Book Image

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Schools, colleges and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and along the way plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there– you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and video. Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast – moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students, and less work for you.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


We learned a lot in this chapter about communicating online. If we are going to convert our courses to Moodle then communication and communicating well is more vital than ever. You wont be able to use the kinds of gestures, expressions, and verbal clues that you would normally use to talk to people in the real world. We saw how you could use forums and chat rooms as teaching tools, and Moodle messages as a course administration tool.

Specifically, we covered:

  • How to add a chat room to a Moodle course using Moodle's very own built-in instant messaging system (such as MSN). A Moodle chat room allows students to talk in real time when they (or we) are out of the classroom. We explored the pros and the cons of using this activity.

  • You can announce when you are going to be available for a chat, and we learned how to add a mini-calendar onto our course front pages to make it easy for students to see what course-related events are about to happen.

  • How debates and discussions could be had online...