SMVDU Katra: Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, on inspiration of Vice Chancellor Dr. Sanjeev Jain, took a path-breaking initiative of training all faculty members of SMVDU for working on Moodle – an open source learning platform. The training took place for last two weeks, holding five rigorous sessions with faculty. Dr. Naveen Kumar Gondhi Asst. Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Mr. Naveen Kumar, Technical Staff, conducted the sessions. Moodle is free and open-source software learning management system designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environment, community driven and globally supported, distributed under GNU general public license. It is developed on pedagogical principles and used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom, which can further be used for a variety of e-learning projects at workplace as well as for personal career development.
Moodle provides the most flexible tool-set to support both blended learning and 100% online courses. It will provide faculty members with a soft platform to keep them updated, to attend courses, to float their courses and get certification, manage students’ attendance and data of the classes conducted, create community and forums etc. This will bring about a smart shift on the way of a teacher’s working in the demanding time of smart teaching. It will bring a transparency in students’ attendance management – which any student can see, assignment distribution and submission, and also it can further be linked with GradeGen software already used by the university for grade management and result display of students. It may be noted that training sessions were mandatory for all faculty members of the university and shall be used by them from the current semester onward. Its utility also reflects through the faculty benchmarking recently set up by the university administration. Moodle Coordinators have been appointed in each dept. for implementation of the same.