Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By : Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak
Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By: Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak

Overview of this book

The new and revamped Moodle is the top choice for developers to create cutting edge e-learning apps that cater to different user’s segments and are visually appealing as well. This book explains how the Moodle 3.x platform provides a framework that allows developers to create a customized e-learning solution. It begins with an exploration of the different types of plugin.. We then continue with an investigation of creating new courses. You will create a custom plugin that pulls in resources from a third-party repository. Then you’ll learn how users can be assigned to courses and granted the necessary permissions. Furthermore, you will develop a custom user home. At the end of the book, we’ll discuss the Web Services API to fully automate Moodle 3.x in real time.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
6
Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Chapter 4. Course Management

In Chapter 3, Internal Interfaces, we investigated core Moodle application programming interfaces--that is, libraries of functions provided to developers that ensure third-party plugins interface with Moodle in a coherent and consistent way. In this chapter, we will be developing plugins to enhance course layout and structure. We will be focusing on three different types of course plugin:

  • Course formats
  • Blocks
  • Text filters

Developing these plugin types will allow us to further explore Moodle's internal APIs--and allows us to see just how plugins can be used to alter Moodle's default behavior.

By the end of this chapter, you will have done the following:

  • Developed a new course format that will reveal activities depending on your GPS location
  • Investigated the intricacies of Moodle's file handling API (the File API) by developing a novel QR Code block
  • Explored how text filters can be used to manipulate onscreen text

The instructional designers (IDs) working on courses for...