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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Sprache: Englisch
A complete guide on course development and delivery using Moodle 3.x
Key Features
- Get the best out of the latest Moodle 3 framework to ensure successful learning
- Create 3rd party plugins and widgets and secure your course efficiently
- Create your first Moodle VR app using the Moodle VR toolset
Book Description
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.
What you will learn
- Know what Moodle does and how it supports your teaching strategies
- Install Moodle on your computer and navigate your way around it
- Understand all of Moodle's learning features
- Monitor how learners interact with your site using site statistics
- Add multimedia content to your site
- Allow students to enroll themselves or invite other students to join a course
Who this book is for
This book is for anyone who wants to get the best out of Moodle. As a beginner, this is a thorough guide for you to understand how the software works, with great ideas for getting off to a good start with your first course. Some experience of working with e-learning systems will be beneficial. Experienced Moodle users will find powerful insights into developing successful and educational courses.
Susan Smith Nash has been designing and developing online courses and programs for more than 15 years for education, training, and personal development. In addition to Moodle 3.x Teaching Techniques, Packt Publishing, she is the author of a number of Moodle books and training videos, including Moodle Course Design - Best Practices and Moodle for Training and Professional Development. Other Packt Publishing instructional videos include two on the Canvas Virtual Learning Environment. She has also authored Video-Assisted Mobile Learning for Writing Courses. William Rice is an e-learning professional from New York City. He has written books on Moodle, Blackboard, Magento, and software training. He enjoys building e-learning solutions for businesses and gains professional satisfaction when his courses help students. His hobbies include writing books, practicing archery near JFK Airport, and playing with his children. William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society, how we create our tools, and how they shape us in turn. Married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, he has two amazing sons.Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 441
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Moodle 3 E-Learning Course Development Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Commissioning Editor: Amarabha BanerjeeAcquisition Editor: Larissa PintoContent Development Editor: Flavian VazTechnical Editor: Vaibhav DwivediCopy Editor: Shaila KusanaleProject Coordinator: Devanshi DoshiProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer: Pratik ShirodkarGraphics: Jason MonteiroProduction Coordinator: Aparna Bhagat
First published: June 2008 Second edition: August 2011 Third edition: June 2015 Fourth edition: May 2018
Production reference: 1250518
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78847-219-7
www.packtpub.com
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Contributors
About the authors
Susan Smith Nash has been designing and developing online courses and programs for more than 15 years for education, training, and personal development. In addition to Moodle 3.x Teaching Techniques, Packt Publishing, she is the author of a number of Moodle books and training videos, including Moodle Course Design - Best Practices and Moodle for Training and Professional Development. Other Packt Publishing instructional videos include two on the Canvas Virtual Learning Environment. She has also authored Video-Assisted Mobile Learningfor Writing Courses.
William Rice is an e-learning professional from New York City. He has written books on Moodle, Blackboard, Magento, and software training. He enjoys building e-learning solutions for businesses and gains professional satisfaction when his courses help students.
His hobbies include writing books, practicing archery near JFK Airport, and playing with his children.
William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society, how we create our tools, and how they shape us in turn. Married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, he has two amazing sons.
About the reviewers
Donald Schwartz has been designing and managing Moodle since 2003. He is an expert on video e-learning course presentation and delivery to large and disparate clients. His clients include medical societies (AOA), engineering schools, a startup med-tech school, a distributed recruitment firm, and many of the ENR top 50 for their CAD software training.
Don is the Principal of VectorSpect LLC, a New Hampshire USA based e-learning consultancy.
Don has reviewed two other Packt publications: Gamification with Moodle and Moodle Administration Essentials.
John Walker is a licensed professional engineer in industrial engineering and currently a licensed full-time teacher in computer science at Cleveland High School in Portland, OR. He has worked on GameMaker Essentials and the GameMaker Cookbook for Packt Publishing. John has used Moodle since 2005 and beyond administering Moodle and creating courses, has created Open Educational resources using Moodle.
Packt is searching for authors like you
If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.packtpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Moodle 3 E-Learning Course Development Fourth Edition
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the authors
About the reviewers
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
A Guided Tour of Moodle
Moodle's philosophy of learning
A plan to create your learning site
Step-by-step instructions to use Moodle
Step 1 – Learning about the Moodle experience
Step 2 – Installing Moodle
Step 3 – Configuring your site
Step 4 – Creating the framework for your learning site
Step 5 – Making decisions about common settings
Step 6 – Adding basic course material
Step 7 – Making your courses interactive
Step 8 – Evaluating your students
Step 9 – Making your course social
Step 10 – Adding collaborative activities
Step 11 – Managing and extending your courses
Step 12 – Taking the pulse of your course
Applying the Moodle philosophy
Adding static content
Interactive and social course material
Creating activities
The Moodle experience
The Moodle front page
Arriving at the site
Using moodlecloud.com
The main menu
Blocks
The site description
Available courses
Inside a course
The navigation bar
Blocks
The navigation block
Sections
Joining a discussion
Completing a lesson
Editing mode
Normal mode versus editing mode
The Edit icon
The Delete icon
The Hidden/Shown icons
The Group icons
Resources and activities
Adding resources and activities
The administration menu
The Moodle architecture
The Moodle application directory
The Moodle data directory
The Moodle database
Summary
Installing Moodle
Installation step 1 – Requirements
Hardware
Disk space
Bandwidth and data transfer limits
Memory
Ensuring minimum prerequisites
Installation step 2 – Subdomain or subdirectory?
Installation step 3 – Getting and unpacking Moodle
Choosing a Moodle version
The quick way – Upload and unzip
Uploading and decompressing the ZIP file on the server
Installation step 4 – Creating an empty database
Installation step 5 – Creating the (moodledata) data directory
Creating the database
Installation step 6 – Installing Moodle
Web-based installer
Installation step 7 – Final configuration
MoodleCloud basics
Getting started with MoodleCloud
MoodleCloud options
Summary
Configuring Your Site
Being mindful of user experience
On-premise versus MoodleCloud
Preparing to experiment
Creating test accounts
Installing several browsers
Exploring the site administration menu
Configuring authentication methods
Manual accounts and no login methods
Manually creating a new user
Suspending a user's account
Enabling email-based self-registration
Authenticating against an external source
Connecting to an external database or server
What happens when users are deleted from the external database?
What happens when usernames are changed in the external database?
Granting access to courses with enrollment choices
Name
Instances/enrollments
Enable
Up/down
Settings
Manual enrollments
Manually enrolling a student in a course
Guest access
Enabling Guest access for a course
Self enrolment
Cohort sync
Creating a cohort
Adding users to a cohort
Adding a user from the cohort page
Adding a student using the bulk action method
Enrolling a cohort in a course
Category enrollments
The flat file
The file
Student ID number required
Course ID required
Role
Summary of flat files
IMS Enterprise file
LDAP
External database
External database connection
Local field mappings
Remote enrolment sync and creation of new courses
PayPal
Mnet remote enrollments (formerly Moodle networking)
Language
About language files
Installing and enabling additional languages
Installing additional languages
Configuring the language
Sitewide locale
Excel encoding
Offering courses in multiple languages
Security settings
The IP blocker – Limiting access to specific locations
Site policies
Protect usernames
Forcing users to log in
Forcing users to log in for profiles
Open to Google
Maximum uploaded file size
Changing the limit on uploaded file size in PHP
Changing the limit on uploaded file size in Apache
Allowing embed and object tags
HTTP security
Using HTTPS for logins
Running Moodle entirely from HTTPS
Filters
Activity names and glossary auto-linking filters
Math filters
Email protection filter
Multimedia plugins
Multi-language content
Word censorship
HTML tidy
Configuring the front page
How to use this section
Front page settings page
Full site name
Front page items
Using a topic section on the front page
Show news items
Backup
Setting up the cron job
Summary
Creating Categories and Courses
Planning based on your institution's mission and vision
Using course categories and the user experience
Displaying courses and categories on your front page
Displaying an uncategorized list of courses on your front page
Choosing the best option for your front page
Creating course categories
Rearranging course categories
Creating courses
Creating a new and blank course
Enrolling teachers and students
Assigning teachers
How to set enrollment methods
Handling course requests
Enabling course requests
Getting notified about course requests
How to request a new course (teachers and students)
Summary
Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access
Mapping your approach
Identifying course goals and learning objectives
Settings that are common to all resources and activities
Adding a resource or activity
Entering the name and description
Showing and hiding a resource or an activity
Setting the availability of a resource or an activity
Using the visibility setting to show or hide a resource
Using the ID number to include a resource in the grade book
Restricting access
Summary of the process to use completion conditions
Creating the activities and resources that need to be completed
Creating the activity completion settings
Creating the activities or resources that will be restricted
Setting the competency conditions
Allowing students to see the activity or resource before they can access it
Rearrange/move items on the course home page
Summary
Adding Resources
Tying resources to course outcomes
Adding different kinds of resources
Adding URLs
Display options – Embed, Open, and In pop-up
Embed
Open
In pop-up
Adding pages
Adding a page to your course
Adding images
Inserting an image file
Inserting a hot-linked picture into a Moodle page
Pasting text
Stripping out the formatting – Pasting plain text
Pasting text from Microsoft Word
Composing in an HTML editor and uploading to Moodle
Learn more about HTML
Adding files for your students to download
When a student selects a file from the course
File repositories
Types of repositories
Using file-sharing services to collaborate
Using repositories to overcome Moodle's limit on file sizes
Enabling the filesystem repository
Creating the directory for the filesystem repository
Uploading files to the filesystem repository
Creating the filesystem repository in your course
Adding media – Video and audio
Adding video or audio to a page
Organizing your course
Name your topics
Rearrange/move items on the course home page
Giving directions and organization with labels
Summary
Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices
Instructional strategy
Learning objectives
Competency learning definitions
Definitions
Selecting assignments
Understanding assignments
What you can do with an assignment
Types of work students can submit
Submitting a digital file
Requiring students to submit online text
Submitting work done in the real world
Submitting an assignment from the student's perspective
Grading an assignment
Receiving a grade for an assignment
Allowing a student to resubmit an assignment
Adding an assignment
Availability
Submission types
Feedback types
Submission settings
Group submission settings
Notifications
Printer-friendly directions
Indicating that assignments are mandatory
Lesson
Definition of a lesson
Example of a simple lesson with remedial page jump
Types of lesson pages
Content pages
Cluster with questions
End of branch
Planning, creating pages, and adding content
Configuring lesson settings
General settings
Appearance
File popup
Display ongoing score
Display left menu and minimum grade to display menu
Maximum number of answers
Use default feedback
Link to next activity
Prerequisite lesson
The flow control
Allow student review
Provide option to try a question again
Maximum number of attempts
Number of pages to show
Grade
The Practice lesson
Custom scoring
Handling of retakes
Minimum number of questions
Adding the first lesson page
Importing questions
Adding a content page
Adding a cluster
Adding a question page
Creating a question page
Page Title
Page Contents
Answers
Responses
Jumps
This Page
Next or Previous Page
Specific Pages
Unseen question within a cluster
Random question within a content page
Creating pages and assigning jumps
The flow of pages
Editing the lesson
Collapsed and expanded
Rearranging pages
Editing pages
Adding pages
Feedback
Feedback isn't just for students
Creating a feedback activity
Question types
Adding a page break
Avoiding bots with captcha
Inserting information
Adding a label
Creating a textbox for a longer text answer
Displaying multiple-choice questions
Creating multiple-choice questions
The numeric answer
The short-text answer
Viewing feedback
Seeing individual responses
Analyzing responses with the Analysis tab
Choice
The student's point of view
The teacher's point of view
Limit
Display Mode
Publish results
Privacy of results
Allowing students to change their minds
Summary
Evaluating Students with Quizzes
Developing graded assignments using quizzes
Question banks
Configuring quiz settings
General
Timing
Grade
Layout
The question behavior
Adaptive mode
Interactive with multiple tries
Immediate feedback
Deferred feedback
Each attempt builds on the last
Review options
Appearance
Extra restrictions on attempts
Techniques for greater security
The overall feedback
Common module settings
Adding questions to a quiz
Adding questions to the Question bank
Moving questions between categories
Managing the proliferation of questions and categories
Creating and editing question categories
Creating a question
Question types
Adding feedback to a question
Types of feedback for a question
Feedback for individual responses
Feedback for a numeric question
Adding the existing questions from the question bank
Adding random questions to a quiz
Maximum grade
Grade for each question
Changing the order of questions
Preventing glossary auto-linking in quiz questions
Preventing an open book quiz
Mastery learning
Competency Frameworks
Certificates
Badges
Summary
Getting Social with Chats and Forums
A forum-based instructional strategy
Learning from one another
The Chat module
The chat settings page
The name of this chat room
Description
The next chat time and repeat/publish sessions
Saving past sessions – Past sessions and everyone can view past sessions
Preventing students from seeing one another's chats
Creating and running forums
Forum-based content delivery
Forum-based assignments
Forum-based peer review
Forum-based review and link to assessments
General purpose forum
Using the news forum to send notifications
Multiple forums
Forum settings
General settings
The forum name
The forum description
The forum type
The maximum attachment size
The maximum number of attachments
The display word count
The subscription mode
Read tracking
Post threshold to block settings
Ratings
Summary
Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries
Using collaboration as an instructional strategy
Glossary
Enabling glossaries and auto-linking
Enabling glossaries for your site
Enabling auto-linking
Enabling auto-linking for the site
Enabling auto-linking for the course
Enabling auto-linking for the activity or resource
Adding and configuring a glossary
The global glossary versus local glossary
The main glossary versus secondary glossary
Entries approved by default
Always allow editing and Duplicate entries allowed
Allowing comments
Automatically linking glossary entries
Appearance settings
Enabling ratings
Adding glossary entries
Importing and exporting entries
Wiki
Using a wiki for student contributions and explanations of a topic
Using a wiki to create a list of judging criteria for evaluating a competition
Planning collaborative projects – Using the wiki type and groups mode to determine who can edit a wiki
Event planning
Business plan for a start-up
Using the wiki type and groups mode to determine who can edit a wiki
The first-page name
The Default format
Summary
Running a Workshop
Why use a workshop?
When are group project-based workshops best?
Workshop strategies
Peer assessment of submissions
The timing of submissions and assessments
The four questions
The four phases
The setup phase – The edit settings page
Name and description
Grading settings
The grading strategy
The Submission settings
Assessment settings
Feedback settings
Example submissions settings
Availability settings
The edit assessment form page
Adding an example to the workshop
The submission phase – Students submit their work
Allocating submissions
The assessment phase
The grading evaluation phase
The closed phase
Summary
Groups and Cohorts
Groups versus cohorts
Cohorts
Creating a cohort
Adding students to a cohort
Manually adding and removing students to a cohort
Adding students to a cohort in bulk – Upload
Cohort sync
Enabling the cohort sync enrollment method
Adding the cohort sync enrollment method to a course
Unenroll a cohort from a course
Differences between cohort sync and enrolling a cohort
Managing students with groups
Course versus activity
The three group modes
Creating a group
Manually creating and populating a group
Automatically creating and populating a group
Importing groups
Summary
Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks
Defining a block
Uses of blocks
Examples of blocks in action
Configuring where a block appears
Standard blocks
The Activities block
The Blog menu block
The Blog tags block
The CALENDAR block
The comments block
The Course completion block
Course/site summary
The Courses block
The FEEDBACK block
The HTML block
The Latest News block
The Logged in user block
The Messages block
The My latest badges block
The My private files block
The Online users block
The quiz results block
The Random glossary entry block
The recent activity block
The Remote RSS feeds block
The Search Forums block
Section links
The Upcoming Events block
Summary
Features for Teachers
Logs and reports
Viewing course logs
Viewing live logs
Viewing activity reports
The participation report
Using activity tracking
Viewing grades
Categorizing grades
Viewing grade categories
Creating grade categories
To create a grade category
To assign an item to a grade category
Using extra credit
Weighting a category
Compensating for a difficult category
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
This book will guide you in setting up a course and also use Moodle’s unique attributes and platform. It will take you on a journey from conception to actualization. After working through this book, you will be able to design, launch, and administer courses in Moodle using effective instructional design that is both attractive and engaging. You will be able to configure your courses so that they incorporate success strategies for students, flexible and high-quality materials, and learning objectives-focused assessment strategies.
Who this book is for
This book is for educators, e-learning professionals, and teachers who want to get the best out of Moodle. Experienced Moodle users will find powerful insights into developing successful educational courses.
What this book covers
This book is intended to be a useful companion as you create your courses in Moodle. It provides step-by-step instructions, and it also gives illustrative examples. At the same time, the book should instill confidence so that you feel free to experiment and create resources and activities that include your own special views and personality. With Moodlecloud and on-premise installations, you have the chance to create sandbox courses where you can play, experiment, build, and create your own unique learning world.
Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, is a guided tour of Moodle and what makes it unique. This chapter is an overview and should give you a good idea of what is possible. We hope you feel inspired to experiment and create after you read this chapter. In this chapter, you will begin building a plan to create your learning site, and how to do it in a way that incorporates Moodle's unique philosophy of learning, which rests on a foundation of interaction and the idea that people learn from each other. You will learn about the way Moodle is structured and its basic architecture. We will review how to get started and describe how you can begin to explore ways to make the "Moodle Experience" uniquely engaging for both students and instructors.
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle, teaches how to install Moodle on a server (on-premise) and also to use cloud-based Moodle (MoodleCloud). If you are a small institution or an individual teacher who would like to create a few courses to experiment with the form, or even to set up your own courses or tutoring services, in this chapter, you will find step-by-step instructions for installing Moodle. You will also learn how to access and use Moodle through the cloud so that you do not have to install Moodle on-premise. In learning about MoodleCloud, you'll find out how Moodle makes it easy for individuals to experiment in a friendly, free environment.
Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, focuses on getting your site ready for use, whether you are using on-premise or a Moodle's cloud-based solution. We will cover the basics of Moodle navigation, and we will introduce the administrative functions for site administrators as well as instructors.
Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, takes a close look at content administration in Moodle. This stage is important, because it involves planning and integrating your institution's mission and vision with the way that you structure and administer your courses. We will discuss how to effectively plan your course and how to align the course with your institution's vision and mission. We'll learn how to set up the framework for creating courses and also learn how to enroll users, including teachers, students, and guests.
Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, says that as you begin to build your courses, it's important to take a look at your curriculum as a whole and then standardize in order to have consistent courses. We will discuss the way to develop your course frameworks and provide an overview of the kinds of resources and activities that are available in Moodle. You will learn how to design your course so that it achieves learning goals, with learning objectives at the center. You will also learn the mechanics of customizing the courses and their functionality.
Chapter 6, Adding Resources, covers the kind of resources you can utilize in Moodle, and it describes ways to customize them and organize the course so that your resources are aligned with your course goals. You will learn how to add different kinds of resources, which include text files, embedded media files, URLs, and links to different types of libraries and open source repositories.
Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, outlines developing the instructional strategy you will use for your courses. In addition, you'll find the best way to build courses around your learning objectives so that you can clearly map your content and activities to them. Also, you'll learn about different ways to motivate your students and keep them engaged. We review writing learning objectives and developing assessments with Bloom's taxonomy in mind. We will also look at competency learning, including micro-competencies. You will learn how to incorporate certificates and badges in Moodle so that they are automatically generated when mastery has been demonstrated.
Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, deals with assessment and assuring that learning objectives have been mastered. We will review how to set up quizzes, and we will include engagement strategies that involve recognizing student achievement. You will learn how to build different types of quizzes and tie them to mastery / competencies.
Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums, informs that collaboration and interaction are important in Moodle, and in many learning settings, they constitute the backbone of the entire educational experience. We will learn how to set up effective social platforms in Moodle that encourage learning objective-focused engagement. We focus on an interaction-based instructional strategy that emphasizes learning from each other, and uses forums and chat rooms.
Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, takes you through learning activities involving collaboration that are very important because they give learners an opportunity to employ numerous skills and also learn from each other. In this chapter, we will look at using collaboration as an instructional strategy, and we will discuss when and where to best employ it. We will go into detail and provide examples. For example, we will look at a wiki that we call the Shark TankWiki, because it deals with evaluating pitches for start-up funding (as in the popular television show, Shark Tank). Another good example of using Moodle for collaboration is in planning an event such as a fund-raiser.
Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, demonstrates that using Moodle for an interactive workshop with group projects is a good strategy, because Moodle has unique attributes that make student interaction and content sharing very easy and effective. In this chapter, we discuss why and when to use a workshop and how to select a topic for a project that is ideal for a group workshop. Then, we review the four phases of a workshop and discuss the best strategies.
Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, says that students learn from each other in the course as a whole and also within groups and subgroups. Many groups are formed for specific purposes, such as peer review or to develop a wiki or glossary entry. In this chapter, you learn how to set up and manage groups and cohorts in Moodle.
Chapter 13, Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks, informs that developing content in the form of a block can be very effective for managing and delivering materials. In this chapter, we will discuss the use and management of blocks. We will cover examples of blocks and discuss how to configure a block and control where it appears. We will learn about standard as well as custom blocks.
Chapter 14, Features for Teachers, says that Moodle has several different types of tools that make the teacher's life easier, which include customizable logs and reports. We learn how to manage them in this chapter.
To get the most out of this book
These are the things you'll need to keep in mind in order to get the most of this book:
You need to be able to use basic HTML
You'll need a good text editor, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word
You'll need to be able to use photo editing programs, either Cloud-based (GIMP, for example), or installed on-premise (MS-Paint, for example)
You'll need to be able to use spreadsheet programs (Excel or Google Sheets) for importing and exporting student records and questions to test banks in quiz
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Note the full course name in the <title> and <meta> tags. Many search engines give a lot of weight to the title tag. If your Moodle system is open to search engines, choose your course title with this in mind."
A block of code is set as follows:
<head> <title>Course: Non-Surgical Anti-Aging Services </title> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://localhost/moodle/theme/image.php/standard/theme/1359480837/favicon" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="keywords" content="moodle, Course: Non-Surgical Anti- Aging Services" />
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<head> <title>Course: Non-Surgical Anti-Aging Services </title> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://localhost/moodle/theme/image.php/standard/theme/1359480837/favicon" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="moodle, Course: Non-Surgical Anti- Aging Services" />
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ git clone -b MOODLE_{{Version3}}_STABLE git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "To use conditional activities, your system administrator must enable the feature Enable conditional access under Site administration | Advanced Features."
Get in touch
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A Guided Tour of Moodle
Moodle is a free, open source learning management system that enables you to create powerful, flexible, and engaging online learning experiences. I use the phrase online learning experiences instead of online courses deliberately. The phrase online course often connotes a sequential series of web pages, some images, maybe a few animations, and a quiz put online. There might be some email or bulletin board communication among the teacher and students. However, online learning can be much more engaging than that.
Moodle's name gives you an insight into its approach to e-learning. The official Moodle documentation on http://docs.moodle.org states the following:
The phrase online learning experience connotes a more active, engaging role for students and teachers. It connotes, among other things, web pages that can be explored in any order, courses with live chats among students and teachers, forums where users can rate messages on their relevance or insight, online workshops that enable students to evaluate one another's work, impromptu polls that let the teacher evaluate what students think of a course's progress, and directories set aside for teachers to upload and share their files. All these features create an active learning environment, full of different kinds of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions. This is the kind of user experience that Moodle excels at and the kind that this book will help you create.
Moodle's philosophy of learning
For those of you who are interested, the underlying learning philosophy for Moodle is that of "connectivism." Basically, it means that people learn from one another, and Moodle's framework is structured to maximize interactivity with other students and the content itself. When Moodle first debuted, the philosophy usually involved forums, with some potential for real-time chat. However, with the ability to include webinars using BigBlueButton and other add-ins, the possibilities of synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous interactivity have expanded.
One thing to keep in mind as you develop a course that incorporates connectivistm as learning philosophy is that you'll be working with the affective (the emotional) as well as the cognitive domain. This means that you will be engaging the emotions (which is good for motivation). Connectivism also means that you can also encourage the sharing of experiences and allow people to build on prior knowledge and experience. In fact, building courses that allow students to scaffold their knowledge with experiential and prior learning can give rise to a very solid approach. Your students will be able to do more with the knowledge, particularly if the course has to do with applied knowledge and skills.
In this chapter, we will learn the following:
How to launch a plan to create your learning site
How Moodle's philosophy of connectivism creates conditions for learning
The fundamental architecture of Moodle
The way people learn with Moodle
What makes Moodle unique
A plan to create your learning site
Whether you are the site creator or a course creator, you can use this book to develop a plan to build your courses and curriculum. As you work your way through each chapter, the book provides guidance on making decisions that meet your goals for your learning site. This helps you create the kind of learning experience that you want for your teachers (if you're the site creator) or students (if you're the teacher). You can also use this book as a traditional reference manual, but its main advantages are its step-by-step, project-oriented approach and the guidance it gives you about creating an interactive learning experience.
Moodle is designed to be intuitive to use, and its online help is well written. It does a good job of telling you how to use each of its features. What Moodle's help files don't tell you is when and why to use each feature and what effect it will have on the student experience, and that is what this book supplies.
One of the most exciting new developments with Moodle is that Moodle now has a cloud-based virtual learning environment (VLE), which is called MoodleCloud. It is free for you to use if you have fewer than 50 registered users (students, instructors, and so on). You can still customize the course, and you can build in a great deal of flexibility and functionality. It does not have the same number of options as an on-premise local installation, but it saves a great deal of time and money. MoodleCloud allows you to experiment with designs and also to start small, with the intention of growing. It also makes it easy for individuals and organizations to develop new kinds of training, collaboration, and education, and then scale up when needed.
Step-by-step instructions to use Moodle
When you create a Moodle learning site, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from each step. Each step is listed with a brief description of the chapter that supports the step.
As you work your way through each chapter, your learning site will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, interactive learning site. As you learn more about what Moodle can do and see your courses taking shape, you may want to change some of the things that you did in the previous chapters. Moodle offers you this flexibility. Also, this book helps you determine how those changes will cascade throughout your site.
Step 1 – Learning about the Moodle experience
Every learning management system (LMS) has a paradigm, or approach, that shapes the user experience and encourages a certain kind of usage. An LMS might encourage very sequential learning by offering features that enforce a given order on each course. It might discourage student-to-student interaction by offering few features that support it, while encouraging solo learning by offering many opportunities for the student to interact with the course material.
In this chapter, you will learn what Moodle can do and what kind of user experience your students and teachers will have, using Moodle. You will also learn about the Moodle philosophy and how it shapes the user experience. With this information, you'll be ready to decide how to make the best use of Moodle's many features and plan your online learning site.
Step 2 – Installing Moodle
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle, guides you through installing Moodle on your web server. It will help you estimate the amount of disk space, bandwidth, and memory that you will need for Moodle. This can help you decide the right hosting service for your needs.
Step 3 – Configuring your site
Most of the decisions you make while installing and configuring Moodle will affect the user experience. Not just students and teachers, but also course creators and site administrators are affected by these decisions. While Moodle's online help does a good job of telling you how to install and configure the software, it doesn't tell you how the settings that you choose affect the user experience. Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, covers the implications of these decisions and helps you configure the site so that it behaves in the way you envision.
Step 4 – Creating the framework for your learning site
In Moodle, every course belongs to a category. Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, takes you through creating course categories and then creating courses. Just as you chose site-wide settings during installation and configuration, you choose course-wide settings while creating each course. This chapter tells you the implications of the various course settings so that you can create the experience that you want for each course. It also shows you how to add teachers and students to the courses.
Step 5 – Making decisions about common settings
In Moodle, course material is either a resource or an activity. A resource is an item that the student views, listens to, reads, or downloads. An activity is an item that the student interacts with or that enables the student to interact with the teacher or other students. In Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, you will learn about the settings that are common to all resources and activities and how to add resources and activities to a course.
Step 6 – Adding basic course material
In most online courses, the core material consists of web pages that the students view. These pages can contain text, graphics, movies, sound files, games, exercises—anything that can appear on the World Wide Web (WWW) can appear on a Moodle web page. Chapter 6, Adding Resources, covers adding this kind of material, plus links to other websites, media files, labels, and directories of files. This chapter also helps you determine when to use each of these types of material.
Step 7 – Making your courses interactive
In this context, interactive means an interaction between the student and the teacher, or the student and an active web page. Student-to-student interaction is covered in a later chapter. This chapter covers activities that involve interaction between the student and an active web page, or between the student and the teacher. Interactive course material includes lessons that guide students through a defined path, based upon their answers to review question and the assignments that are uploaded by the student and then graded by the teacher. Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, tells you how to create these interactions and how each of them affects the student and teacher experience.
Step 8 – Evaluating your students
In Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, you'll learn how to evaluate the students' knowledge with a quiz. The chapter thoroughly covers creating quiz questions, sharing quiz questions with other courses, adding feedback to questions and quizzes, and more.
Step 9 – Making your course social
Social course material enables student-to-student interaction. Moodle enables you to add chats and forums to your courses. These types of interactions will be familiar to many students. Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums, shows you how to create and manage these social activities.
Step 10 – Adding collaborative activities
Moodle enables students to work together to create new material. For example, you can create glossaries that are site-wide and those that are specific to a single course. Students can add to the glossaries. You can also allow students to contribute to and edit a wiki in class.
Moodle also offers a powerful workshop tool, which enables the students to view and evaluate one another's work.
Each of these interactions makes the course more interesting but also more complicated for the teacher to manage. The result is a course that encourages the students to contribute, share, and engage. Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, and Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, help you rise to the challenge of managing your students' collaborative work.
Step 11 – Managing and extending your courses
Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, shows you how to use groups to separate the students in a course. You will also learn how to use cohorts, or site-wide groups, to mass enroll students into courses.
Every block adds functionality to your site or your course. Chapter 13, Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks, describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them. You can use blocks to display calendars, enable commenting, enable tagging, show navigation features, and much more.
Step 12 – Taking the pulse of your course
Moodle offers several tools to help teachers administer and deliver courses. It keeps detailed access logs that enable the teachers to see exactly what content the students access, and when. It also enables the teachers to establish custom grading scales, which are available site-wide or for a single course. Student grades can be accessed online and can also be downloaded in a variety of formats (including spreadsheet). Finally, teachers can collaborate in special forums (bulletin boards) reserved just for them. This is a part of Chapter 14, Features for Teachers.
Applying the Moodle philosophy
Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called social constructionism. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material. The difference between a traditional philosophy and the social constructionist philosophy is the difference between a lecture and a discussion.
Adding static content
Moodle does not require you to use the social constructionist method for your courses. However, it best supports this method. For example, Moodle enables you to add several kinds of static course material. This is the course material that a student reads but does not interact with, such as the following:
Web pages
Links to anything on the web (including material on your Moodle site)
A folder of files
A label that displays any text or image
Interactive and social course material
However, Moodle enables you to add even more kinds of interactive and social course material. This is the course material that a student interacts with, by answering questions, entering text, or uploading files, which includes the following:
Assignment (uploading files to be reviewed by the teacher)
Choice (a single question)
Lesson (a conditional, branching activity)
Quiz (an online test)
Creating activities
Moodle also offers activities in which the students interact with one another. These are used to create social course material, such as the following:
Chat (live online chat between students)
Forum (you can have none or several online bulletin boards for each course)
Glossary (students and/or teachers can contribute terms to site-wide glossaries)
Wiki (this is a familiar tool for collaboration with most younger students and many older students)
Workshop (this supports peer review and feedback of the assignments that the students upload)
In addition, some of Moodle's add-on modules add even more types of interaction. For example, one add-on module enables the students and the teachers to schedule appointments with each other.
The Moodle experience
As Moodle encourages interaction and exploration, your students' learning experience will often be non-linear. Moodle can enforce a specific order upon a course, using something called conditional activities. Conditional activities can be arranged in a sequence. Your course can contain a mix of conditional and non-linear activities.
In this section, I'll take you on a tour of a Moodle learning site. You will see a student's experience from the time the student arrives at the site, enters a course, and works through some material in the course. You will also see some student-to-student interaction and some functions used by the teacher to manage the course. Along the way, I'll point out many of the features that you will learn to implement in this book and how the demo site is using those features.
The Moodle front page
The front page of your site is the first thing that most users will see. This section takes you on a tour of the front page of a demonstration site.
Arriving at the site
When a visitor arrives at the demonstration learning site, the visitor sees the front page. You can require the visitor to register and log in before seeing any part of your site.
Alternatively, you can allow the anonymous visitor to see a lot of information about the site on the front page, which is what I have done in the following screenshot:
One of the first things that a visitor will note is that you can search for courses to download and use. You can enter keywords, and you'll be able to select from different options. For example, I entered the word literature, and I was able to find a number of modules that I can use in my courses. All I have to do is provide proper attribution. Several options are available, as seen in the following screenshot:
Using moodlecloud.com
Moodle has created a cloud-based Moodle, which allows you to set up courses, develop a sandbox, and launch the courses. It is located at http://www.moodlecloud.com, and, depending on the number of users, your cost can range from absolutely free to higher costs, seen as follows, and also as described on the information page at https://moodlecloud.com/app/en/:
Free
: It allows you to develop as many courses as you'd like and develop as many as 50 users. Your idle courses are not archived, so you need to log in often. Your account will be deleted if you do not access it regularly.
Starter
: It allows you to have the same number of users as the
Free
option, but you also have access to more applications such as document converters and certificate generators. However, you're limited with respect to themes and other utilities. It costs
80
AUD per year.
Moodle for School
: It has different levels and pricing, depending on the number of users and storage space. With packages that can scale up to 500 users, it's ideal for a small school, but does not work for a large school.
The main menu
Logging into MoodleCloud, note the My new Moodle site in the upper-left corner in the following screenshot. It includes Dashboard, Site pages, and My courses. It tells the user about the courses you have created and also those made available by Moodle. It includes Introduction to Moodle, which is an introductory guided tour that all new users should explore.
In Moodle, the icons tell the user what kind of resource will be accessed by a link. In this case, the icon tells the user that the first resource is a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) document and the second is a web page. Course material that a student observes or reads, such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files, is called resources. In Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, you will learn how to add resources to a course.
Blocks
In the side bars of the page, you will find Blocks. For example, the Main menu, Calendar, and Tags blocks. You can choose to add a block to the front page, to all the pages in the site, or to an individual course.
