Preface
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, provide a forum for communication among all those involved in your institution, and even to control your course registration and enrollment.
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 enrollment, 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.
This book is a practical step-by-step guide to expand the functionality of your Moodle Learning Management System.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Welcome to Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System (CIMS)!, explains how to expand the use of the Moodle system to function as a portal for information exchange, professional collaboration, and curriculum management.
Chapter 2, Building the Foundation—Creating Categories and Courses, explains and demonstrates how to create and organize the courses offered in your curriculum, within Moodle.
Chapter 3, Student Account Creation and Enrollment, explains how to create student accounts in bulk and experiment with different ways of enrolling those students in courses on the Moodle site.
Chapter 4, Incorporating Educational Standards, introduces and explains some tasks that will enable you to incorporate educational standards in your Moodle CIMS site.
Chapter 5, Enabling your Moodle Site to Function as an Information Portal, explores some of the possibilities such as modifying display settings, removing course lists from the category page, increasing the detailed summary settings, and others, through discussion and experimentation.
Chapter 6, Customized Roles, explores various methods for monitoring and reporting on student access and performance in the Moodle site.
Chapter 7, Advanced Data Access and Display, explores the installation and use of several tools that allow for more advanced methods of accessing data generated and used by your Moodle site.
Chapter 8, Setting Up a Mini SIS, explores two different methods of setting up Moodle to function as an SIS.
Chapter 9, Promoting Efficient Communication, introduces and explains the strategies for establishing an efficient communication portal through your Moodle CIMS.
Chapter 10, Advanced Enrollment Plugin, covers how to enable your site to function as a registration and enrollment system that will allow you to regulate how students matriculate through the set of courses that make up your curriculum.
What you need for this book
A web browser (Firefox preferred)
A text editor
Who this book is for
If you are a teacher or head of a department in an institution and are interested in how Moodle can be used to streamline curriculum delivery and information flow in your institution, this book is for you. This book is also useful for Moodle administrators.
Conventions
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 are shown as follows: "This will download a compressed package containing all of the files for the block called myCourses.zip."
A block of code is set as follows:
if (!defined('FRONTPAGECOURSELIMIT')) {
define('FRONTPAGECOURSELIMIT', 200);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: "Select your language and click on the Next button found at the bottom of the screen."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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