Moodle is a very flexible learning management system that is open source and used by millions of people around the world to host and offer online education and training programs. Moodle is an open source learning management system with a wide array of contributed activities, themes, and resources that developers make available for free.
A vast array of Moodle resources often causes difficulties such that it is not easy to take advantage of so many applications and design options. However, now you can overcome these limitations; Moodle Course Design Best Practices helps you put those resources to good use and create Moodle courses that are ideal for all kinds of organizations, teachers, and learners.
In this book, you'll learn the best practices to create effective and engaging courses for all kinds of learning organizations, ranging from online schools to colleges, universities, training centers, and even online communities.
You'll learn how to plan the structure of your courses, select the best resources, activities, and assessments for your purposes, and use the latest Moodle-friendly programs, plugins, applications, and social media.
We hope you will enjoy this book and find it to be both useful and helpful.
With the information in the chapters, you'll be able to work with Moodle from the very beginning and have the information you need at every step of the way.
Chapter 1, Preparing to Build an Exemplary Moodle Course, shows what you need to do if you're setting up your first Moodle course. It also contains information about where to go for information and support.
Chapter 2, Planning Your Course, explains how to develop a course that incorporates learning theories by showing you how to build good learning objectives. You will also learn the best approaches to plan your course so that you can structure it to maximize the chances of success.
Chapter 3, Organizing Your Course, focuses on course organization and shows you how to choose the right course format, and define course settings.
Chapter 4, Best Practices in Content Delivery, discusses how to manage content and the best approaches to deliver content of all kinds.
Chapter 5, Designing Self-paced Independent Study Courses, shows you how to design and structure self-paced independent study courses and where to put all the materials, assessments, and other items. It also discusses how to build a course that motivates students and encourages them to complete it.
Chapter 6, Developing Cohort-based Courses with Teacher-student Interaction, focuses on the best design for instructor-led courses that are meant to be delivered to groups of students. It discusses the best themes to use and then reviews the theme settings for a course and its ideal format as well as the best resources and activities to use and how to use them.
Chapter 7, Creating Student-centered Project-based Courses, helps you create courses that include student projects and collaborative activities. It demonstrates which universal and course-specific theme settings are best for your course, and how to select the ideal combination of resources, activities, and assessments.
Chapter 8, Moodle for Online Communities, focuses on how Moodle can be used for online communities, either closed, as in the case of specific organizations, or open, as in the case of social media. It includes strategies for motivating students and discusses how to organize Moodle to take advantage of the constantly changing landscape of the social media, programs, applications, resources, and activities that are available for Moodle.
You will need to have access to an installation of Moodle 2.0 or newer (ideally Version 2.6 or newer), and you will need to install the latest versions of Java and JavaScript. In addition, you may want Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat so that you can create PDF documents. It would also be helpful to use an audio-editing program, such as Audacity, and an image editor, such as PicMonkey or Pixlr.
This book is for teachers, trainers, course creators, instructional technologists, instructional designers, and Moodle administrators.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "suppose you have a file in your course called Course Guide and wish to refer your students to that guide".
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus, or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to the NAVIGATION block."
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