Returning to study, whether part-time or full-time, can be a rewarding and life-changing experience. But, for some of us, it might be daunting and mean a change to our daily routine.

• Are you thinking about starting a course but don't know how well you'll do?
• Do you want to test your current skills?

Why not spend some time practicing with the WF Associates online e-learning classrooms?  We have established practice areas for you to try-out some of the material and compare your performance anonymously with others.

A learning management system or LMS for short is a virtual classroom. The intention of the LMS is to provide the student with course material, and a means of interacting with other students and teachers. Also, and most importantly, the LMS is a means of structuring the student's participation in the course, submission of assignments, participation in quizzes and ultimately grading of work. You will find that as you progress through your courses then more and more material will be LMS-based.

Moodle is an open source LMS, and has now been recognised as one of the most innovative and practical software packages of its kind. In fact the UNESCO rate Moodle as the most popular open source LMS available. There are now over 11,000 colleges and over 75,000 organisations using Moodle. One of these the Open University in the UK, which is one of the largest organisations of its kind in the world, announced that from 2007 its online student learning environment for the 21st century will be based on Moodle (http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/3460). Although there are commercial rival products, the combined weight of the open source community, teachers, support engineers in colleges and universities and other interested parties have joined together to make Moodle a really good product.

Obviously, there are many considerations in selecting a LMS, such as security, privacy, robustness, portability, performance, scalability, stability, and so on. Moodle has been designed with an architectural model that fulfils all of the common requirements of learning institutions. In fact its architectural model is superior to common proprietary LMS products such as Blackboard, WebCT, Saba and others. So in short in all the existing and new courses have been 'Moodled'. Therefore the student is encouraged to take advantage of Moodle, and gain familiarization with the online learning concept. The progression to LMS's and Moodle is a trend that we cannot afford to ignore (see the stats - http://moodle.org/stats/) and will provide many benefits in the long run.

The WF Associates Learning Management System (LMS) has been designed to provide you with a very friendly way of you testing your skills.   If you want to at any time try out the LMS then either click on the menu link above, or from the WF Associates pre-install screen, or by clicking on the link such as the one you see below:

When you enter the Moodle Learning Management System site you will be invited to login.  Once you've completed the login you can then enrol in courses, participate in forums, undertake online quizzes and undertake lots of learning experiences.

Students:

Enter the Moodle Learning Management System to access your online classroom:

• Interact with course participants to develop your learning community.
• Access the course forum, respond to postings, and identify postings that need attention.
• Answer emails from your learning colleagues and direct emails that require instructor attention.
• Participate in chat sessions and web cast events, as scheduled in the course.
• Undertake quizzes and submit your assignments.
• Access your results and receive feedback from your instructors.
• Perform a self-assessment of your skill development and compare to your peer group.

Your skills, interests, personality, and values play an important role in your career choice. Find out what effect they have and learn about the various self assessment tools, also called career assessment tools, that help with the career planning process.

Self assessment is the first step of the career planning process. It is the process of gathering information about yourself in order to make an informed career decision.

A self assessment process should not only look at your academic skills, but should include your values, interests, and personality.

In addition to determining what you're good at, a skills assessment also helps you figure out what you could be doing. The skills you use in your career should combine academic and personal characteristics.

You can use the results of this skills assessment to make some changes by measuring the skills you need for a particular career.

• Follow the self-assessment process methodology for helping with your learning needs.
• Then click on the link to enter the Learning Management System.

You will receive feedback as to your results and can check out your current knowledge by comparing against the database of skills.