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.
