Moodle is a leading open source e-learning management system. With Moodle, teachers and professors can easily construct richly textured web-based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons. Each lesson consists of reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and group work among students.
This book shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. It will help you analyze your students' requirements and come to an understanding of what Moodle can do for them. After this, 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 is to develop a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively to the content-established learning situation. This book and e-book guides you to meet this challenge.
The latest edition of the ultimate introduction to Moodle will show you how to add static learning materials, interactive activities, and social features to your courses so that students reach their learning potential. Whether you want to support traditional class teaching or lecturing or provide complete online and distance e-learning courses, this book will prove to be a powerful resource throughout your use of Moodle.
This book is a complete guide to successful learning using Moodle. It is focused on course development and delivery using the best educational practices.
Screenshots of the courses in the Mount Orange School (http://school.demo.moodle.net) are attributed to https://moodle.net/, and copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Many thanks for supplying this demonstration site to the Moodle community.
Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, tells you 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 user experience. This helps you to decide how to make the best use of Moodle and plan your learning site.
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle, teaches you how to install Moodle on your web server.
Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, explains how to configure your site so that it behaves in the way you envision. It also helps you to create the user experience you want. If someone manages your Moodle site for you, you can use this chapter to learn about various configuration options that will make creating and teaching courses easier for you.
Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, shows you how to create course categories and new courses. It covers course settings that affect the behavior of a course. It also shows you how to enroll teachers and students in a course.
Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, covers some common settings that you will need to choose for all the resources and activities that you add. It also shows you how to control the flow of students through a course using conditional access. Also, you will learn how to hide, show, and rearrange items on your course's home page.
Chapter 6, Adding Resources, talks about resources as course materials that students read, but don't interact with, such as web pages, graphics, and Adobe Acrobat documents. This chapter teaches you how to add these resources to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, covers course activities that enable students to interact with the instructor, the learning system, or each other. In this chapter, you will see how to add several kinds of interactive course material: assignments, lessons, choices, and feedback.
Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, shows you how to evaluate your students' knowledge and attitude.
Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums, covers how Moodle excels at peer interaction. This chapter teaches you how to add social resources activities to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, provides insights on how to add wikis and glossaries to your course. These activities enable students to work together in order to build a body of knowledge.
Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, talks about a workshop that provides a place for students in a class to see an example project, upload their individual projects, and see and assess each other's projects.
Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, explains how to use groups to separate students in a course into teams. You will also learn how to use cohorts to mass enroll students to courses.
Chapter 13, Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks, provides insights on how every block adds functionality to your site or course. This chapter describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you to decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them.
Chapter 14, Features for Teachers, 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 on Moodle. To make the best use of Moodle, you will need to play the role of a teacher on a Moodle site. This means that you will need the ability to edit a course on the 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 when you configure the Moodle 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. This book is also helpful for those who create and deliver courses on the site, 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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " You can protect it either by using an .htaccess file or by placing the directory outside the web server's documents directory."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?php /// Moodle Configuration File unset($CFG); $CFG->dbtype = 'mysqli'; $CFG->dblibrary = 'native'; $CFG->dbhost = 'localhost'; $CFG->dbname = 'info-overload';
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: " The contents of the Administration menu change depending upon who is logged in ".
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