How Caravel Will Improve Your HSC Experience!
Caravel vs. Moodle: A New Day for Catholic Homeschool Families
If you’ve been following Homeschool Connections‘ news, you’re probably aware that we are switching to a new learning management system called Caravel for the upcoming school year. As both a homeschooling parent and a Homeschool Connections teacher, I am thrilled about this development!
Caravel was custom-built just for homeschooling families’ needs. It is 100% designed, built, and operated by the Homeschool Connections staff! The adoption of Caravel brings the long Moodle epoch to a close. While there will undoubtedly be a learning curve as everyone gets acclimated to the new system, Caravel is vastly superior to Moodle in what it offers homeschoolers. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the benefits of Caravel over Moodle.
Integrated Registration
One of the best aspects of Caravel is that registration for both LIVE and Recorded courses will be integrated in one convenient place on the website. (Upcoming LIVE courses are available now for registration. Recorded courses will open in the upcoming months. We’ll keep you updated!)
This is a tremendous improvement! Under Moodle, we were forced to use third-party apps to fulfill the needs of our registered families. There were different procedures for LIVE & Recorded course registration, and all information had to be manually inputted by HSC staff. This meant that sometimes there would be a delay in when you saw your registrations appear on your account.
With Caravel, all your registrations will be handled in a single place, the process is streamlined with no third-party apps, and your registration will be processed instantly.
One Login for the Entire Family!
One of the most irksome things about Moodle was maintaining multiple logins for LIVE and Recorded accounts. If you wanted different children to have their own accounts, you’d need a different login for each child, as well as a duplicate if they were doing Recorded courses on top of LIVE courses. We’ve had HSC families maintain as many as ten different accounts! Thankfully, Caravel makes Moodle’s multiple logins obsolete.
With Caravel, you will have a single login for the entire family, whether you are taking LIVE or Recorded courses. Instead of separate student accounts, parents can easily create profiles for each child under the one family account (similar to how Netflix’s login works). You will no longer have to remember multiple logins, only one!
All Your Course Info in One Place!
Because you will have one family account, all course information for students can be accessed within one account (whether LIVE or Recorded), and you can move seamlessly between student profiles to easily access course information. Since you won’t need a separate account for Recorded and LIVE courses, all of your student’s course information will be accessed in one place.
Improved Communication
Caravel features an improved communication platform that offers direct messaging between families and instructors. On Moodle, the instructors for different courses had to be accessed through different accounts for LIVE and Recorded, or if you had multiple children with their own accounts. Another tremendous improvement is that Caravel allows parents to easily see all communication between their student and teacher.
Additionally, Moodle made it difficult for parents to track messaging between students, while Caravel does not allow messaging between students. Teachers may set up forums within a course for students to work on the course together. Lastly, Homeschool Connections has a monitored Student Cafe, which students can join with their parent’s permission during set times of the school year. The Cafe allows teens to connect with other Homeschool Connections students outside of the classroom.
One Location for Grades
Under Moodle, if you wanted to see your child’s grades, you had to log in and out of the various student accounts to look at them. With Caravel, parents now have the option to access their students’ grades in one convenient location. This makes keeping up with your child’s class progress much easier. Many times, parents have told me they don’t keep up with their child’s grades because they’d find it too much of a hassle to go into the different Moodle accounts to find them.
Caravel rectifies that problem by keeping all your children’s grade information just a single click away!
Fun for Students
Finally, Caravel will be much more fun for students to use, allowing them to customize their profiles’ colors and fonts to reflect their lovely, eccentric personalities. They will also find it much easier to navigate, as the dizzying array of needless options that characterized the Moodle interface will be eliminated, leaving students with a streamlined, more ergonomic experience.
Wish Lists for Everyone
Too many times, parents were timed out after they found the perfect course for their child. With no way of saving it till later, parents had to make a decision right then and there. Well, Caravel now lets parents create multiple wish lists (one for each student, presumably…whatever your preference is) so you can register your student later after finding that perfect course. BONUS: If you decide to buy that course that day, you still won’t get timed out while attempting to register.
Conclusion
One last plus to having our own learning management system is that we can continue to improve and add new features to better serve our homeschooling families. We are always open to your feedback!
We’ll profile more about Caravel in the near future, so stay tuned! In the meantime, to keep up on all the latest HSC news, I invite you to join me and other parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group. You can also visit the Caravel FAQ page.
