Why another book on Moodle?

So what's the difference between this book and any other book on Moodle? There's an increasingly large number of books about Moodle on the market. General introductions to Moodle, such as "Moodle Teaching Techniques", William Rice, Packt Publishing and "Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development", William Rice, Packt Publishing, go through key Moodle modules methodically and then offer examples. This book takes the opposite approach: it starts with examples based on what you need for your language teaching and shows which bits of Moodle you need to make them. As such, it isn't a comprehensive guide to Moodle, but it aims to provide relevant information for language teachers. There is no one way to organize a language course. It depends on the level and age of students, the language learning goals, and learning style preferences, amongst other things. But most language courses include a focus on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and also offer support for vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. This book has taken those areas as its starting point.

Moodle's popularity has led to the development of hundreds of add-on modules. The list is available at http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009. A useful service a book like this can offer is recommending which add-on modules are worth getting. For example, a VLE for language learning without a speak and record facility would be incomplete. I've chosen a simple sound recorder called NanoGong. Why? Because it is supported for Moodle 1.9; it's very easy to install and works well on a variety of browsers. You can also set up Moodle activities without NanoGong, simply by recording directly onto the computer, but you'd lose the advantage of being able to manage your recordings inside Moodle. There's a useful discussion of available recorders at http://metamedia.typepad.com/metamedia/listen-up-audio-in-moodle.html.

Note

Voice recording in future versions of Moodle

It's uncertain whether NanoGong will work with Moodle 2.0, but a similar recording plug-in is being developed for it (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/GSOC/2009). Meanwhile, NanoGong is probably the simplest choice.

As well as providing an overview of core Moodle modules, Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle will take you through all the add-on modules you'll need for this book. The reasons for choosing them are the same in each case:

• Ease of use

• Available support

• Suitability for language learning

It is important to remember that add-on modules may not work with future updates of Moodle, but I've chosen ones which look likely to receive continued support. All the examples in this book work with Moodle 1.9.5.

Sometimes I've recommended an alternative to the core modules, simply because they are better for language teaching. For example, Moodle has core Blog and Wiki modules, but they don't work with NanoGong, the recording tool, whereas the Open University versions named OUblog and OUwiki do work.

Assessment

There are also some aspects of assessment in Moodle which have a specific language-teaching slant in this book:

• Moodle allows you to provide detailed feedback to your students on specific areas of language performance. So you can give separate marks on areas such as grammar, fluency, and pronunciation, for example. You do this by setting up rating scales for each type of activity. In Moodle speak, categories for assessment are called Outcomes (see Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle for more information).

• Moodle also allows us to create marking scales which relate specifically to language work. One example of this would be the use of the language achievement evaluation scales set by the Council of Europe's Common European Framework. (http://www.coe.int/T/DG4/Linguistic/CADRE_EN.asp). We can customize scales to suit our school or institution.

• Many Moodle activities can be assessed. All the marks can be collected in an online gradebook. Moodle also provides some basic statistics which teachers can use to see how well their tests are working, and to improve them if necessary.

• There is also an add-on ordering task for the Quiz module. This lets students practice ordering the words in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph, and paragraphs in a text, and putting a sequence of events in chronological order.

Making Moodle look good

The success of any activity also depends on how good it looks. Chapter 11, Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials takes a look at some basic things you can do to make your Moodle site look better and, therefore, more attractive to your students.