Moodle is the leading open source learning management system. Using Moodle, teachers can easily construct richly-textured web-based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons, with each lesson including reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and group work between students.
Moodle 2.0 E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. It will help you to analyze your students' requirements, and come to an understanding of what Moodle can do for them. After that, you'll see how to use every feature of Moodle to meet your course goals. Moodle is relatively easy to install and use, but the real challenge lies in developing a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively onto the established learning situation. This book guides you through meeting that challenge.
Whether you are the site creator or a course creator, you can use this book as you would a project plan. As you work your way through each chapter, the book provides guidance on making decisions that meet your goals for your learning site. This helps you to create the kind of learning experience that you want for your teachers (if you're the site creator) or students (if you're the teacher). You can also use this book as a traditional reference manual, but its main advantages are its step-by-step, project-oriented approach, and the guidance it gives you on creating an interactive learning experience.
Moodle is designed to be intuitive to use, and its online help is well written. It does a good job of telling you how to use each of its features. What Moodle's help files don't tell you is, when and why to use each feature, and what effect the feature will have on the students' experience. That is what this book provides.
This book shows you how to add static learning material, interactive activities, and social features to your courses, so that students can reach their full learning potential. This book is a complete guide to successful teaching using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery, and using the best educational practices.
Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle: In this chapter, you will learn what Moodle can do and what kind of user experiences you can create for your students and teachers. You will also learn how the Moodle philosophy shapes the user experience. This helps you to decide how to make the best use of Moodle, and to plan your learning site.
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle: This chapter guides you through the installation of Moodle on your Web server.
Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site: This chapter helps you to configure your site so that it behaves in the way that you envision, and helps to create the user experience that you want. If someone manages your Moodle site for you, you can use this chapter to learn about configuration options that will make the creation and teaching of courses easier for you and your teachers.
Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses: This chapter shows you how to create course categories and new courses. It covers course settings that affect the behavior of the course. It also shows you how to enroll teachers and students in a course.
Chapter 5, Adding Static Course Material: Static course materials are resources that students view or listen to, but don't interact with. This chapter shows you how to add web pages, graphics, Adobe Acrobat documents, and media to a course.
Chapter 6, Adding Interaction with Lessons and Assignments: Lessons and Assignments are Moodle activities that allow the student to interact with Moodle, and with the teacher. This chapter shows you how to create and use those activities.
Chapter 7, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, Choices, and Feedback: This chapter shows you how to evaluate your students' knowledge and attitudes to your course.
Chapter 8, Adding Social Activities to Your Course: Moodle excels at peer interaction. This chapter shows you several tools for making student-to-student interaction an integral part of your course.
Chapter 9, Blocks: Every block adds functionality to your site or your course. This chapter describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them.
Chapter 10, Features for Teachers: This chapter shows you how to use Moodle's gradebook and logs to track student activity.
This book is designed for people who are creating and delivering courses in Moodle. To make the best use of this book, you will need to have the role of Teacher on a Moodle site. That is, you will need the ability to edit a course on a Moodle site.
This book also contains some information for the Administrator of a Moodle site. Even if you're not the Site Administrator, you can use this information to work with your Administrator to configure the site and use logs and reports.
This book is for anyone who wants to make the most of Moodle's features to produce an interactive online learning experience. If you're an educator, corporate trainer, or just someone with something to teach, this book can guide you through the installation, configuration, creation, and management of a Moodle site. It is suitable for people who perform the task of creating and setting up the learning site, and for those who create and deliver courses on the site. That is, this book is for Site Administrators, Course Creators, and Teachers.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The PHP installed on your server uses a file called php.ini to store its settings."
A block of code is set as follows:
$CFG->dbtype = 'mysql'; $CFG->dbhost = 'localhost'; $CFG->dbname = 'info-overload'; $CFG->dbuser = 'info-overload'; $CFG->dbpass = 'badpassword'; $CFG->dbpersist = false; $CFG->prefix = 'mdl20_';
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<meta name="description" content="
Welcome to the Wilderness Skills site
title>Wilderness Skills</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="moodle, Wilderness Skills " />New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to the Download Moodle page and select the version and format that you need".
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