Book Image

Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Book Image

Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Overview of this book

Moodle is the most widely used Learning Management System in the world. Moodle is primarily used as an online learning course platform and few people know how to use it in any other way. However, Moodle can also be used as a management system. By adapting Moodle to become a curriculum and information management system, you can keep your administrative tasks in the same place as your lesson plans by managing student attendance records, recording grades, sharing reports between departments, and much more Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System will show you how you can use Moodle to set up an environment that enables you to disseminate information about your educational program, provides a forum for communication amongst all those involved in your institution, and even allows you to control your course registration and enrollment. This book is written on version 1.9 and also includes examples applicable to version 2.0. This book will show you how to create courses and organize them into categories. You will learn to assign teachers to each course, which will greatly help you to manage timetables and student enrolment, which can otherwise be a very frustrating and time consuming task. You will learn how to display the different aspects of your Curriculum and Information Management System to make it easily accessible and navigable for staff and students alike, ensuring that everyone knows what they are doing and where they are meant to be.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – installing the Mac OS X package


We will install the MAMP variety for Macintosh OS X because it is much more portable than the XAMPP variety. This means that once you have the MAMP folder in your Applications folder, all you need to do to use the MAMP package on a different computer is to copy the contents of the directory to the Applications folder of another machine running OS X. To install the Mac OS MAMP package, follow these steps:

  1. First, go to www.moodle.org and move your mouse over the Downloads menu item.

  2. Mouse over and click on the Moodle for Mac OS X link.

  3. Then click on the MAMP package to start the download as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. Once the download has completed, you will have a Moodle4Mac-MAMP-19.dmg file to work with. Double-click the file to decompress it. The following screenshot is of the window that will open when the dmg file has been mounted as a folder on your desktop.

  5. Copy the contents of the MAMP package to your Applications folder, as instructed in the window.

  6. Once all of the contents of the MAMP folder have been copied to your Applications folder, double-click on the MAMP application, shown in the following screenshot to launch the server control tool:

  7. Click the Start Servers button to start the servers on your local computer. The Moodle instance contained in the MAMP package is preconfigured to use these servers.

  8. The red light, to the left of the server name, will turn green signifying that it is running. The MAMP control tool will automatically open the MAMP startup page in your browser. Click on the Moodle tab, shown in the following screenshot, to open your Moodle site in a new page:

What just happened?

You have now installed all of the components necessary to turn your computer into an experimental server for your Moodle site. You also have a prepackaged instance of Moodle that is ready to use the servers you have installed and turned on. You can now jump forward to the Basic setup and customization of your Moodle site section in this chapter.