Dan, Qaixen Consultant, discusses the differences between Moodle and Microsoft Teams to help schools chose the best platform for online teaching and learning success in his latest blog:
Competition or cooperation?
In the red corner, meet Moodle, an established, open sourced, online learning platform, created in 1999 to help students learn outside of the classroom environment.
In the blue corner, we find the heavy weight champion of the world, Microsoft Teams, a relative newcomer in the world of education.
What is Moodle?
Moodle is an online learning platform that allows teachers to set tasks and activities to a user that can be completed one after the other. This allows educators to build up a linear learning journey for their students with progression built into the system. A teacher can set questions that can assess whether a student is ready to progress.
This means that courses can be created in an organised way allowing students to progress at their own pace. Completion trackers allow users to see what they have focused on and what they still have left to do. Moodle allows users to work asynchronously, meaning that students can take part in their learning on their own and whenever they choose. This gives a great framework for independent learning, allowing users to pick up what they have been studying at their own pace.
Where does Microsoft Teams fit in?
Unlike Moodle, Microsoft Teams is fantastic at creating a continuous learning journey, meaning that a learner does not need to follow a set route whilst moving their studies forward. This allows for more communication and group collaboration when working towards a task. For example, a student may have been set a research task but instead of doing this independently, the student would use Teams to work with others on the same project. Teams also allows for synchronous learning meaning that students can be given feedback in real time through the Chat or the Post function. Collaboration on documents is instant and eliminates the risk of having multiple copies of the same document. Finally, Teams excels at giving formative assessments to your students. This feedback can then be acted on immediately, ensuring that learners can efficiently modify and improve their work.
Is there really a winner?
You may have started to realise there really isn’t an outright winner in this contest of learning platforms. As with most tools in education, there is no one size fits all platform or mythical silver bullet that ensures learners get the best experience.
Careful planning is needed to decide on the best approach with what you wish to achieve. Do you want students to learn the steps needed to complete a complex set of instructions and learn how to achieve a new skill? Then Moodle is for you. However, if you need students to discuss and analyse those instructions and to evaluate where others may need support, Teams would be your best bet. In the end, the question shouldn’t be which online learning platform is the best, but instead which online learning platform is best suited for the type of learning you need to achieve.
Can’t we just all get along?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have all these features integrated in one place? It just so happens that you can! Moodle can be fully integrated within Microsoft Teams, allowing for teachers and students to access courses whilst being able to communicate with other students and educators.
With the Moodle plugin to Microsoft Teams, you have access to a Moodle tab allowing you to easily pin courses to a Team or Channel. From here, you can also sign into the Moodle course without having to switch to your Moodle username and password. Finally, teachers and students have access to the Moodle assistant bot which allows you to ask questions about an assignment, such as when did a particular user last sign in. This gives a quick and time saving method to ensure that any queries are answered efficiently.
As you can see, there is a lot more to choosing the right platform for online learning than just choosing one and sticking to it. Thought needs to be taken on what type of learning is expected and how best this can be achieved. As usual, it is the blended approach that will ensure the greatest progress for your students.
Here at Qaixen, we offer a range of Microsoft 365 services for teachers to help drive adoption and increase understanding of all cloud tools, including Microsoft Teams. If you would like to learn more about how Qaixen can help your school, college or university, simply contact us.