It’s time for software manuals to evolve. I’ve been teaching software and writing manuals for about twenty years now, and have found that most software manuals are missing the most important information. While most of these do a good job of telling you how to perform tasks, that is, what buttons to push and menus to choose, they often leave the two most important questions unanswered:
What effect will doing this have on your audience’s experience?
When would you want to do this?
For example, it would be nice if the manual that came with your word processor told you more than how to create tables and graphs. It would be even better if it also told you what kind of information is most easily understood in a table, as against a graph.
In this book, I hope to take a more evolved approach. I want to share techniques for creating effective learning solutions using Moodle, the world’s most popular online learning management system. I’ll give you keystroke-and-click directions to create these solutions. I’ll also tell you what effect they’ll have on your students’ experience, and how to make best use of these solutions. You can let me know if I’ve succeeded (or not) by sending comments to us at <[email protected]>, making sure that you have mentioned the book title in the subject of your message.
Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction with their students. It is the world’s most popular online learning system. It will run on most low-cost hosting services, and probably on your company’s or school’s web server.
Moodle offers teachers and course designers a toolbox full of powerful, interactive online teaching tools. This book shows you how to use those tools to create effective learning solutions. These learning solutions are based on proven and accepted instructional principles, and traditional classroom activities, such as Distributed Practice, Self Monitoring, Pre-correction, and more. This book shows you how to creatively use Moodle’s online learning features in ways that adhere to proven educational principles.
Chapter 1: Introduction, expalins the approach the book will take for creating learning solutions, and briefly describes the educational principles and practices upon which the techniques are based.
Chapter 2: Forum Solutions, offers you solutions for managing your forums. The first two sections focus on making the best use of forums. The last two sections of this chapter, focus on managing your forums.
Chapter 3: Chat Solutions, gives you a key to making the best use of Moodle’s—or any LMS’s—chat function, in a way that takes advantage of its unique strengths, instead of trying to make it act like a face-to-face meeting. In this chapter, we explore the questions “What is chat good for?” and “How can I achieve success in an online chat?” Considering the fact that Moodle’s chat functions are similar to most other chat software, the answers to these questions apply to more than just Moodle.
Chapter 4: Quiz Solutions, tells you that a quiz can be more than just a test. At its best, a quiz can also become a learning experience. Moodle offers features that help you to accomplish that. This chapter gives you five ways to use Moodle quizzes for more than testing.
Chapter 5: Lesson Solutions, tells you that a Moodle lesson can be a powerful combination of instruction and assessment. Lessons offer the flexibility of a web page, the interactivity of a quiz, and branching capabilities.
Chapter 6: Wiki Solutions, tells you that a wiki is a powerful tool for collaboration, and it does enable students to participate in a group activity from anywhere at any time. However, a wiki can also be a powerful tool for individualized learning. This principle is called “differential learning”, which means that the learning experience should be customized for each student, depending on his/her learning ability. With individual wikis, you can differentiate the learning experience for your students.
Chapter 7: Glossary Solutions, tells you that glossaries are not just special-purpose, online dictionaries, but can also be an enjoyable, collaborative activity for your class, and a teaching tool.
Chapter 8: The Choice Activity, tells you that a choice activity is the simplest type of activities. You can use a choice to: take a quick poll, ask students to choose sides in a debate, confirm the students’ understanding of an agreement, and gather consent.
Chapter 9: Course Solution, focuses on making your course easier to navigate. The goal of all these solutions is to reduce the time and effort your students spend in figuring out what to do next, so they can get on with the learning. Sometimes, just slightly reducing the effort that students make on navigating through your course, requires a great effort on your part. But, anything you do to help your students navigate easily through your course is worth the effort. The result is less time spent wondering what to do next, and more time spent on the course content.
Chapter 10: Workshop Solution, tells you that it is one of the most complex and powerful, of activities. This chapter takes you through the process of creating a full-featured workshop. It focuses on helping you to make decisions that create the kind of workshop experience you want for your students.
The book is written for educators, corporate trainers, university professors, and others who have a basic knowledge of Moodle. If you don’t know how to create basic courseware in Moodle, you can still use this book. But, you will need to learn those basics as you build the solutions in this book. You can use the online help, the forums on moodle.org, a basic Moodle book, and trial-and-error to fill in the gap in your knowledge.
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.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: “The file Microscopy.txt will have links to the other three pages. In the Wiki Markup language, links are encased in square brackets, like this: [The_Light_Microscope]”.
A block of code will be set as follows:
!!!Microscopy and Specimen Preparation [Lenses and the Bending of Light | Lenses_and_the_Bending_of_ Light] [The Light Microscope |The_Light_Microscope] [Preparation and Staining of Specimens | Preparation_and_Staining_ of_Specimens]
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font.
Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: “From the Add an activity… drop-down list, select Forum, as shown in the following screenshot”.
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