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 Tank Wiki, 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.
