Moodle encourages exploration and interaction among students and teachers. As a course designer and teacher, you will have the maximum number of tools at your disposal if you work with this tendency, which will make your learning experiences as interactive as possible. Creating courses with forums, peer-assessed workshops, surveys, and interactive lessons is more work than creating a course from a series of static web pages. However, it is also more engaging and effective, and you will find it worth the effort to use Moodle's many interactive features.
When teaching an online course in Moodle, remember that Moodle generally enables you to add, move, and modify course material on the fly. If it's permitted by your institution's policies, don't hesitate to change a course in response to student needs.
Keep in mind that if you're using the cloud-based virtual learning environment version of Moodle, MoodleCloud, you will have built-in options and may not be able to modify the course in the way you could if you had a custom or local (on-premise) installation.
Finally, learn the basics of Moodle's architecture, and at least read over the installation and configuration in Chapter 2, Installing Moodle. Don't be afraid of the technology. If you can master the difficult art of teaching, you can master using Moodle to its full potential.
