in learning how to set up a moodle system completely for free.

Engrade

Another very useful system has become popular recently, called 'Engrade.' Engrade is mainly an online gradebook system, but you can also use it for more complete course management. You can log into Engrade at http://www.engrade.com and create a new school or class. You can then invite your students to sign up and enroll for your class. Engrade is pretty easy to use, and it's used by a lot of organizations.

Once you are signed up with engrade as a teacher, you can easily create a class by filling out a form. You can then send invitations to your students to enroll in the class. It’s very easy to create assignments, which are automatically placed on a calendar for students to see. You can associate each assignment with a calendar entry, and with a turnin, which is a mechanism for turning in assignments online. Grading the assignments is also quite easy. When you’re logged in as the teacher, you’ll see a list of assignments. When you edit an assignment, you’ll also see a list of students and you can enter each student’s grade in the online form. There is a limited feature for adding comments to a grade.

The turnin feature allows students to submit projects electronically. This can be a very helpful tool in a coop setting, where you might only see students once a week. If you have students turn in files online, they do not get lost in the mini-van.

Engrade is not a full-blown course management system, but it is heading in that direction. There is a good quiz tool which allows you to create multiple choice tests which can be administered online with automatic grading. It also has a wiki feature which allows you to build an entire website for your course with resources and links. This feature does not require web programming skills, and it’s pretty easy to use. I find that the wiki feels detached from the rest of the site, and students can get confused.

Engrade supports class chats, both in general and attached to each assignment. You’ll definitely want to consider some kind of ground rules if you enable these chat features. Not all families will want to participate, and chatting can be distracting. Personally, I prefer the students chat in a forum I control and moderate, so I can teach them how to use this kind of online tool responsibly.

We actually use both systems in our coop. Many of the teachers use engrade, and I’m currently building a Moodle installation for the coop. I find Engrade much easier to get started with (as there’s no installation and very little configuration) but the day-to-day running of Engrade is a bit frustrating. The gradebook functionality is outstanding, but the other features are not as strong, and can feel a bit disjointed. Moodle is far more powerful and configurable, but it requires a developer with technical skills to set things up.

Blessings to you...