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

Installation step 3 – Getting and unpacking Moodle


Get Moodle from the official website, http://www.moodle.org/. Go to the Moodledownloads page and select the version and format that you need.

Choosing a Moodle version

For a new installation, the latest stable branch is usually your best choice. The last build information tells you when it was last updated with a bug fix or a patch. This is usually irrelevant to you; the version number determines which features you get, not the build time.

For a production server, do not use the standalone packages mentioned earlier. They are insecure, because they are meant for use by a Moodle developer for experimentation and development. To make the development of a site easier and faster, security settings that would slow down development have been turned off by default. Standalone packages are a good choice if you want to experiment or develop a Moodle site on your local (non-networked) computer.

For a production site, instead of the standalone packages...