Curating learning spaces: My journey with iSpring Suite and Moodle platform

        Greetings to my fellow teachers! In this post, I will reflect on how Moodle and iSpring Suite have shaped my teaching and learning experience.

        Let me start with some throwback to times when I accessed Moodle as a student of UzSWLU. The platform seemed to be a nice LMS website where our teachers would post resources and assignments with set deadlines. However, as a student I did not quite like the simplicity of it and how teachers designed each unit's assignments with the certain structure. We always had a lecture posted for the each topic followed by discussion forum (where we were obliged to share the answers to questions), a quiz on the topic with multiple choice questions and an assignment, which had to be completed with a document attachment. Even though I did understand that it was completely organised and suitable for teachers to access, I knew that students were not excited to open LMS to actually learn. 

Moodle platform homepage

      

    However, as a teacher, I believe if used properly, Moodle can be both great management system for teachers and learning platform for students. When I gained access to it as a teacher back when I was a coordinator for online course design for first-year UzSWLU students, I found out that Moodle actually had way more features than I expected. First of them was that I could design assignments for each student separately, addressing individual student needs in diverse classrooms (Gogan, Sirbu and Draghici, 2015). Another aspect that was particularly good about Moodle platform was that it supported the theory of connectivism. The students were encouraged to have networked learning interacting with each other through features like wikis, forums, and collaborative projects (Mpungose and Khoza, 2020).

    Meanwhile, there was another great LMS that addressed my students' needs in interaction more than Moodle could. It was iSpring Suite application that was incorporated into Microsoft PowerPoint to create presentations on lessons. At first, I thought it was a great extension to PowerPoint to add some features like screen-recording or audio to my presentations. But as the time went on, I noticed that it could be used even to design a complete online course with a great variety of interactivity. Even though the lesson created with this application seemed to be focused on individual work rather than teamwork, it gave an unforgettable learning experience to my students. In particular, those who enjoyed autonomous learning and online courses seemed to benefit from it the most. Among interactive features of iSpring Suite that I used in my practice are the following: 

• interactive quizzes with 14 types of questions; 
• dialogue simulations with characters that you choose from the database;
• opportunity to embed videos into the lessons that would have automatic playback;
• user-friendly interfaces with tabs and great organisation;
• screen-recording feature for teachers;
• timed quizzes, flashcards, and points system;
• scenario-based assignments, and;
• e-books creation and glossaries.

    A long and exciting list, isn't it? When I first created an online course with iSpring Suite, I probably was excited the most as a teacher to test it on my students and see what kind of results it will give. And, as a result, most of the reactions from students were positive. Therefore, this platform promotes constructivist learning theory. in which the students build knowledge as a set of blocks through their experiences (Kosareva et al., 2021).

How iSpring Suite looks

    In conclusion, these two LMS both have benefits and drawbacks on their own, but can be used together to help teachers and students meet learning outcomes they intend to meet. What are learning management systems that you particularly came across with? Feel free to share your insights and comments on this post as well! Stay tuned for more updates!)

References

Gogan, M.L., Sirbu, R. and Draghici, A. (2015). Aspects Concerning the Use of the Moodle Platform – Case Study. Procedia Technology, 19, 1142–1148. Available from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.protcy.2015.02.163. 

Kosareva, L. et al. (2021). Ispring platform for learning Russian as a foreign language. Interactive Learning Environments, 1–12. Available from https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2021.1913423 [Accessed 28 September 2024].

Mpungose, C.B. and Khoza, S.B. (2020). Postgraduate Students’ Experiences on the Use of Moodle and Canvas Learning Management System. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 27 (1). Available from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-09475-1.