Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Overview of this book

In today's world, multimedia can provide a more engaging experience for learners. You can embed your own audio, link to pages off-site, or pull a YouTube video into your course. You can use feature-rich quizzes that allow you to assess your students, or provide them with tools and feedback to test their own knowledge. All these require standard procedures and cutting-edge tools. Selecting tools to make multimedia integration in Moodle faster, simpler, and more precise is not child's play. This book provides you with everything you need to include sound, video, animation, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy. This book covers integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. It will take you through these elements in detail where you will learn how to create, edit, and integrate these elements into Moodle. The book is written around the design of an online course called "Music for Everyday Life" using Moodle, where teachers and students create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. You will also learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to create images, audio, and video and then we will take a look at the web applications that allow easy creation, collaboration, and sharing of multimedia elements. Finally, you will learn how to interact with students in real-time using a particular online phone service and a desktop sharing application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Multimedia
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

Moodle it!


To integrate audio into Moodle, we have two options:

  • Upload an audio file to the course's files area and then link to it by using any HTML editor—if Moodle has the multimedia filter working, and if we are talking about MP3 files, a flash player will automatically be inserted to play the file. We have seen this in Chapter 1.

    Note

    The flash player in Moodle only accepts MP3 files with a sample rate of 11.025, 22.050, or 44.100 kHz, a bitrate below 128 Kbps, and preferably CBR (Constant Bit Rate) over VBR (Variable Bit Rate). Usually, you won't have problems, but if you hear a chipmunk-like sound when you play one of these files in Moodle the problem will probably be in one of these properties.

  • Upload an audio file to an online service and then embed it in Moodle—this is what we have done in Imeem.

The same applies to other audio formats recognized by the multimeda plugin in Moodle (in audio, Real Player for now, in video others such as Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime). In...