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

Summary


Moodle encourages exploration and interaction among students and teachers. As a course designer and teacher, you will have the maximum number of tools at your disposal if you work with this tendency, which will make your learning experiences as interactive as possible. Creating courses with forums, peer-assessed workshops, surveys, and interactive lessons is more work than creating a course from a series of static web pages. However, it is also more engaging and effective, and you will find it worth the effort to use Moodle's many interactive features.

When teaching an online course in Moodle, remember that Moodle generally enables you to add, move, and modify course material on the fly. If it's permitted by your institution's policies, don't hesitate to change a course in response to student needs.

Keep in mind that if you're using the cloud-based virtual learning environment version of Moodle, MoodleCloud, you will have built-in options and may not be able to modify the course in the way you could if you had a custom or local (on-premise) installation.

Finally, learn the basics of Moodle's architecture, and at least read over the installation and configuration in Chapter 2, Installing Moodle. Don't be afraid of the technology. If you can master the difficult art of teaching, you can master using Moodle to its full potential.