Book Image

Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Many people will recognize Moodle as a Virtual Learning Environment that can be used in schools to teach lessons and organize student information. Fewer people will realize that Moodle can be used in businesses to dispense training, share important documents, and encourage teamwork. Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner's Guide will show you how to set up Moodle in your corporation. By introducing a system within your company that will allow for a centralized, accessible repository of knowledge, staff training will become a lot more streamlined, and the retention of skills will improve, leading to huge productivity benefits. An easy-to-access, user-friendly system is crucial to keep communication flowing in any successful business. By putting your H.R. documents, newsletters, discussions, and training documents all in one place, which is accessible from the office or from home, you are giving your employees all the information that they need to be productive and become integrated members of your company. This book will show you how to get your important business documents online, as well as the recruitment and training processes. You will learn how to move any existing processes to Moodle, as well as set up new ones that will have you wondering what you did before Moodle came along!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing Moodle for experimentation


As Kenneth Grahame's character the Water Rat said in The Wind in the Willows, "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." One of the best tools to have to learn about Moodle is an installation where you can "mess about" without worrying about the impact on other people. Learning theory tells us we need to spend many hours practicing in a safe environment to become proficient. The authors of this book have collectively spent more than 5,000 hours experimenting, building, and messing about with Moodle.

There is much to be said for having the ability to play around with Moodle without worrying about other people seeing what you are doing, even after you go live with your Moodle solution. When dealing with some of the more advanced features, like permissions and conditional activities, you will need to be able to log in with multiple roles to ensure you have the options configured properly. If you make a mistake on a production server, you could create a support headache. Having your own sandbox provides that safe place.

So we are going to start your Moodle exploration by installing Moodle on your personal computer. If your corporate policy prohibits you from installing software on your machine, discuss getting a small area on a server set up for Moodle. The installation instructions below will work on either your laptop, personal computer, or a server.