35,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is for anyone who wants to get the best out of Moodle. Experienced Moodle users will find powerful insights into developing successful educational courses.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 433
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Moodle E-Learning Course Development Third Edition
Moodle E-Learning Course Development Third Edition
Copyright © 2015 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 author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be 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.
First published: June 2008
Second edition: August 2011
Third edition: June 2015
Production reference: 1230615
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78216-334-3
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
William Rice
Reviewers
Saad Faruque
Anna Krassa (kanna)
Danny Wahl
Commissioning Editor
Joanne Fitzpatrick
Acquisition Editor
Subho Gupta
Content Development Editor
Arun Nadar
Technical Editors
Siddhesh Ghadi
Siddhesh Patil
Copy Editors
Relin Hedly
Ulka Manjrekar
Sonia Mathur
Karuna Narayanan
Project Coordinator
Nikhil Nair
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Production Coordinator
Arvindkumar Gupta
Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
William Rice is an e-learning professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. He has authored books based on Moodle, Blackboard, Magento, and software training. William enjoys building e-learning solutions for small and midsized businesses. He gains professional satisfaction when his courses help students and make their work easier and more productive.
His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending time reading at http://slashdot.org/. His outdoor hobbies include practicing archery within sight of JFK Airport and playing with his children.
William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society, how we create our tools, and how our tools shape us in turn. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits. William has two amazing sons.
You can reach William on his website at http://williamrice.com.
For every book that I successfully complete, I owe my wife a debt of gratitude. Thank you for creating the space and time for me to write.
I would also like to thank my small business clients, especially Financial Success Training and Dubspot. Moodle is an essential tool for their businesses. I am grateful for their trust in me and enabling me to guide and help them build their online schools.
About the Reviewers
Saad Faruque has over 15 years of experience implementing open source software solutions for business and educational institutions. During this period, he worked with banks, ISPs, and educational institutions. Recently, Saad helped set up the IT infrastructure for International School Dhaka and Stonehill International School, Bangalore.
Currently, he works as the head of solution development at Xeo InfoSoft (http://xeois.com), a Bangalore-based company that he cofounded. Xeo helps businesses implement open source software solutions, such as Moodle, Mahara, Alfresco, Zimbra, ORTS, Nagios, and Elastix.
You can find him on his blog at http://tektab.com. For Moodle and some other open source software implementation-related support, Saad can be reached at <[email protected]>.
Anna Krassa (kanna) holds a bachelor's degree in librarianship and information science. Mostly, she works as an e-learning consultant. Anna lives in North Greece (Nea Moudania, Chalkidiki). In December 2006, she became the first Moodle-certified teacher in Greece. In May 2007, Anna became a mentor and assessor for MTC/MCCC candidates and collaborated with Certification Central Administration, HRD Moodle Partner (New Zealand). In 2012, Anna became the main mentor and assessor at MCCC Central Administration. Her responsibilities include assessing MCCC candidates, mentoring MCCC mentors and assessors, and representing HRDNZ in conferences.
Anna has also been working at GAC Corporate Academy since 2007, initially as an external facilitator for HRDNZ Moodle Partner, facilitating the course on personal and professional development. When this course was withdrawn after 2 years, her position changed from a facilitator to a course developer and GAClearn administrator because of her Moodle background. Since 2012, she has been working as a GCA learning developer. Her areas of focus are site administration, course design, facilitator training and support, participant assistance, research on e-learning, and Moodle. She also represents GCA at conferences, seminars, and similar events.
In Greece, Anna has worked for the e-learning service of the Greek School Network and the Library of University of Macedonia Telemathea. As a volunteer, she has worked for FreeMoodle and Mathisis, the most active e-schools in Greece and Cyprus. Internationally, she worked as an HRDNZ contractor in Bahrain (GII Academy), Ethiopia (Mekelle University), Canada (the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology), and Cyprus (European University Cyprus).
Anna started collaborating with Packt Publishing as a technical reviewer in 2013. Until now, she has been involved in three books: Moodle 2.5 Multimedia, Moodle Course DesignBest Practices, and Moodle E-Learning Course Development, Third Edition.
She is married to Vasilis and has a lovely daughter.
Danny Wahl is an educational technology consultant and implementation specialist working in the Asia-Pacific region with a particular focus on international schools. He has assisted several schools in 1:1 computing, online, and mobile e-learning programs, among other things. When not working, he enjoys web development, reading the Bible, and playing the ukulele.
www.PacktPub.com
Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
For support files and downloads related to your book, please visit www.PacktPub.com.
Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at <[email protected]> for more details.
At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.
https://www2.packtpub.com/books/subscription/packtlib
Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can search, access, and read Packt's entire library of books.
Why subscribe?
Free access for Packt account holders
If you have an account with Packt at www.PacktPub.com, you can use this to access PacktLib today and view 9 entirely free books. Simply use your login credentials for immediate access.
Preface
Moodle is a leading open source e-learning management system. With Moodle, teachers and professors can easily construct richly textured web-based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons. Each lesson consists of reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and group work among students.
This book shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. It will help you analyze your students' requirements and come to an understanding of what Moodle can do for them. After this, you'll see how to use every feature of Moodle to meet your course goals. Moodle is relatively easy to install and use, but the real challenge is to develop a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively to the content-established learning situation. This book and e-book guides you to meet this challenge.
The latest edition of the ultimate introduction to Moodle will show you how to add static learning materials, interactive activities, and social features 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.
This book is a complete guide to successful learning using Moodle. It is focused on course development and delivery using the best educational practices.
Screenshots of the courses in the Mount Orange School (http://school.demo.moodle.net) are attributed to https://moodle.net/, and copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Many thanks for supplying this demonstration site to the Moodle community.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, tells you what Moodle can do and what kind of user experiences you can create for your students and teachers. You will also learn how the Moodle philosophy shapes user experience. This helps you to decide how to make the best use of Moodle and plan your learning site.
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle, teaches you how to install Moodle on your web server.
Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, explains how to configure your site so that it behaves in the way you envision. It also helps you to create the user experience you want. If someone manages your Moodle site for you, you can use this chapter to learn about various configuration options that will make creating and teaching courses easier for you.
Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, shows you how to create course categories and new courses. It covers course settings that affect the behavior of a course. It also shows you how to enroll teachers and students in a course.
Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, covers some common settings that you will need to choose for all the resources and activities that you add. It also shows you how to control the flow of students through a course using conditional access. Also, you will learn how to hide, show, and rearrange items on your course's home page.
Chapter 6, Adding Resources, talks about resources as course materials that students read, but don't interact with, such as web pages, graphics, and Adobe Acrobat documents. This chapter teaches you how to add these resources to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, covers course activities that enable students to interact with the instructor, the learning system, or each other. In this chapter, you will see how to add several kinds of interactive course material: assignments, lessons, choices, and feedback.
Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, shows you how to evaluate your students' knowledge and attitude.
Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums, covers how Moodle excels at peer interaction. This chapter teaches you how to add social resources activities to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, provides insights on how to add wikis and glossaries to your course. These activities enable students to work together in order to build a body of knowledge.
Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, talks about a workshop that provides a place for students in a class to see an example project, upload their individual projects, and see and assess each other's projects.
Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, explains how to use groups to separate students in a course into teams. You will also learn how to use cohorts to mass enroll students to courses.
Chapter 13, Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks, provides insights on how every block adds functionality to your site or course. This chapter describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you to decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them.
Chapter 14, Features for Teachers, shows you how to use Moodle's gradebook and logs to track student activity.
What you need for this book
This book is designed for people who are creating and delivering courses on Moodle. To make the best use of Moodle, you will need to play the role of a teacher on a Moodle site. This means that you will need the ability to edit a course on the Moodle site.
This book also contains some information for the administrator of a Moodle site. Even if you're not the site administrator, you can use this information to work with your administrator when you configure the Moodle site and use logs and reports.
Who this book is for
This book is for anyone who wants to make the most of Moodle's features to produce an interactive online learning experience. If you're an educator, corporate trainer, or just someone with something to teach, this book can guide you through the installation, configuration, creation, and management of a Moodle site. It is suitable for people who perform the task of creating and setting up the learning site. This book is also helpful for those who create and deliver courses on the site, site administrators, course creators, and teachers.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. 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 e-mail 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 word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler.
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 each other'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 to create.
A plan to create your learning site
Whether you are the site creator or a course creator, you can use this book as you would a project plan. 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 to 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, what effect it will have on the student experience, and that is what this book supplies.
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. And this book helps you determine how those changes will cascade throughout your site.
Step 1 – learn 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 Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, 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 to plan your online learning site.
Step 2 – install 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 to decide upon the right hosting service for your needs.
Step 3 – configure 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 – create 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 – make 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 – add 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 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 – make 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 – evaluate 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 – make 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 – add collaborative activities
Moodle enables students to work together to create new material. For example, you can create glossaries that are site-wide, and glossaries 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 each other's work.
Each of these interactions make 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 – manage and extend 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 – take 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.
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.
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:
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:
Moodle also offers activities in which the students interact with each other. These are used to create social course material, such the following:
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
Because 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.
Tip
Probably the best Moodle demo sites are http://demo.moodle.net/ and http://school.demo.moodle.net/. Many of the screenshots in this book are from http://school.demo.moodle.net. The contents of that site are graciously offered by Moodle Pty Ltd, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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. Or, 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 notice is the announcement at the top and center of the page, Moodle 2.0 Book Almost Ready!. Below the announcement are two activities: a quiz, Win a Prize: Test Your Knowledge of E-mail History, and a chat room, Global Chat Room. Selecting either of these activities will require the visitor to register or log in with the site, as seen in the following screenshot:
Anonymous, guest, and registered access
Notice the line Some courses may allow guest access in the left column of the page. You can set three levels of access for your site and for individual courses, as follows:
Anonymous access allows anyone to see the contents of your site's front page. Notice that there is no anonymous access for courses. Everyone who enters a course must have a role in the system. However, there is a special role, called Guest, which is automatically given to any anonymous person.
Guest access allows the user to enter without logging in. This enables you to track usage by looking at the statistics for the user, Guest.
Registered access requires the user to register on your site. You can allow people to register with or without e-mail confirmation, require a special code for enrolment, manually create their accounts, import accounts from another system, or use an outside system (like a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server) for your accounts. There's more on this in Chapter 2, Installing Moodle.
The main menu
Returning to the front page, notice the Main menu in the upper left corner in the following screenshot. We added these two documents to the menu. They tell the user what the site is about, and how to use it:
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 are 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 of the pages in the site, or to an individual course.
Other blocks display a summary of the current course, a list of courses available on the site, the latest news, who is online, and other information. At the bottom-right side of the front page, you see the Login block. Chapter 13, Extending your Course by Adding Blocks, tells you how to use these blocks.
Tip
Your site's front page is a course!
You can add these blocks to the front page of your site because the front page is essentially a course. Anything that you can add to a course—such as resources and blocks—can be added to the front page.
The site description
On the right-hand side of the front page, you see a Site Description. This is optional. If this were a course, you could choose to display the Course Description.
The Site or Course Description can contain anything that you can put on a web page. It is essentially a block of HTML code that is displayed on the front page.
Available courses
You can choose to display the available courses on the front page of your site. Looking at the screenshot a few pages back, you can see that in my demonstration site, I've chosen to display the available courses on the front page to anyone who visits the site. On the demonstration site run by Moodle, they have chosen to hide the courses from the users who are not logged in. Their front page displays the information about their site, and links that enable the visitors to proceed to the login page, as seen in the following screenshot:
When a course is displayed in a list, clicking on the information icon next to a course displays its Course Description in a popup window. Clicking on a course's name takes you into the course. If the course allows anonymous access, you are taken directly into the course. If the course allows guest access or requires registration, you are taken to the login screen.
Inside a course
Now, let us take a look inside a course:
The navigation bar
In the preceding screenshot, the user has logged in as Barbara Gardner and entered the Psychology in Cinema course. Notice the breadcrumbs trail (the Navbar) at the top-left corner of the screen, which tells us the name of the site and the short name of the course.
At the upper-right side of the screen, we see a confirmation that the user has logged in. That is not a part of the Navbar, but usually appears next to it.
Blocks
Like the front page, this course uses various blocks. The most prominent one is the Navigation block on the left. Let's talk more about navigation:
The navigation block
The Navigation block shows you where you are and where you can go in the site. In the demonstration, you can see direct links to the topics in the course. This enables the student to jump to a topic that is much further down on the page, without scrolling.
At the bottom of the Navigation block is a link to the My courses page. Clicking this link displays the courses the student is enrolled in and notices if the student has anything due in those courses, as seen in the following screenshot:
We will cover how to create assignments in Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices.
Sections
Moodle enables you to organize a course by Week, in which case each section is labeled with a date instead of a number. Or, you can choose to make your course a single, large discussion forum. Most courses are organized by Topic, such as the one seen in the next screenshot:
Notice that the first topic is not numbered. Moodle gives you a Topic 0 to use as the course introduction.
Teachers can hide and show sections at will. This enables a teacher to open and close resources and activities as the course progresses.
Topics are the lowest level of organization in Moodle. The hierarchy is: Site | Course Category | Course Subcategory (optional) | Course | Section. Every item in your course belongs to a Topic, even if your course consists of only Topic 0.
Joining a discussion
Clicking on the link for a discussion takes the student into the forum. Clicking on a discussion thread opens that thread in the forum. You can see in the following screenshot that the teacher started with the first post. Then a student replied to the original post:
The student's message in the preceding screenshot doesn't serve our students. Fortunately, the teacher has editing rights to this forum, and so he or she can delete posts at will. The teacher can also rate posts for their relevance, as shown in the following screenshot:
Because Moodle supports an interactive, collaborative style of learning, students can also be given the ability to rate forum posts and the material submitted by other students. You'll find out more about forums in Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums.
Completing a workshop
Next, the student will enter a workshop called Observing the Familiar.
In this workshop, the student writes and updates some defined observations. These observations are then rated by other students in the course. When the student first enters the workshop, he or she sees directions for completing the workshop, as seen in the next screenshot:
After reading these directions, the student continues to the workshop submission form, which is seen in the next screenshot:
Notice the online editor that the student uses to write the assignment. This gives the student basic What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) features. The same word processor appears when the course creators create web pages, when students write online assignment entries, and at other times when a user is editing and formatting text.
Moodle can be configured to use several different kinds of editors. Depending upon your exact version and how your site administrator configures your site, yours might differ slightly from what is shown here.
Editing mode
We've been looking at Moodle from a student's perspective. Students usually don't edit course material. Let us see what happens when you turn on the editing mode to make changes.
Normal mode versus editing mode
When a Guest user or a registered student browses through your learning site, Moodle displays the pages normally. However, when someone with a course editing privilege enters a course, Moodle offers a button for switching into editing mode:
Clicking Turn editing on puts Moodle into editing mode:
Let's walk through the icons that become available in editing mode.
