What this book covers
Chapter 1, An Introduction to Moodle 3 and MoodleCloud, covers most of what needs to be known about e-learning, VLEs, Moodle, and MoodleCloud. There is a slight difference in between Moodle and MoodleCloud, especially if you don’t have access to a Moodle course in the institution where you are working and want to design a Moodle course. Furthermore, Moodle is used on different devices, and there are several aspects to take into account when designing a course and building a Moodle theme for these devices. We have also dealt with screen resolution, aspect ratio, types of images, and texts and anti-aliasing effects.
Chapter 2, Themes in Moodle 3 on-premises and MoodleCloud, shows what themes are and how to find them in Moodle and in MoodleCloud. We also reveal a little about HTML code and how colors are named in this code. We customize the Moodle theme called More and find out where our Moodle themes are on our computer. We have search for, download, and install Moodle theme Essential. We deal with plenty of information relevant to Moodle themes and where to find it.
Chapter 3, Setting Up Logos in Moodle Themes, works with UI-based settings to tune our Moodle themes. We do not change specific files such as HTML files or CSS because we take advantage of a theme where we can design a logo using on online logo editor, upload a logo, Favicon, background image as a tiled style. Regarding MoodleCloud, we learn how to upload a logo that can be seen in the header of the front page and the header of the login page, which is allowed in the theme that we are working with, bearing in mind that MoodleCloud has some limitations.
Chapter 4, Customizing the Header and the Footer, explain how to add images and text to the footer and the header. Hence, we add hyperlinks to social networks in Moodle on-premises. Apart from that, we can add a slide show and modify the front page changing the look and feel of the Moodle course. We learn how to make some changes to MoodleCloud, taking into account its limitations. There are customizable areas, though.
Chapter 5, Customizing Elements with CSS, works with several online text editors so as to learn more about CSS and what we can do in order to change the look and feel of Moodle on-premises. We test the code before making any changes and avoid making mistakes when customizing the look and feel of the Moodle theme.
Chapter 6, Locating, Editing, and Using New Icons, works with icons, vector graphics, and bitmaps. We learn who to modify SVG and export them as PNG. We change the look and feel of the Moodle on-premises course and personalize the icon. We can also add more images to the icons or edit them in a different way, but we always have to follow the steps that we have taken. We need to make copies of files and replace the edited files with the originals. We may not like how the new icon looks in the Moodle course.
Chapter 7, Optimizing Themes for Mobile Devices, works with emulators for mobile devices; we also check Internet connectivity and learn how to modify, edit, and custom some of these options. We work with Google DevTools, which is an online emulator, and we can easily learn how to work with a mobile device from either our desktop or laptop. Moreover, we emulate network connectivity to check how the theme download in a mobile device. We can customize not only the device, but also its connectivity. Besides, when throttling the connectivity, we can see the speed.
Chapter 8, Exploring Layouts, deals with all the themes available for Moodle 3.1 and Moodle 3, which are free of charge and downloadable at https://moodle.org/plugins/browse.php?list=category&id=3. We change the look and feel of our Moodle course several times in order to show how it looks dressed in other themes.
Chapter 9, Course Formats, deals with course formats. There are default course formats and there is also a plugin for them. These course formats can be downloaded from the Moodle website and can be installed in Moodle on-premises. We can also change the format of our courses in order to enhance them and make them a little bit different. We have to bear in mind what type of course we need to create in order to choose the right format.
Chapter 10, Extending Moodle Theming to Specific Sections, combines all the elements that we have learned throughout the chapters. We also add some ingredients in some cases that allow us to change the appearance of the Moodle course in order to customize it in the desired way.
Furthermore, we explore different ways in which we can simply change the look and feel of the course, since we can add just blocks, images, or make some small changes to the Moodle course that will allow us to see it in a different way.
Whenever we design an activity or add a resource, we must also bear in mind that we need to think how to organize them, due to the fact that the course will look tidier depending on how we organize the content.
