Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative Ways To Use Moodle For Consturcting Online Learning Solutions E-Book
Rice IV William H.
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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. It is the world's most popular online learning system. It has many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit.
Visit Moodle Teaching Techniques' Free Online Edition http://moodlesolutions.packtpub.com
Approach
This book has a friendly approach and even experienced trainers will benefit a lot from it. It uses copious screenshots, for you to get a feel of the course site even while you are learning by building the solutions.
Who this book is for
If you are a teacher or a corporate trainer with a desire to design effective and innovative Moodle courses, then this book is your best choice. The book assumes that you have a basic understanding of Moodle, but it does not need any programming knowledge. It's all about teaching and not programming. If you are new to Moodle, start with Moodle E-Learning Course Development by the same author.
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Seitenzahl: 199
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007
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Table of Contents
Moodle Teaching Techniques
Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions
William Rice
Moodle Teaching Techniques
Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions
Copyright © 2007 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, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or 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 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: September 2007
Production Reference: 1120907
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847192-84-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
William H. Rice IV
Reviewers
Mark Bailye
Gurudutt Talgery
Derrin Kent
Senior Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Rashmi Phadnis
Technical Editor
Sarvesh Shanbhag
Editorial Manager
Dipali Chittar
Project Manager
Patricia Weir
Project Coordinator
Sagara Naik
Indexer
Bhushan Pangaonkar
Proofreader
Damian Carvill
Cathy Cumberlidge
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Designer
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in the New York City. His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading sites like slashdot and 43folders. His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, rock climbing, and edible wild plants (a book on that is coming someday).
William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society; how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, and has two amazing sons.
He can be reached through his website at http://www.williamrice.com.
About the Reviewers
Gurudutt Talgery has wide-ranging industry experience in the areas of software development, software process, and product engineering with the Indian arms of reputed transnational technology companies. His current interests include content management, search applications, and information retrieval using open-source solution stacks.
Gurudutt finds a strong similarity between the spiritual freedom propounded by the ancient Indian Vedanta philosophy and the empowering freedom provided by the modern-day Open Source Software(OSS) movement. He single handedly manages a no-frills, multilingual India-centric search engine: www.bhramara.in. He can be reached via his blog at www.bhramara.in/blog.
Derrin Kent describes himself as a cross between a “teacher”, a “geek”, and an “HR/Project Manager”. He is a founder, director, trainer, consultant, and a general dogsbody for The Development Manager Ltd. http://tdm.info. Derrin understands how e-learning and open-source software solutions can help workplace organisations to simultaneously improve both staff performance/satisfaction as well as the corporate bottom line. Derrin has been delivering work-based learning since 1992 and has supported a wide variety of workplace organisations with e-learning and open source including UK government bodies, large national charities, large national accrediting bodies, multi-site vocational training provider organisations, and networks of small local businesses.
Mark Bailye is currently working in the field of Medical Education where he has worked for ten years and has developed a great interest in learning and teaching. He has a proven track record in both online and face-to-face education and training. He is passionate about education and technology and wherever possible, incorporates the latest information and communication technologies into his teaching in order to enhance, engage and enrich the learner’s experience.
I would also like thank PACKT Publishing and in particular Rashmi for giving me the opportunity to review this book.
For Gavin Bradford; you showed us we really can feel that way again. And for Lisa; you did it again! Thanks for encouraging me and making this book possible.
Preface
It’s time for software manuals to evolve. I’ve been teaching software and writing manuals for about twenty years now, and have found that most software manuals are missing the most important information. While most of these do a good job of telling you how to perform tasks, that is, what buttons to push and menus to choose, they often leave the two most important questions unanswered:
For example, it would be nice if the manual that came with your word processor told you more than how to create tables and graphs. It would be even better if it also told you what kind of information is most easily understood in a table, as against a graph.
In this book, I hope to take a more evolved approach. I want to share techniques for creating effective learning solutions using Moodle, the world’s most popular online learning management system. I’ll give you keystroke-and-click directions to create these solutions. I’ll also tell you what effect they’ll have on your students’ experience, and how to make best use of these solutions. You can let me know if I’ve succeeded (or not) by sending comments to us at <[email protected]>, making sure that you have mentioned the book title in the subject of your message.
What is Moodle?
Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction with their students. It is the world’s most popular online learning system. It will run on most low-cost hosting services, and probably on your company’s or school’s web server.
Moodle offers teachers and course designers a toolbox full of powerful, interactive online teaching tools. This book shows you how to use those tools to create effective learning solutions. These learning solutions are based on proven and accepted instructional principles, and traditional classroom activities, such as Distributed Practice, Self Monitoring, Pre-correction, and more. This book shows you how to creatively use Moodle’s online learning features in ways that adhere to proven educational principles.
What This Book Covers
Chapter 1: Introduction, expalins the approach the book will take for creating learning solutions, and briefly describes the educational principles and practices upon which the techniques are based.
Chapter 2: Forum Solutions, offers you solutions for managing your forums. The first two sections focus on making the best use of forums. The last two sections of this chapter, focus on managing your forums.
Chapter 3: Chat Solutions, gives you a key to making the best use of Moodle’s—or any LMS’s—chat function, in a way that takes advantage of its unique strengths, instead of trying to make it act like a face-to-face meeting. In this chapter, we explore the questions “What is chat good for?” and “How can I achieve success in an online chat?” Considering the fact that Moodle’s chat functions are similar to most other chat software, the answers to these questions apply to more than just Moodle.
Chapter 4: Quiz Solutions, tells you that a quiz can be more than just a test. At its best, a quiz can also become a learning experience. Moodle offers features that help you to accomplish that. This chapter gives you five ways to use Moodle quizzes for more than testing.
Chapter 5: Lesson Solutions, tells you that a Moodle lesson can be a powerful combination of instruction and assessment. Lessons offer the flexibility of a web page, the interactivity of a quiz, and branching capabilities.
Chapter 6: Wiki Solutions, tells you that a wiki is a powerful tool for collaboration, and it does enable students to participate in a group activity from anywhere at any time. However, a wiki can also be a powerful tool for individualized learning. This principle is called “differential learning”, which means that the learning experience should be customized for each student, depending on his/her learning ability. With individual wikis, you can differentiate the learning experience for your students.
Chapter 7: Glossary Solutions, tells you that glossaries are not just special-purpose, online dictionaries, but can also be an enjoyable, collaborative activity for your class, and a teaching tool.
Chapter 8: The Choice Activity, tells you that a choice activity is the simplest type of activities. You can use a choice to: take a quick poll, ask students to choose sides in a debate, confirm the students’ understanding of an agreement, and gather consent.
Chapter 9: Course Solution, focuses on making your course easier to navigate. The goal of all these solutions is to reduce the time and effort your students spend in figuring out what to do next, so they can get on with the learning. Sometimes, just slightly reducing the effort that students make on navigating through your course, requires a great effort on your part. But, anything you do to help your students navigate easily through your course is worth the effort. The result is less time spent wondering what to do next, and more time spent on the course content.
Chapter 10: Workshop Solution, tells you that it is one of the most complex and powerful, of activities. This chapter takes you through the process of creating a full-featured workshop. It focuses on helping you to make decisions that create the kind of workshop experience you want for your students.
Who is this book for?
The book is written for educators, corporate trainers, university professors, and others who have a basic knowledge of Moodle. If you don’t know how to create basic courseware in Moodle, you can still use this book. But, you will need to learn those basics as you build the solutions in this book. You can use the online help, the forums on moodle.org, a basic Moodle book, and trial-and-error to fill in the gap in your knowledge.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: “The file Microscopy.txt will have links to the other three pages. In the Wiki Markup language, links are encased in square brackets, like this: [The_Light_Microscope]”.
A block of code will be set as follows:
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font.
Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: “From the Add an activity... drop-down list, select Forum, as shown in the following screenshot”.
Note
Important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader Feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book, what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply drop an email to <[email protected]>, making sure to mention the book title in the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or email <[email protected]>.
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.
Downloading the Example Code for the Book
Visit http://www.packtpub.com/support, and select this book from the list of titles, to download any example code or extra resources for this book. The files available for download will then be displayed.
The downloadable files contain instructions on how to use them.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books — maybe a mistake in text or code — we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing this you can save other readers from frustration, and help to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the Submit Errata link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata are added to the list of existing errata. The existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with some aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Welcome to Moodle Teaching Techniques! Moodle offers teachers and course designers a toolbox full of online teaching tools. This book shows you how to use those tools to create effective learning solutions. These learning solutions are based on proven, accepted instructional principles, and traditional classroom activities.
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS) for producing web-based courses. It is a Free Open Source Software (FOSS), which means that you are free to use, modify, and redistribute it as long as you:
Under these conditions, thousands of developers have contributed features and functionality to Moodle. The result is the world’s most popular, free, and feature-packed online learning system.
The Moodle Advantage
Many of the features in Moodle, are carefully chosen to support a philosophy of learning, called “social constructionist pedagogy”. Simply stated, this style of learning and teaching is based upon four concepts:
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/polovina/learnpyramid/about.html
When students become part of a culture, they are constantly learning. For example, you and your partner would probably learn more about ballroom dancing when you’re in a dance class, versus watching a video together. The interaction with other students and possibly a variety of teachers would enrich and accelerate your learning process.Some students try to remain objective and factual, some try to accept more subjective views, and others try to integrate both approaches. Constructed behavior is when a student can choose whichever approach is more appropriate.You are probably not accustomed to an application’s features being chosen based upon a philosophy. Usually, features are chosen based only on what is technically feasible and what customers are willing to pay for. These certainly are factors for the Moodle developers. However, the educational philosophy behind Moodle is also a criterion for adding features. This gives Moodle a tremendous advantage.
As Moodle is designed around a well-defined educational philosophy, its user interface is very consistent. I don’t just mean in the traditional sense, where you compare the icons, colors, menu actions, and layout on each page to ensure they match. As you go through a Moodle site, things look, feel, and function consistently. But more importantly, you interact with each activity, your classmates, and the teacher in a consistent way, whether it’s in the chat room, a forum, or leaving feedback on a workshop. When interaction becomes easier, the student can focus more on learning, and less on the software.
What will We Accomplish with this Book?
When a teacher begins using an online learning system, the first thing most of us do is explore the system’s features. We discover it has online forums, electronic flashcards, interactive quizzes, Wikis, collaborative workshops, and other features. Our question now becomes, “How can I use this feature to teach my course?” or “What features of this software can be used to effectively teach my course?”. For example, we discover the software has an Assignment module and ask, “How can I use online assignments in my course?”. We start by exploring the software and asking how we can use it to effectively teach our courses. When given a new tool, it’s natural to explore the tool’s functions and think of ways to use it.
This book gives you solutions that help you make the most of the many features found in a standard Moodle installation. Some of these solutions require several hours to build. Others are just a matter of selecting a single option in one of Moodle’s setup pages.
Effective learning and teaching principles are not just for academic teachers. If you’re a corporate trainer, your students will benefit from the learning solutions in this book. These solutions are based on instructional practices that have been proven to work for young and adult learners.
I’ll give you enough step-by-step instruction to create each solution in Moodle, and information about each solution to understand its basic theory. This understanding will enable you to determine if that practice will work for your students in your course. For example, I’ll discuss the role of immediate feedback in the learning process. Then, I’ll describe how to use immediate feedback when you administer a quiz. You must decide if immediate feedback is appropriate for your class and learning objectives. If you decide that it is, I’ll show you how to enable feedback for each type of quiz question, and for the quiz as a whole.
In the chapter on Lessons, we’ll discuss the role of sequential versus non-sequential activities in a class. I’ll show you how to use a lesson to structure learning material so that the student must proceed in a given sequence. Then, we’ll discuss some creative uses of Lessons: as an alternative to Quizzes, a flash card deck, and to review step-by-step instructions for an assigned activity.
