Summary

Moodle encourages exploration and interaction among students and teachers. Moodle 4.0's new, redesigned icons, enhanced navigation, and improved user experience have a positive impact on collaboration, interaction, and reflection, resulting in a platform that enhances its core social constructionist pedagogy. As a course designer and teacher, you will have the maximum number of tools at your disposal if you work in this way, 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. Moodle's design is focused on enhancing learning, and you will enjoy the features that make self-guided and collaborative learning effective.

In this chapter, we learned about the history, development, and underlying philosophy of Moodle. We also learned the basics of how to start designing a site in which you'll build courses, and then include activities and resources in them.

Keep in mind that if you're using the cloud-based VLE 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 customized installation from a Moodle partner or a self-hosted installation.

Now, it's time to learn about the basics of Moodle's architecture, and at least read over the installation and configuration information provided in Chapter 2, Installing Moodle and Configuring Your Site. 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.