Book Image

Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Book Image

Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Overview of this book

Moodle is the most widely used Learning Management System in the world. Moodle is primarily used as an online learning course platform and few people know how to use it in any other way. However, Moodle can also be used as a management system. By adapting Moodle to become a curriculum and information management system, you can keep your administrative tasks in the same place as your lesson plans by managing student attendance records, recording grades, sharing reports between departments, and much more Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System will show you how you can use Moodle to set up an environment that enables you to disseminate information about your educational program, provides a forum for communication amongst all those involved in your institution, and even allows you to control your course registration and enrollment. This book is written on version 1.9 and also includes examples applicable to version 2.0. This book will show you how to create courses and organize them into categories. You will learn to assign teachers to each course, which will greatly help you to manage timetables and student enrolment, which can otherwise be a very frustrating and time consuming task. You will learn how to display the different aspects of your Curriculum and Information Management System to make it easily accessible and navigable for staff and students alike, ensuring that everyone knows what they are doing and where they are meant to be.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using Moodle as a CIMS


In most institutions, there is a need to maintain data and information related to the education taking place as well as to perform various peripheral tasks that are not directly related to, or are at a macro level to the education itself.

Some examples of this type of peripheral work are:

  • Monitoring of student attendance records

  • Presenting information of course offerings to students in order that they may make decisions about what courses to take

  • Assigning courses to students in programs where students are not allowed to select their own courses

  • Controlling which courses, and how many courses, students can register for or enroll in

  • Establishing limits on how many students can enroll in a single course

  • Delivering and analyzing standardized tests to students within a school or other type of educational or training program and various other educational, administrative, and collaboration-type tasks and activities

As Moodle is designed to be extremely flexible and is provided as an open source package, it is fairly easy to extend, and even stretch Moodle through imaginative uses, installation of third-party contributed plugins, and minor code manipulations to enable it to function as a system that helps to manage an educational curriculum and to support the flow and use of information that is accumulated and digested in such educational settings. As such, Moodle will function as what I call a Curriculum and Information Management System (CIMS), while simultaneously functioning as an LMS. The CIMS idea encapsulates the various tasks that surround an educational institution and includes functions that are often performed by Portals, Student Information Systems (SIS), and Content Management Systems (CMS). As a CIMS, Moodle can perform all of the tasks listed in the previous paragraph as well as a host of others that will be introduced in subsequent chapters. Get ready for an exciting adventure in setting up Moodle as your core CIMS and LMS!