rket. Furthermore, the shutdown of schools, compounded by the associated public health and economic crises, poses complicated challenges to students’ learning. Thus, Moodle’s affordability helps bring VLE, LMS, and CMS technology within the reach of students and teachers with limited technical and financial resources. Especially during the economic decline brought about by the pandemic, Moodle’s license-free software platform eliminates the digital divide between privileged and the disadvantaged students due to its low cost. Its accessibility for all may also be the primary reason for its wide popularity, even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Moodle E-learning Platform: Barriers
Struggles with Moodle’s Pedagogical Approach
Pedagogy refers to the “interactions between teachers, students, and the learning environment and the learning tasks” (Murphy, 2008 p. 35). In layman’s terms, pedagogy simply means the method and way of how teachers teach, in theory and in practice. In the context of e-learning, VLEs do not appear to support any particular pedagogical approach (McAvinia, 2016). However, according to McAvinia (2016), the inventor of Moodle states that Moodle employs an explicitly social constructivist pedagogy. The constructivist pedagogy is classified as a learner-centered or student-centered pedagogical approach wherein knowledge is constructed by learners through an active, mental process of development, and learners are the builders and creators of meaning and knowledge (Ozola, 2012).
Some research suggests that while the student-centered approach, which encapsulates constructivism, can be very effective to students’ learning and academic performance, it is still generally difficult to measure consistently (Westbrook et al., 2013). This is because there are very few assessment tools evaluating this specific pedagogical approach, and virtually no assessment tools for constructivist-type VLEs. The said few assessment tools available are also relatively new, so not much considerable research has been done to test its reliability and consistency. One such assessment tool specifically made to measure the student-centered pedagogical approach, excluding constructivist-type VLEs, is the recently developed Measuring and Improving Student-Centered Learning (MISCL) Toolkit (Kaufman et al, 2020).
According to the research report authored by Kaufman et al. (2020), the MISCL Toolkit is easy to use and produces accurate, meaningful results. Additionally, the toolkit users or participants in this preliminary study found that the MISCL Toolkit process is understandable and useful (Kaufman et al, 2020). However, since the assessment tool is relatively new and one of the few that specifically measures student-centered learning in the market, Kaufman et al. (2020) concede that more testing in schools with a var
