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Moodle E-Learning Course Development

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

complete guide to e-learning using Moodle

I went to a Moodle training course recently, and the universal cry there was for training manuals or guidance books which would talk you through the program and its features. This new software package is sweeping the world of further and higher education. Just in case you didn’t know, Moodle is an Open Source (that is, free) course management system (CMS). Or if you prefer, a virtual learning environment (VLE) into which tutors can upload their course materials.

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development It’s a sophisticated and complex program which offers all sorts of features to please teachers and students alike. Interactive exercises; journals; email and chat; Wikis; forums; and surveys – all in addition to the basic learning materials, which can be uploaded in any file format. Moodle is built on what’s called a ‘social constructivist’ model.

That is, students are encouraged to build their own learning experiences by engaging with teaching materials, interactive exercises, tutors, and fellow students.

Moodle organises everything for you – from individual student enrolments to databases of complete course results. Students can store drafts of their work, see their quiz results, build learning diaries, or participate in joint project-building. Tutors can set time limits for tests,

First off the block in guidance manuals there was Jason Cole’s book Using Moodle which gave a description of the system. Now comes William Rice’s guide to building courses. The difference between the two is that Rice gets further under the bonnet and shows you the workings of Moodle. More importantly, he tells you in advance what the consequences of your choices will be.

Moodle is so modularised and flexible that you can arrange your course contents however you wish (well, almost). But your choices (which can be made very easily) can also have hidden knock-on effects.

The Moodle interface can also be changed at a single click to work in any one of a number of languages. It offers you the opportunity to add course materials in any format – and to edit your pages and turn them into web pages without having to learn HTML coding.

And if you want to be really adventurous in terms of pedagogy, you can have students assessing their own and other students’ work, voting on the relevance of discussion contributions, and collectively building course-related glossaries and encyclopedias (using a Wiki).

William Rice makes course design clear by breaking down the process into separate elements – for instance, showing the difference between static pages (text and Web pages) and interactive pages (quizzes, journals, and assignments). Most importantly, he explains the advantages and limitations of each.

For the technically minded, there’s an entire chapter on how Moodle is installed and configured to suit your needs. On the other hand, if you want to practice or ‘try before you download’, there’s an excellent demonstration version of Moodle at demo.moodle.org. I actually read the book and had the demo open on screen at the same time, to check each feature for real. But you don’t have to go that far: there are screenshots illustrating every item.

There is extensive coverage of the quizzes, lessons, assignments, and other pedagogic tools available, and a chapter which introduces all the add-ons and plug-in modules which are available for free download. The only thing which struck me as odd was a chapter about welcoming students and making your starting page friendly – which puzzlingly came near the end of the book.

I’m working on a Moodle-based project at the moment, and can vouch for the comprehensiveness of Moodle’s own online documentation – but I imagine most course designers (like me) will feel more confident with a printed manual to hand. This is the one I would suggest you go for.

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2006


William H. Rice, Moodle: E-Learning Course Development, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, 2006, pp.236, ISBN: 1904811299


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Filed Under: CMS, Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: CMS, eLearning, Moodle, Moodle: E-Learning Courses, Online learning, Open Sources, Rapid eLearning

Moodle English Teacher Cookbook

October 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

80 effective recipes for creating online learning materials

Moodle has now established itself as the de facto standard eLearning software tool in further and higher education. It’s an open source program (which means it’s free) and it also acts as a virtual learning environment (VLE) which makes expensive alternatives such as Blackboard redundant. If anybody tells you it’s an easy software program to use, they’re lying. Most people will need all the help they can get, even if they are putting some ready-made course materials into Moodle’s default templates. That’s why books such as this Moodle English Teacher Cookbook guide to course creation exist – to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features.

Moodle English Teacher CookbookEnglish Teacher’s Cookbook is aimed at classroom teachers of English for comprehension, writing skills, and composition – but in fact the techniques it demonstrates would be applicable in any humanities subject. Unlike many other guidance manuals it doesn’t bother explaining all of Moodle’s features, but instead plunges immediately into constructing modules of learning using a variety of supplementary programs such as Hot Potatoes and Microsoft Word, and Open Office

Silvina Hillar starts out with simple exercises, such as ‘matching sentences’ (which is actually a misnomer and should be ‘matching sentence parts) then creating learning journals, discussing responses in a forum, comparing notes, and constructing story boards.

I was a surprised that there was so little on the pedagogy behind the task, but her entire focus is on showing how to get it done in Moodle – or Let’s Moodle it! as she keeps repeating. This means lots of screenshots showing you what to enter into each dialogue box, and which menu options to choose. If you’re not experienced in using Moodle, you will find these very helpful.

Many of the stages of course creation involve entering small items of information into a data base using forms. There is quite a conceptual gap between the data entry process and what eventually appears on screen as the final result to a user. You should expect to find this quite arduous at first, but then straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

There are lots of different types of quizzes possible – missing words, multiple choice questions, matching words, or matching pictures to text – and you can also shuffle questions so that no two people see them in the same order (which I can assure you helps to minimize copying by students using adjacent screens).

Moodle has a lot of different learning activities (the quiz, lesson, survey, journal, wiki, forum) and it’s as well to know exactly what each one does, as well as the differences between them. The strength of Hillar’s approach is that she demonstrates how to use each of these options, and what the dialogue boxes look like on screen as you fill them with choices and information. The only weakness is that she doesn’t always show what the finished learning object will look like when accessed by the learner.

Another weakness of her approach is that many of the projects require outcomes to be read, assessed, and marked manually by a teacher. This not only fails to take advantage of the interactivities and the record-keeping features within Moodle, but gives the teacher an extra task for which many of them will not thank you.

However, to offset this, there’s plenty on embedding interactive materials from elsewhere – which is the quickest way to build course modules. Sources include other web sites, video from YouTube and Vimeo, and animated quizzes and games from what2learn.com. Almost all the third-party software she uses is open source or free to use.

Pedagogically, the examples are designed to provide a wide range of activities encouraging students to write – something that many of them (especially teenagers) are notoriously reluctant to do. There’s very little in here that couldn’t be done in a traditional manner with photocopied handouts – but the important feature of Moodle if you can incorporate it into your own learning modules is that it’s also a mechanism for marking and storing the results of student’s work.

Later chapters deal with discussing fictional characters, sentence and paragraph construction, and (keeping matters as fashionable and smack up to date as possible) how to integrate social media such as Twitter and FaceBook into Moodle courses. There’s also an entire chapter dealing with mind maps and tree diagrams – something I have never found convincing as a mechanism for learning, but which I know many people find reassuring.

I have been critical of some Moodle guides in the past. That’s because most of them are not much more than an explanation of Moodle features, but no suggestions about how they might be used to create dynamic eLearning courses, exploiting the interactivity that Moodle offers. This book is far more useful, because it approaches these issues the other way round. It starts with the premise of online learning design, then shows how it can be done using Moodle.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Silvina P. Hillar, Moodle English Teacher’s Cookbook, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2010, pp.207, ISBN: 1849510881


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Filed Under: Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: eLearning, Moodle, Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook, Online learning, Open Sources, Teaching

Moodle for Language Teaching

November 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

online language-learning activities using Moodle

I have been critical of some of these Moodle guides in the past. That’s because most of them are not much more than an explanation of Moodle’s individual features, but no suggestions about how they might be used to create dynamic eLearning courses, exploiting the interactivity that Moodle offers. Moodle for Language Teaching is far more useful, because it approaches these issues the other way round. It starts with the premise of online learning design, then shows how it can be done using Moodle.

Moodle 1.9 for Language TeachingJeff Stanford very sensibly begins by explaining the structure of a course in Moodle, and how its parts relate to each other. It’s important if you haven’t used Moodle before to understand the difference between course content and the extras that can be attached via blocks and add-on modules. [You also need to get used to the names of all these features.] All this will help you to conceptualise your course design, and it explains clever supplements such as Mobile Quiz which allows the downloading of quiz questions onto mobile phones.

Stanford also explains how to choose all the important settings for a course – the various permissions, users, course timetable, and what will be shown to students in the way of grades, results, and feedback. All of these options are amazingly detailed and customisable from within Moodle – so long as you know your way around the various settings.

All of his explanations are offered in a direct ‘Here’s how to do it’ manner, with screenshots showing you what to expect and copious lists of free software to help you achieve what you’re looking for. But be warned! Take anything new one step at a time, and don’t expect to create a richly interactive multimedia course in just a few days. Or – if you are new to Moodle – even a few weeks.

He explains how to create quizzes – and here’s an extra tip from someone who did this the hard way. You should learn how to categorise and store your quiz questions groups, so that you can re-use them in different combinations. This will save you the laborious effort of re-keying questions and their multiple possible answers.

The book understandably uses language learning as its pedagogic objective, but in fact almost all of the features of Moodle discussed could be used for creating courses in other subjects. For instance the glossary building activity to create lists of key terms and a ‘word a day’ feature; the Chat module, which acts in the same way as other Instant Messaging systems; or the ‘Hot Potatoes’ quiz-making module.

It’s assumed that the second language being taught is English, so this makes both the ideas and the examples useful for teachers of English, communication skills, or other language-oriented courses.

Many of the stages of course creation involve entering small items of information into a data base using forms. There is quite a conceptual gap between the data entry process and what appears on screen as the final result to a user. You should expect to find this quite arduous at first, but then straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

There are lots of different types of quizzes possible – missing words, multiple choice questions, matching words, or matching pictures to text – and you can also shuffle questions so that no two people see them in the same order (which I can assure you helps to minimize copying by students using adjacent screens).

For a language course he naturally explains the use of audio and video files to enhance learning. There’s a free add-on module called NanoGong which can be used in conjunction with a quiz to produce vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, and word stress exercises. You can also make short podcasts or add dictation exercises to which students reply in writing.

There are any number of opportunities to allow students to interact with each other, compare notes, see each other’s blog entries, rate discussion contributions, swap messages via email and the forum, and comment on each other’s work. But here’s another tip from hard won experience. Before you design a course, make sure how much time the tutor (even if that is you) can spend monitoring all this activity and participation in group work. Many institutions see online learning as a way of saving the expense of tutor time, rather than enhancing the student’s learning experience.

Writing activities are relatively straightforward. Students enter text and save their efforts as a journal, a blog, their profile, or as an assignment. You’ll be lucky if they do just one of these. But they do like feedback on any work submitted – so the book quite rightly ends with a section explaining the huge variety of assessment and grading systems that are available in Moodle.

In fact there is so much guidance and support available that it won’t all fit in this (fairly long) book. So two additional chapters have been placed on the publisher’s web site. These cover making your Moodle course materials look nice on screen, and preparing your students to use Moodle.

I’ve a feeling that the publishers Packt have learned from feedback on their earlier Moodle guides, and have wisely gone down the road of putting the designer’s needs first. Their formula works well here, and this guide for me is a better manual for designing courses than all the others currently available. We’ve been designing customized Moodle courses at www.texman.net for the last few years now, and having a guide like this at the outset would have flattened what at times was a painfully steep learning curve.

Moodle for Language Teaching   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2009


Jeff Stanford, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching, Birmingham: Packt, 2009, pp.505, ISBN: 1847196241


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Filed Under: CMS, Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: Course design, Education, Moodle, Online learning, Open Sources, VLE

Moodle Teaching Techniques

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creative ways to use Moodle for online learning courses

William H. Rice is something of a Moodle specialist. This is a follow up to his recent Moodle: E-Learning Course Development in which he seeks to explain the finer points of Moodle’s dizzying array of features and how they can be used to construct ever more sophisticated models of online teaching and learning. Moodle Teaching Techniques looks at the current and the future versions of Moodle. For instance, many tutors want to control the sequence of the student’s progress through a course, so that they need to understand one topic before they pass on to the next.

Moodle Teaching TechniquesThis is called ‘activity locking’, which is not available in the currently popular Moodle 1.8 version, but will be by the time version 2.0 appears. This is a good way of future-proofing the book’s relevance. All the strategies are explained in a perfectly straightforward manner, and illustrated with screenshots from the relevant control panels within Moodle. Those people who are familiar with its interface will have no difficulty in finding their way around.

The central feature of Moodle’s interactivity is the quiz option – and fortunately this is explored in some detail, showing how tutors can give graded levels of feedback on answers. I can tell you from first hand experience that all this is hard work – thinking up questions, correct solutions, and responses to all possible answers – but it does give students something more interactive than just reading flat text on a screen.

It’s certainly true that Moodle gives tutors and administrators an amazing amount of control over what appears and what takes place on a course. Postings to a discussion forum can be rated for their relevance, ordered by priority, and monitored for the participation level. These features are particularly useful for students engaged with online college degree programs where there is less face-to-face contact with other students as well as tutors.

However, some features are explored to the point of Utopianism – such as the ability of tutors to conduct chat sessions with students in a foreign language, with all the keyboard allocations used to type in foreign characters.

It’s good to know that Moodle has these features, but the basics of course construction still need to be explained and promoted – such as how to get more graphics, video, sound, and general animation and interaction into a typical course. Ninety-nine out of every hundred online tutors will still be having problems getting their students to the keyboard and keeping them there.

And some of the suggestions are workarounds bordering on the perverse – such as creating forums and allocating to them single students for what seems no more than what would be possible in a private email exchange. It’s possible, and it’s ingenious – but any tutor who has the time to do this ought to be making better use of it.

His suggestions for using Moodle’s lesson and Wiki features are much more realistic, as well as his assessment of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the forum, blog and journal features. He finishes by showing how the block elements of a Moodle course can be re-arranged on the page – something I think might have been more usefully placed at the start of the book.

So on the whole I think that whilst all Moodle-using course designers will want to get their hands on this well-timed publication – the definitive guide to designing online learning experiences is still to be written.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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William H. Rice IV, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Birmingham UK: Pakt, 2007, pp.172, ISBN: 184719284X


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Filed Under: Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: CMS, eLearning, Moodle, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Online learning, Open Sources, Rapid eLearning

Moodle Teaching Techniques

April 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

creative effective online learning courses using Moodle

As a course management system, Moodle has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, it’s a ‘constructivist’ program. This means that it allows users to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception. If anybody tells you it’s an easy software program to use, they’re lying. Most people will need all the help they can get, even if they are putting some ready-made course materials into Moodle’s default templates. That’s why books such as Moodle Teaching Techniques exist – to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features.

Moodle 1.9 Teaching TechniquesThe first chapter in Rice and Nash’s guide details the variety of strategies people use when learning, and it identifies the tools within Moodle which can be used to include them in an eLearning programme. This is useful at beginners and intermediate levels, when it’s not always easy to understand the difference in purpose of, say, a quiz and a lesson.

The next step – quite logically – is the creation of a structure for a course. It is now a generally accepted fact that courses need to be split into small, easily manageable units – whether these are called topics, modules, units, lessons, or chapters. The recommendation here is to use Moodle’s forum tool for creating these discrete parts. This is quite reasonable – but users will need to make clear to themselves the distinctions between student, group, forum, class, and course which flow from this decision. It is not immediately clear in Moodle what the consequences of making one choice rather than another will be.

The same is true when it comes to allocating permissions. Moodle permits a number of levels of privacy and security, and you will need to consider carefully the benefits and potential disadvantages of allowing students to see, for instance, each other’s work and teacher’s comments upon it. Fortunately, each stage of their recommendations is illustrated with screen shots showing how to effect the required configuarations.

They are quite right to assume that Chat will be an attractive feature for students – particularly youngers ones who have grown up in a world of Messenger and Facebook. But it seems odd to discuss all Chat’s possible uses before any course materials and structure have been shown. Unless you already know how to use Moodle, this book itself would need to be used in conjunction with another – such as Using Moodle or Moodle: E-Learning Course Development.

The issue of assessment is focussed exclusively on the creation of quizzes – which can be a rather complex and often counter-intuitive matter in Moodle. They show how a quiz can be timed, limited, and controlled – but they miss one important feature which could save course designers lots of time. That is the creation of categories for question banks in which the quiz questions can be saved for future re-use. These are, after all, the fundamental and re-usable learning objects which form the basis of a Moodle course.

Next they cover the use of the lesson to promote learning. The course materials should be chunked and their sequence controlled, with a series of checks on undestanding included at each stage. And if you didn’t already appreciate the fact, it’s worth knowing that Moodle records every single student activity on a course – so it’s possible to see how many attempts have been made at a quiz, how long was spent on each page, and how many correct answers have been accumulated. This allows for a lot of revision and fine tuning of the materials between each itteration of the course.

Then they cover features which will probably only be used on courses in further and higher levels of education (and training) – the use of the Wiki feature, the Glossary, the Workshop, and the Choice activity. It’s typical of Moodle’s use of confusing terminology that ‘Choice’ is what most normal people would call a Poll or a Survey.

And at the end comes a chapter which should more logically, but perhaps less inspiringly, come first – course management. You really do need to know how to set up a course so that students can find their way around, see what’s available, and keep track of their learning.

I continue to believe that the definitive guide to using Moodle as a course design and management tool is still to be written. It will be a hefty tome if it ever appears – but in the meantime, users will have to cope with these slimmer (but still expensive) volumes which offer pointers in roughly the right direction.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


William Rice and Susan Smith Nash, Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2010, pp.200, ISBN 1849510067


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Filed Under: Online Learning Tagged With: Education, Moodle, Online learning, Open Sources, Technology

Using Moodle (second edition)

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

open source software for online learning courses

Two or three years ago, attempts to put educational courses on line were stuck with using programs such as Blackboard and WebCT, which were costly, cumbersome, and deeply unpopular with the teachers who were being urged to use them. Now these programs are being swept away by the arrival of Moodle, the open source Content Management System (CMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which has one killer feature: it’s free.

Using MoodleActually, it also has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, this is a ‘constructivist’ program. That is, it allows people to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception. This is the second edition of a basic introduction to Moodle’s features – and it’s a big improvement over the first edition.

Jason Cole and Helen Foster start off quite rightly by taking you on a tour of the user interface – what you see when you start using Moodle. That is – how to log in and edit your user profile; how to navigate through the sections of a course using the breadcrumb trail; and how to explore all the tools and support information buttons which surround the main working area on screen.

Moodle allows you to arrange your courses chronologically, conceptually by topics, or socially according to the people using it. For tutors there is an amazing degree of control over every aspect of a course – its start date, duration, enrolments, course materials, quizzes, email forums, activities, reports, and student grades.

The heart of Moodle is the huge variety of interactive engagements it will support. These range from chatrooms, forums, and discussion boards, to collective activities such as building glossaries, journals, surveys, and (perhaps most novel of all) an option for student peer assessment.

The book’s basic assumption is that you are using what’s called ‘blended learning’ – that is, a combination of face-to-face tuition such as lectures or seminars, plus online course materials and lecture notes, email support, instant messaging – and anything else that will empower the student and enhance the learning process. It is also assuming a fairly mature and serious attitude to eLearning from the student.

From my experience of online teaching, they seem a bit over-optimistic about participation rates in discussion forums, but Moodle certainly does have some sophisticated features to help promote debate. For instance, the latest version allows participants to rate each other’s contributions (though you might have doubts about that being a good thing).

There are many other features that teachers will welcome. Add a news item for your group, and every member of it will automatically be sent an email informing them of the update. There are also handy tips such as reducing file sizes and saving PowerPoint presentations as Rich Text File format to save space.

They confront head on the issue of possible cheating in online tests, and provides a number of strategies for counteracting twisters. The most advanced current feature of Moodle is workshops – which allow students to see good and bad examples of coursework, and to offer critiques of each other’s work prior to formal submission.

That comes with the additional feature of what’s called an exercise. This is a piece of work the student submits along with a self-assessed grade. Their final grade is a combination of the tutor’s score and how well the student’s assessment matches it. This is an example of what struck me as verging on Utopian.

The journals feature is a tool that encourages students to reflect on their own learning process. Glossaries offers a similar property in that they can be created collaboratively. Lessons is a system of developing multiple-choice enquiries. That is, if you answer a question correctly, you move on the next topic; if you do not, you move back to check you understand the course materials.

Moodle even has its own built-in Wiki, so tutor and students can assemble basic information about their subject. Various levels of permissions for editing and access are also available so that the results can be safeguarded.

This is an excellently clear user’s guide, and almost every topic is illustrated with a screenshot. Full technical software documentation is available at Moodle, but if you’re anything like me, you will feel far more secure with a book to hand.

In this second edition there’s far more detail on how Moodle tools and features can be used to meet teaching objectives as techniques for the equivalent of classroom activity. This is getting closer to the book on constructing online learning courses which still needs to be written.

There are descriptions of how various IT champions are using Moodle to develop new forms of collaborative, blended and social learning . Some of these will seem rather advanced to even to even the most ambitious elearning tutor. Peer assessment, messaging and chat facilities could easily be seen as distractions for younger learners, but could be more appropriate for adults.

There’s still room for improvement in future editions. I would like to see some examples of course design and structure for instance. But for now, this is still the best guide to Moodle available in book form.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Using Moodle   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Using Moodle   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jason Cole & Helen Foster,Using Moodle, Sebastopo (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.266, ISBN: 059652918X


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Filed Under: CMS, Online Learning, Open Sources Tagged With: CMS, Education, eLearning, Moodle, Online learning, Technology, Using Moodle

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