Most readers, by now, will be familiar with Moodle through the excellent publications from Packt, but a quick overview is useful to remind ourselves of why it has been chosen for this subject guide. In addition, the methods and practices in this book will be supported through a Moodle site set up to support Design Technology (DT).
Support can be found at www.dtmoodle.org.uk. Please feel free to register and join in with the discussions and help each other out. The more material we can amass together, the easier it will be for all of us.
In this chapter, we will take a look at setting up a very basic Moodle course in order to begin building our more DT specific elements. We will briefly look at setting up some basic resources and then add some interactive materials. These on their own would build a useful course, but we will then extend the facilities and features in order to maximize student participation and curriculum support. We will also look at the basic reporting and assessment tools available and how to enhance the look of your course. These will build the foundations from which we can build more sophisticated and comprehensive sites to support DT.
Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that is based on open source principles and the educational philosophy called social constructivism.
Note
You can find out more about the philosophical underpinnings through a search on the Internet or through Moodle's own document page at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy.
This methodology holds that the best and most effective way for people to learn is by a collaborative sharing of knowledge and practice. Moodle is therefore designed from the ground up to support collaborative learning practices and methods. In addition, Moodle is part of the open source movement, which is a large community of people who support each other and work towards some shared goals. At the time of writing, this number is close to 850,000. If you join in with the Moodle community through forums and conferences, you will find a wealth of information and help available from people throughout the world. This large pool of people is really what makes Moodle work so well. There is a good chance that any problem that you may have had with an aspect of using Moodle has already been solved by someone else or a group of people. This will save you a great deal of valuable time and energy.
Once you have logged in to a Moodle site, you will have been granted some sort of role. In most instances, as we are dealing with supporting students, this is likely to be a teacher role. This role will allow you to customize your own courses and add material to them, as well as support and assess the progress of the students who are also enrolled in the course.
The three key roles you are likely to deal with will be your own as teacher, the non-editing teacher role for class-based assistants, and the student role. The basic overview of roles can be found on the Administration panel under Users. The overview of the roles is displayed there, as shown in the following screenshot:
When you log on to your own course, you will see the various roles that users have been granted. Once you log in to Moodle, you will see which courses you have access to. If you are watching a particular course, you will see the role that you are assigned, as shown in the following screenshot:
