When you create a Moodle learning site, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from each step. Each step is listed below, with a brief description of the chapter that supports that step.
As you work your way through each chapter, your learning site will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, interactive learning site. As you learn more about what Moodle can do, and see your courses taking shape, you may want to change some of the things that you did in previous chapters. Moodle offers you this flexibility. And, this book helps you to determine how those changes will cascade throughout your site.
Every Learning Management System (LMS) has a paradigm, or approach, that shapes the user experience and encourages a certain kind of usage. An LMS might encourage very sequential learning by offering features that enforce a given order for each course. It might discourage student-to-student interaction by offering few features that support it, while encouraging solo learning by offering many opportunities for the student to interact with the course material. In this chapter, you will learn what Moodle can do and what kind of user experience your students and teachers will have when they use Moodle. You will also learn about the Moodle philosophy, and how it shapes the user experience. With this information, you'll be ready to decide how to make the best use of Moodle's many features, and to plan your online learning site.
This chapter guides you through installing Moodle on your web server. It will help you to estimate the amount of disk space, bandwidth, and memory that you will need for Moodle. This can help you to decide upon the right hosting service for your needs.
Most of the decisions that you make when installing and configuring Moodle will affect the user experience. Not just students and teachers, but also course creators and site administrators are affected by these decisions. Although Moodle's online help does a good job of telling you how to install and configure the software, it doesn't tell you how the settings you choose affect the user experience. Chapter 3 covers the implications of these decisions, and helps you to configure the site so that it behaves in the way that you envision.
In Moodle, every course belongs to a category. Chapter 4 takes you through the creation of course categories, and the creation of courses. Just as you chose sitewide settings during installation and configuration, you choose course-wide settings when creating each course. This chapter tells you the implications of the various course settings, so that you can create the experience that you want for each course. It also shows you how to add teachers and students to courses.
In most online courses, the core material consists of web pages that the students view. These pages can contain text, graphics, movies, sound files, games, and exercises: anything that can appear on the World Wide Web can appear on a Moodle web page. Chapter 5 covers how to add web pages to Moodle courses, and also how to add other kinds of static course material: links to other websites, media files, labels, and directories of files. This chapter also helps you to decide when to use each of these types of material.
In this context, "interactive" means interaction between the student and teacher, or the student and an active web page. Student-to-student interaction is covered in the next step. This chapter covers activities that involve interaction between the student and an active web page, or between the student and the teacher. Interactive course material includes lessons that guide students through a defined path based upon their answers to review questions, and assignments that are uploaded by the student and then graded by the teacher. Chapter 6 tells you how to create these interactions, and how each of them affects the student and teacher experience.
In Chapter 7, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, Choices, and Feedback, you'll learn how to evaluate students' knowledge with a Quiz. You will also learn how to to evaluate their attitude towards the class by using the Feedback activity. Finally, you'll learn how to evaluate students' opinions by using the Choice activity.
Social course material enables student-to-student interaction. Moodle allows you to add chats, forums, and Wikis to your courses. These types of interactions will be familiar to many students. You can also create glossaries that are site-wide and ones that are specific to a single course. Students can also add to the glossaries. Finally, Moodle offers a powerful workshop tool, which enables students to view and evaluate each others, work. Each of these interactions makes the course more interesting, but also makes it more complicated for the teacher to manage. Chapter 8 helps you to make the best use of Moodle's social features. The result is a course that encourages students to contribute, share, and engage.
Every block adds functionality to your site or your course. You can use blocks to display calendars, enable commenting, enable tagging, show navigation features, and much more. This chapter describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them.
Moodle offers several tools to help teachers administer and deliver courses. It keeps detailed access logs that enable teachers to see exactly what content students accessed, and when they did so. It also allows teachers to establish custom grading scales, which are available site-wide or for a single course. Student grades can be accessed online and also downloaded to a spreadsheet program. Finally, teachers can collaborate in special forums (bulletin boards) reserved just for them.