Book Image

Moodle 3 E-Learning Course Development - Fourth Edition

By : Susan Smith Nash, William Rice
Book Image

Moodle 3 E-Learning Course Development - Fourth Edition

By: Susan Smith Nash, William Rice

Overview of this book

Moodle is a learning platform or Course Management System (CMS) that is easy to install and use, but the real challenge is in developing a learning process that leverages its power and maps the learning objectives to content and assessments for an integrated and effective course. Moodle 3 E-Learning Course Development guides you through meeting that challenge in a practical way. This latest edition will show you how to add static learning material, assessments, and social features such as forum-based instructional strategy, a chat module, and forums 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. You’ll learn how to create and integrate third-party plugins and widgets in your Moodle app, implement site permissions and user accounts, and ensure the security of content and test papers. Further on, you’ll implement PHP scripts that will help you create customized UIs for your app. You’ll also understand how to create your first Moodle VR e-learning app using the latest VR learning experience that Moodle 3 has to offer. By the end of this book, you will have explored the decisions, design considerations, and thought processes that go into developing a successful course.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Standard blocks


Moodle gives you many standard blocks that you can add to your courses. Some of the most useful ones are discussed in the following sections.

The Activities block

The Activitiesblock lists all types of activities that are used in the course:

If a type of activity is not used in the course, the link for that type is not presented. The activity type is only shown if your course contains at least one instance of that type. When a user clicks on the type of activity, all those kinds of activities for the course are listed.

In the following screenshot, the user clicked on Forums in the Activities block, and a list of the resources in the course is presented:

Note

If this block is on the site's front page, clicking on a type of activity gives a list for the activities on the front page (not for the entire site).

The Blog menu block

By default, every Moodle user has a personal blog on the site. Selecting this block, as seen in the following screenshot, puts the menu into the sidebar of...