Introduction
| Home page | Creating a course
| Course page | Adding resources
| text page | web page | links
to files or a site | help
Moodle. Strange
new word. Google was a strange new word a few years ago and, certainly
within the education sector, Moodle is also likely to become quite
a familiar term very quickly.
Moodle is a structure that can be installed at an
institution like ours and provide ways for tutors to make course
material, resources and information available on-line. Putting courses
on-line has all sorts of benefits. People have quick access to whatever
files or resources they may need anywhere that has an internet connection.
‘People’ might be tutors wanting to prepare lesson materials
or have resources to hand instead of carrying huge bundles around.
They might be students looking for more information for assignments
or the assignment itself. They might be both, exchanging views on
a topic and, of course, they might be colleagues based miles away
but with whom you wish to share developments and ideas.
Whether you think of it as a web site, an intranet
or a virtual learning environment, the concept of putting courses
on-line lies at the heart of e-learning development and students
now expect to be able to access at least some information and material
on a computer and tutors have a responsibility to guide them in
a similar way to how we recommend journals and books. The fact that
tutors can also now add their own learning materials, quizzes and
provide facilities for students to discuss matters provides an opportunity
for you to add valuable personal and interactive elements.
Some tutors have already reported that they are
now creating more on-line documents than printed items or ‘in-class
only’ presentations. Just as the overhead projector now looks
terribly old-fashioned so too, soon, will the pile of photocopied
documents. These notes were written as initial guidance for
staff at Dunstable College but may also prove useful to anyone else
at the 'beginner's stage'.
So
how can you get started?
What’s on the home
page?
The Main Menu has
links to other areas within the College, including the Library,
the College web site, a user forum and any global announcements.
All the courses created in Moodle are listed in curriculum groups
under Course categories. You will also find a panel
of Upcoming Events and a Calendar.
This is the opening page for everyone.
Whilst many areas have been set as ‘open access’ at
the moment you can see quite a lot by just clicking on links like
a normal web site. You and students, though, will be able to see
and do a lot more by logging in.
There are log-in
links at the top right and foot of the page. Clicking there brings
up a standard log-in page – this would also happen if you
try to access a course. You will be advised of your user ID and
password / code and entering these takes you to a similar-looking
page but with an important difference: an Administration
menu.
Creating
a course
If you have already created a course,
or have been set as a tutor on one by someone else, then you will
have a My courses menu. If there are no courses
linked to you then go to Courses, select a category
and then Create a new course.
A series of questions need to be answered
now, mostly self-explanatory or with default settings you can safely
leave as they are. The important ones to get right are the name,
ID, format, whether guest
access is allowed, whether you want students to
see it yet and the theme.
The course ID will in due course be
the College course code in many instances but where you are creating
a course for a particular unit or module, or just ‘practising’,
that won’t be appropriate. It is suggested that, until further
advised, you use an ID comprising your initials and 001, 002 etc.
and keep a note of these. When the time comes to add students to
courses (and prevent them seeing others) the Moodle administrators
will need this information and may then allocate more permanent
ID codes.
The short name is merely an abbreviation
which is recognisable – it will appear in the menu bar across
most pages and provide a quick link to the new course home page.
Format concerns how
the information you provide is presented. There are three options:
Topic, Weekly and Social.
Topic format is probably
the easiest to use in most cases. You will be provided with 10 (default
setting) main heading areas which can be used as links to virtually
anything. This format can, therefore, list subjects with links to
information, lessons by day, week or whatever or any other type
of listing you can think of. An example might be to utilise the
area as items in a scheme of work.
Weekly format is
similar but can be a bit more restrictive. You will, for instance,
have to consider carefully what date you enter for the course start
date as that will be the first entry – creating a course some
way through the academic year may result in rather a lot of previous
entries you may not have time to go back and fill in! There are
ways around this (you can hide weeks from view, for example) so
if the weekly format suits you and better matches your current documents
by all means go for it.
Social format is
the least likely to be of use in normal course creation. It is essentially
a ‘talking shop’ or a collection of forums where various
topics can be discussed. It is most suited to collaborative work
and may well be a good idea for group project activities and you
may set this type of ‘course’ up in addition to the
more traditional collection of materials and resources.
The next important item is access:
who do you want to see your course? Whilst things are under development
we encourage everyone to allow anyone and everyone to have access
but if you are uploading material that you wish or need to keep
restricted then select the appropriate options for students and
staff. It is possible to adopt a sort of ‘half-way house’
by allocating a key word to a course. That will allow those who
know it in but not others.
Lastly, in this section, you should
choose a theme and it’s advised that you
‘force a theme’ to prevent it getting
changed. We are developing our own in-house themes and Moodle administrators
will be advising more about a better range of ‘Dunstable College’
styles and shades. These are most likely to be based on the ‘formal
white’ template which is recommended.
You should find that your new course
home page is now created and appears under My courses
on your home page too. In some instances you may be asked to assign
a tutor to the course, or you may wish to add new tutors. This can
be accomplished from the Tutors link in Administration,
searching by first or second name and adding one at a time.
It is hoped that students will be
added en bloc by Moodle administrators – more about that at
a later stage.
Course home
page
Now you have a course you will also
have a Turn Editing On button (or link in the Administration menu).
This is by far the most important button but first we should deal
with the other Administration menu items.
Whilst there is a lot that you can
do with your course from this list, very little is of much use until
you have people using your course and viewing your resources on
it! The only ones you’re likely to need are:
Settings: to change
set-up information, edit the name/ID or change access rules
Tutors: to add a colleague to the list
Files: to access your own files for this area
Help: most actions have a context-sensitive help
icon and this link takes you to Moodle’s excellent, and mostly
Plain English, user help files.
Turn Editing On: this enables panels to be moved
around the screen, added to, deleted, orders changed in lists etc.
It is the essential tool and is how you actually start adding content.
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Adding a
resource
Turning editing on
reveals a number of icons. Holding your mouse over each will indicate
what it does. To add content, click on Add a resource .
. .
You’ll have five options usually:
compose a text page
compose a web page
link to a file or site
directory
label
Illustrations of what the first three
are, and how they work, are included in the ‘Getting
started with Moodle’ section under Courses.
A brief summary is also provided below.
Compose a
text page
A panel is provided into which you
can either type directly or copy and paste text. Moodle will format
the text style and size to a default setting and there’s not
much control over how it appears. This is, however, a very quick
and simple way to add text content and suits things like short reports,
summaries, notes (without illustrations) etc.
Compose a
web page
Again, a panel is provided into which
you can just type or paste text. The difference is that you can
also change the font style, size, colour etc and add images, change
alignment etc. It’s very similar to using a standard text
processor with familiar icons and buttons too.
You need no special skills to use
this facility! You can even copy chunks from web sites or your own
notes and Moodle will reproduce it pretty accurately.
To add images, however, you will need
to upload them or provide a link so that Moodle knows where to find
them elsewhere on the internet. Uploading them is best and the process
is very similar to that described below.
If you have any knowledge of web design,
or can use tables then you may be able to create quite smart-looking
pages using this facility and those familiar with html code will
have spotted that they can write or edit content in that language
too.
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Link to a
file or site
Linking to a site
is extremely simple and is a very quick way to add smart content
to your course. Apart from typing a title, a short summary and the
link, the rest of the work is done for you! There are two options:
the web page can appear in a new window or stay part of the course
window. Keeping web content within the course structure can help
prevent students from wandering off elsewhere but some users do
prefer separate windows – you may like to try both options
and see which you prefer. (Use the Edit icon after completing the
link)
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Linking to a file
is probably the first part of the whole process that may be a little
more difficult. In order for people to be able to see your file
it has to be stored in the Moodle structure. As you’ve only
just started you won’t have a folder yet but, luckily, Moodle
helps you create one.
Make sure you have the file you need
available on either your computer somewhere, on a USB drive that’s
plugged in or even on a floppy disk (if they are still in use when
these notes see the light of day!)
Give the file a name,
a summary (which could include instructions as
to what you’d like people to do with it or a description of
pertinent features etc.) and then click on Choose or upload
file .
As in this example, there are no folders
yet in the Course area, so click on Make a folder.
Give the folder a name (if you share
the course with other tutors, adding your initials to the folder
name can help identify whose is whose!) and click Create.
As that is the folder you wish to
upload a file to, you have to open it by clicking on it (I always
find that part a bit odd) but if you keep your eye on the ‘breadcrumbs’
indicating the folders along the top then it will be in to the
last folder listed that the upload will go – not the
one shown under Name!
Then click on Upload a file.
Then Browse . . .
Then Upload this file
And finally, click on the word Choose
to feature the file in whichever section of the course page you
started in.
Once the file has been added to your
folder it will remain available for other use too if required. You
can access this from the Files entry in the Administration
menu. The panel illustrated above has several other options which
are worth noting. You can rename a file – not a bad idea if
you have spaces in the original name which get changed to_underscore_characters_in_Moodle
and can look grotty. Whilst there is an Edit option it is best to
make any changes to your original file and then upload the fresh
version and also to give it a new name and change the link. I have
heard of instances where uploading a file with the same name doesn’t
always replace the old one.
You can also create more folders,
or folders within folders and move files around. Be careful, though,
that you don’t break links to files that you move.
Once you’ve mastered the process
and both have folders created and can figure out where uploaded
files get deposited, the process is reasonably easy. It could, though,
be a drag having to upload a whole bundle of files which may well
be the case for most new courses being put on-line. There is a method
to upload whole folders of files and this may be preferable in many
cases. The Moodle administrators can either do this for you or explain
how to do it (using zip applications).
Whilst you can upload virtually any
sort of file, and Moodle will give icons to the ones it recognises,
you should bear in mind that if unusual software is required to
open a file which a user doesn’t have installed then he or
she won’t be able to see that resource.
There is currently an 8MB maximum
file size for uploads. That should be ample for most files but contact
the Moodle administrators if you have something larger.
The other two options under ‘Add
a resource’ are ‘Directory’
and ‘Label’. I can’t at present
quite figure out how a directory could be useful but you may wish
to use a ‘label’. This could be an
image, an icon or just a piece of graphic text which you’d
like to feature to make an item stand out or encourage people to
view it. If you were using the ‘Create a text
file’ option to make content then having a ‘label’
above it would be one way to add an image or something because images
can’t be included in that simple type of content.
That should be sufficient to get you
to the point of having a course or two created, with tutors allocated,
access arranged and a range of content provided in either a list
or week-by-week format.
You may have noticed the ‘Add
an activity’ box next to the resource box. In there
are a host of interesting-looking features, some of which will be
the subject of the next set of notes. In the meantime, those of
you who are getting the hang of Moodle may wish to experiment there
and try creating a quiz (probably the most popular
item in the selection).
Help
As mentioned above, there are good
notes available within the pages when opened for editing and a full
range of advice in the main help files. In addition there is a rapidly
growing and enthusiastic Moodle group and considerable expertise
within the FE community too. You can also contact the Moodle administration
team via Andrew Hill, ahill@dunstable.ac.uk and we’ll do our
best to help you.
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©
Andrew Hill, Milton Keynes, 2006
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