Moodle in education

Getting started

This document assumes your site administrator has set up Moodle and given you new, blank course to start with. It also assumes you have logged in to your course using your teacher account.

Here are three general tips that will help you get started.

Don't be afraid to experiment: feel free to poke around and change things.
It's hard to break anything in a Moodle course, and even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.
Notice and use these little icons:

Now onto the nitty gritty. You will find the course homepage is broken down into Course sections. A course is created by adding resources and activities. When writing text in Moodle you have a range of Formatting options including using HTML in Moodle

Teacher introduction

Activity modules

There are a number of interactive learning activity modules that you can use in your course. Work can be submitted by students and marked by teachers using Assignments or Workshops. Automatic marking can be achieved by using Quizzes. You can even integrate your Hot Potato quizzes by adding a Hotpot activity.

Communications can take place using Chats and Forums for conversational activities and Choices to gain group feedback. Adding Wikis to your courses is an excellent way to allow students to work together on a single piece.

Content can be delivered and supported using Lessons and SCORM activities. Key words can be added to Glossaries by yourself of, if you allow it, your students.

Surveys and Databases are also very powerful additions to any course.

If all of that isn't enough for you then you can also add other modules that are not part of the official Moodle release!

Resources

Moodle supports a range of different resource types that allow you to insert almost any kind of web content into your courses.

A Text page is a simple page written using plain text. Text pages aren't pretty, but they're a good place to put some information or instructions. If you are after more options for your new page then you should be thinking about adding a Web page and making use of Moodle's WYSIWYG editor.

Of course the resource may already exist in electronic form so you may want to link to an uploaded file or external website or simply display the complete contents of a directory in your course files and let your users pick the file themselves. If you have an IMS content package then this can be easily added to your course.

Use a labels to embed instructions or information in the course section.

Course Settings

The first thing you should do is look under the "Administration" on your course home page and click on "Settings..." (Note that this link, and in fact the whole Administration section is only available to you (and the site administrator). Students will not even see these links).

Enrollments and Keys
metacourses

Course Formats

Note that the weekly and topics formats are very similar in structure. The main difference is that each box in the weekly format covers exactly one week, whereas in the topic format each box can cover whatever you like. The social format doesn't use much content at all and is based around just one forum - this is displayed on the main page.

Something about the [] hide/show icon here

Weekly
Topic
- Making a topic current
Social

Uploading Files

You may have existing content that you want to add to your course, such as web pages, audio files, video files, word documents, or flash animations. Any type of file that exists can be uploaded into your course and stored on the server. While your files are on the server you can move, rename, edit or delete them.

All of this is achieved through the Files link in your Administration menu. The Files section looks like this:

IMAGE HERE - DO WE WANT IMAGES?

This interface is only available to teachers - it is not accessible by students.

As you can see in the screenshot, files are listed alongside subdirectories. You can create any number of subdirectories to organise your files and move your files from one to the other.

Uploading files via the web is currently restricted to one file at a time. If you want to upload a lot of files at once (for example a whole web site), it can be a lot easier to use a zip program to compress them into a single file, upload the zip file and then unzip them again on the server (you will see an "unzip" link next to zip archives).

To preview any file you have uploaded just click on its name. Your web browser will take care of either displaying it or downloading it to your computer.

HTML and text files can be edited in-place online. Other files will need to be edited on your local computer and uploaded again. if you upload a file with the same name as an existing file it will automatically be overwritten.

A final note: if your content resides out on the web then you don't need to upload the files at all - you can link directly to them from inside the course (see the Resources module and the next section).

Blocks

Running the Course

Adding more Teachers
Enrolling Students
Creating and using Groups
Teacher Forum
Blocks
Custom Scales
Gradebook

General Advice

Subscribe yourself to all the forums so you keep in touch with your class activity. Encourage all the students fill out their user profile (including photos) and read them all - this will help provide some context to their later writings and help you to respond in ways that are tailored to their own needs. Keep notes to yourself in the private "Teacher's Forum" (under Administration). This is especially useful when team teaching. Use the "Logs" link (under Administration) to get access to complete, raw logs. In there you'll see a link to a popup window that updates every sixty seconds and shows the last hour of activity. This is useful to keep open on your desktop all day so you can feel in touch with what's going on in the course. Use the "Activity Reports" (next to each name in the list of all people, or from any user profile page). These provide a great way to see what any particular person has been up to in the course. Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later - do it right away. Not only is it easy to become overwhelmed with the volume that can be generated, but it's a crucial part of building and maintaining a community feel in your course.

Documentation