Now our journey with Moodle has begun and already we've learned a lot about the system.
Specifically, we covered:
The origins of Moodle: We learned that Moodle was the brainchild of someone who was home schooled. Martin Dougiamas designed a system to support collaboration and learning by sharing knowledge. Although that's the underlying pedagogy, we learned that Moodle can support many different learning styles.
How to log on to Moodle: We learned how to change our passwords and covered what you need to do in the event that you forget it. We also covered how to make sure you've logged off. We don't want students being able to get onto the system pretending they are you.
Modifying our user profiles: We saw that Moodle administrators can "lock" certain aspects of our user profiles (mine had my First name, Surname, and Email fields locked). But I could still modify my description and we saw how to do this.
Roles and capabilities: We saw how different roles have different capabilities, and that your role depends on the context. For example, I'm a teacher in the courses I teach in, but in the courses I'm enrolled on I'm a student.
Moodle look-and-feel: Together we learned about the different elements that make up a Moodle page.
We also briefly discussed what we're going to cover in the rest of this book.
Now that we've got a feel for Moodle we're ready to configure a Moodle course which is the topic of the next chapter.