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

Using course categories and the user experience


Categories are a site-wide way to organize your courses. You can also create subcategories. The categories or subcategories become an online course catalog. Organize them in the same intuitive way that you would organize a printed course catalog.

Every Moodle course must be assigned to at least one-course category. Even if you choose to hide the display of categories, each course must still belong to a category; that's how the Moodle platform is organized. For sites with one or a few courses, we often hide and ignore the categories and display just the courses. When we need to show our users an organized catalog, we display the categories and subcategories.

Displaying courses and categories on your front page

There are several ways to display categories on the front page of your Moodle site.

The list that shows both course categories and the courses is called the combo list. You can configure the courses block to make it visible on the left or...