Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques

Overview of this book

Moodle is the world's most popular, free open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is vast and has lots to offer. More and more colleges, universities, and training providers are using Moodle, which has helped revolutionize e-learning with its flexible, reusable platform and components. It works best when you feel confident that the tools you have at hand will allow you to create exactly what you need.This book brings together step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions and learning theory to give you new tools and new power with Moodle. It will show you how to connect with your online students, and how and where they develop an enthusiastic, open, and trusting relationship with their fellow students and with you, their instructor. With this book, you'll learn to get the best from Moodle.This book helps you develop good, solid, dynamic courses that will last by making sure that your instructional design is robust, and that they are built around satisfying learning objectives and course outcomes. With this book, you'll have excellent support and step-by-step guidance for putting together courses that incorporate your choice of the many features that Moodle offers. You will also find the best way to create effective assessments, and how to create them for now and in the future. The book will also introduce you to many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit. In addition, you will learn how you can save time and reuse your best ideas by taking advantage of Moodle's unique features.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Summary


Forums are one of Moodle's strongest features. You can use them as building blocks in which you organize the instructional material for the entire course.

So, don't be limited by the traditional notions of forums, just as a place for group discussion. You can use the forum for creating a template for future courses, and for developing a logical and easy-to-follow sequence. Finally, you can also use the forum for one-to-one discussion between a student and an instructor.

We saw how a custom scale can be used to rate the relevance of postings; you can also use custom scales to have students rate any other aspect of a forum posting. For example, suppose your class was writing a play. You could have students contribute story ideas and character sketches to a forum. Then the class could use a custom scale to vote on whether to include them in the play.

In classes that require student participation, Moodle's log files can quantify a student's participation in class discussion. Splitting a...