Book Image

Moodle Course Design Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Susan Smith Nash
Book Image

Moodle Course Design Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Susan Smith Nash

Overview of this book

Moodle is a leading virtual learning environment for your online course. This book incorporates the principles of instructional design, showing you how to apply them to your Moodle courses. With this guidance, you will develop and deploy better courses, content, and assessments than ever. This book will guide you as you learn how to build and incorporate many different types of course materials and dynamic activities. You will learn how to improve the structure and presentation of resources, activities, and assessments. All this will help you to create better for self-led courses, instructor-led courses, and courses for collaborative groups. The use of multimedia features to enhance your Moodle courses is also explained in this book. Our goal is to encourage creativity, and the free MoodleCloud hosting option is an ideal place for teachers, students, trainers, and administrators to jump in and play with all the new features, which include powerful new plug-ins, new resources, and activities. Moodle can be your sandbox as well as your castle of learning! With this book, you will build learning experiences that will last your learners’ lifetimes.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

To get the most out of this book

These are the things you’ll need to keep in mind in order to get the most out of this book:

  1. You’ll need to be able to use basic HTML
  2. You’ll need a good text editor, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word
  3. You’ll need to be able to use photo editing programs, either Cloud-based (Flickr or GIMP, for example) or installed on-premise (MS-Paint, for example)
  4. You’ll need to be able to use cloud-based video, audio, and presentation editing and hosting apps, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, SlideShare, Screencast-o-matic, Soundcloud, in order to create content and host it on the cloud due to space limitations in Moodle
  5. You’ll need to be able to use spreadsheet programs (Excel or Google Sheets) to import and export student records and questions to test banks in quizzes

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Note the full course name in the <title> and <meta> tags. Many search engines give a lot of weight to the title tag. If your Moodle system is open to search engines, choose your course title with this in mind."

A block of code is set as follows:

<head>
<title>Course: Non-Surgical Anti-Aging Services </title>
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="http://localhost/moodle/theme/image.php/standard/theme/1359480837/favicon" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="moodle, Course: Non-Surgical Anti-
Aging Services" />

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<head>
<title>Course: Non-Surgical Anti-Aging Services </title>
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="http://localhost/moodle/theme/image.php/standard/theme/1359480837/favicon" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="moodle, Course: Non-Surgical Anti-
Aging Services" />

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ git clone -b MOODLE_{{Version3}}_STABLE git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git  

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "To use conditional activities, your system administrator must enable the feature Enable conditional access under Site administration | Advanced Features."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.