Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called Social Constructionism. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material. The difference between a traditional class and the social constructionist philosophy is the difference between a lecture and a discussion.
Moodle does not require you to use the social constructionist method for your courses. However, it best supports this method. For example, Moodle enables you to add five kinds of static course material that a student reads, but does not interact with:
Text pages
Web pages
Links to anything on the Web (including material on your Moodle site)
A view into one of the course's directories
A label that displays any text or image
However, Moodle enables you to add six types of interactive course materials. This is the course material that a student interacts with, by answering questions, entering text, or uploading files:
Assignment (uploading files to be reviewed by the teacher)
Choice (a single question)
Journal (an online journal)
Lesson (a conditional, branching activity)
Quiz (an online test)
Survey (with results available to the teacher and/or students)
Moodle also offers five kinds of activities where students interact with each other. These are used to create social course materials:
Chat (live online chat between students)
Forum (you can have none or several online bulletin boards for each course)
Glossary (students and/or teachers can contribute terms to site-wide glossaries)
Wiki (these are a familiar tool for collaboration to most younger students and many older students)
Workshop (these support peer review and feedback of assignments that the students upload)
So far, we have listed five kinds of static course materials, and eleven kinds of interactive course materials. In addition, some of Moodle's add-on modules add more types of interaction. For example, one add-on module enables students and teachers to schedule appointments with each other.