In summary, in this first chapter you have covered most of what there needs to be known about VLEs and Moodle. You have obviously already chosen Moodle, as you would not have bought this book otherwise. However, the preceding sections should help you to understand a little more about the Moodle application. You have learned about VLEs and their relationship to education: they are a tool used by educators to facilitate learning over the Internet. You have also learned about the different types of VLE that are available, and made some comparisons among these systems. You should now also understand what Moodle is and what advantages it has for teachers and learners.
Specifically, we covered:
What VLEs are and what features we should expect from them
We have looked into the different types of VLEs and the advantages that they offer over the traditional teaching and learning methods
We have learned about Moodle and why we can use it
Finally, we have learned what we will be doing in this book, what skills will be needed, and what tools will be required to work our way through the exercises.
Now that we've introduced Virtual Learning Environments and learned what Moodle can do for our organization, we can finally start to get our hands dirty and move on to some more interesting stuff, such as choosing and changing our fi rst Moodle theme.