Moodle Tutorial - Features & Benefits

Why use Moodle?

Moodle is a learning management system (LMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 400,000 members, speaking 60 languages in 120 countries. Moodle is the most popular learning management system on the web. Its rich-featured tool set suits school, high school, college, and university web sites.

Moodle features for Educators

• Moodle promotes a social constructionist pedagogy (which includes collaboration, activity-based learning, critical reflection, etc)

• Moodle is suitable for 100% online classes as well as supplementing face-to-face learning

• Moodle has a simple, efficient, low-tech browser interface

• Course listings show descriptions for every course on the server, including accessibility to guests.

• Courses can be categorised and searched - one Moodle site can support thousands of courses

• Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings, journal entries etc) can be edited using a capable, embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor

Managing Moodle User Accounts

• Goals are to reduce admin involvement to a minimum, while retaining high security

• Each person requires only one account for the whole server - each account can have different access

• An admin account controls the creation of courses and creates teachers by assigning users to courses

• A course creator account is only allowed to create courses and teach in them.

• Teachers may have editing privileges removed so that they can't modify the course (eg for part-time tutors)

• Teachers can enrol students manually if desired

• Students are encouraged to build an online profile including photos, description. Email addresses can be protected from display if required.

• Every user can choose the language used for the Moodle interface (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese etc)

Managing Moodle Courses

• A full teacher has full control over all settings for a course, including restricting other teachers

• Choice of course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focussed social format

• Flexible array of course activities - Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops

• Recent changes to the course since the last login can be displayed on the course home page - helps give sense of community

• Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings, journal entries etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor

• All grades for Forums, Journals, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file)

• Full user logging and tracking - activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed "story" of each students involvement including postings, journal entries etc on one page.

• Mail integration - copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text.

• Custom scales - teachers can define their own scales to be used for grading forums, assignments and journals

• Courses can be packaged as a single zip file using the Backup function. These can be restored on any Moodle server.

Now that you know about the great functionalities of Moodle, we can continue with further instructions on how to use Moodle.

 

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