If the title caught your attention, then chances are:
* you’re an instructor new to online learning or,
* you’re a department administrator seeking to draw instructors to online learning or,
* you’re an instructional designer helping instructors integrate technology into their teaching practices
At any rate, this series is aimed at illustrating how using an LMS – like Moodle – can assist you in transitioning your instruction to the online medium.
So, where to begin? Let’s talk about what you already DO know: your syllabus.
Every instructor has a “plan” for what content they are going to deliver to their students, what tools and resources they will be using, and how they are going to assess the learning of their students. This is the all-powerful “syllabus”. The syllabus generally has passed some sort of accreditation body – be it the NCLB, the campus curriculum committee, a certification committee – whatever this accreditation body is, it means your syllabus has passed the muster for you to deliver and teach said content in the classroom.
So now – let’s go one step further: Your syllabus is your CONTRACT with your students. Yep. It’s a living, breathing document – it grounds you and your students and sets the expectations for the course. So, let’s make use of this document in bringing you to the online world.
I’m presenting at conferences again. Here’s the latest:
Topic: Moodle Site Administration: Bringing Together Technology and Usability (link to course)
Presented at:
Access to the materials are freely available to the public.
For attendees of my presentation, I’ve two unique login credentials (choose one to login to the course linked above):
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If you’ve already got courses built on Moodle using an unsecure server and you switch to a secure server, the http will not auto-translate to https in all of your course links. Moodle seeks out the root file path to swap out and update links when courses are restored – meaning it takes the “http://yourserver.com/file.php/###/” and swaps it when restoring courses. But by default, if you switch to an https server, you’ll have to write a custom script to make the site properly update the file paths in all links.
Moodle is an open-source learning management system (LMS). It has been around for awhile. Currently, it’s the hot “new” system in competition with other LMS courseware systems – both public and private – such as WebCT/Blackboard, Angel Learning, Desire2Learn, Sakai, ETUDES NG, and various textbook publisher versions of LMS systems.
The draw of Moodle is that it’s low-cost in comparison to the other LMS systems out there – both private and open-source. Moodle is freely distributed to anyone who downloads it with a GPL license. It is relatively easy to set up and start building courses on. “Out-of-the-box” it is meant for non-enterprise deployment. Anyone hosting with a provider who has Apache, PHP, MySQL installed can pretty much get this system up and running. That’s the backend – and indeed, if you’re a geek you can do this yourself at home [but research security first - especially with student data and FERPA or PPRA]. From the instructor perspective, creating courses is relatively simple. The complexity varies depending upon the customization of the system (what bells and whistles have been “added on”) and if your Moodle installation is affiliated with an institution rather than your own “private” hosting. Meaning, if it’s hosted at a school, you’ve got to abide by their systems and processes, whereas if you’re hosting it yourself – well, get in there and just start building!