Book Image

Moodle 2.0 First Look

Book Image

Moodle 2.0 First Look

Overview of this book

Moodle is currently the world's most popular E-learning platform. The long-awaited second version of Moodle is now available and brings with it greatly improved functionality. If you are planning to upgrade your site to Moodle 2.0 and want to be up-to-date with the latest developments, then this book is for you.This book takes an in-depth look at all of the major new features in Moodle 2.0 and how it differs from previous Moodle versions. It highlights changes to the standard installation and explains the new features with clear screenshots, so you can quickly take full advantage of Moodle 2.0. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Moodle 2.0, and will give you the confidence to make the move up to Moodle 2.0, either as an administrator or a course teacher.With its step-by-step introduction to the new features of Moodle 2.0, this book will leave you confident and keen to get your own courses up and running on Moodle 2.0. It will take you on a journey from basic navigation to advanced administration, looking at the changes in resource management and activity setup along the way. It will show you new ways tutors and students can control the pace of their learning and introduce you to the numerous possibilities for global sharing and collaborating now available in Moodle 2.0
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Moodle 2.0 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

A new way of managing your content


In Moodle 1.x, the Resource module offered the teacher in a course the ability to upload their documents, create web pages in Moodle, or even display a directory of materials. Users, who had particularly large files, say SCORM packages or multimedia for example, were able to upload via FTP once they knew the directory number for their course and were granted the rights to do so. Moodle 2.0 does away with most of this, using a different philosophy for file management. It has more functionality and is more secure; however, for some it might initially appear more complex to manoeuvre.

Compare and contrast the Add a resource… drop-down in Moodle 2.0 (on the left) and Moodle 1.9 on the right:

Note the simpler, clearer terms:

  • File (instead of link to a file or web site)

  • Folder (instead of Display a directory)

  • Page (instead of Compose a web page/Compose a text page)

  • URL (instead of link to a file or web site)

In Chapter 3, Editing Text and Adding Files and Chapter 4, What's New in Add a Resource we'll look more closely at the way you can display content in Moodle 2.0. While you are still able to upload all your word-processed documents and Powerpoint presentations, you can also easily embed media from other sites such as http://www.youtube.com/ or http://www.flickr.com/ from the new text editor (based on the popular tinyMCE editor as used in WordPress for example). Here's a screenshot of the so-called File Picker where you can see that, alongside files already in Moodle and files you might want to upload, there is a link and the facility to search YouTube: