Module 2 Book: Optimizing the Organization of a Moodle Course

Curate: Filter, Collect, Organize, Group

When it comes to putting resources in your Moodle course, Gonzalez (2018) asks, are you a curator or a dumper? A curator thoughtfully includes resources and considers where they are placed so they meaningfully impact the learning experience. On the contrary, a dumper includes resources with little consideration of where they are placed or how they impact the overall learning experience.

Human brains do not respond well to dumping as it is often associated with little organization, lack of clarity, and inconsistencies. According to cognitive load theory, the mind has limited capacity to hold information in working memory when it’s processing content. For this reason, it’s critical to organize information in an efficient way to optimize mental processing (Nilson & Goodson, 2018, p. 80).

But, what might curation look like? According to Dirksen (2016), curation could be the ability to:

• filter or identify the really interesting information to present to students
• collect and caption certain pieces of information to help students see how it all fits together 
• aggregate relevant resources into a single location for easy access
• organize disparate content around a theme
• group certain elements to provide context (p. 254).