Every Learning Management System (LMS) has a paradigm, or approach, that shapes the user experience and encourages a certain kind of usage. An LMS might encourage very sequential learning by offering features that enforce a given order on each course. It might discourage student-to-student interaction by offering few features that support it, while encouraging solo learning by offering many opportunities for the student to interact with the course material. In Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, you will learn what Moodle can do and what kind of user experience your students and teachers will have, using Moodle. You will also learn about the Moodle philosophy, and how it shapes the user experience. With this information, you'll be ready to decide how to make the best use of Moodle's many features, and to plan your online learning site.

Chapter 2, Installing Moodle guides you through installing Moodle on your web server. It will help you estimate the amount of disk space, bandwidth, and memory that you will need for Moodle. This can help you to decide upon the right hosting service for your needs.

Most of the decisions you make while installing and configuring Moodle will affect the user experience. Not just students and teachers, but also course creators and site administrators are affected by these decisions. While Moodle's online help does a good job of telling you how to install and configure the software, it doesn't tell you how the settings that you choose affect the user experience. Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, covers the implications of these decisions, and helps you configure the site so that it behaves in the way you envision.

In Moodle, every course belongs to a category. Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, takes you through creating course categories, and then creating courses. Just as you chose site-wide settings during installation and configuration, you choose course-wide settings while creating each course. This chapter tells you the implications of the various course settings so that you can create the experience that you want for each course. It also shows you how to add teachers and students to the courses.

In Moodle, course material is either a resource or an activity. A resource is an item that the student views, listens to, reads, or downloads. An activity is an item that the student interacts with, or that enables the student to interact with the teacher or other students. In Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access you will learn about the settings that are common to all resources and activities, and how to add resources and activities to a course.

In most online courses, the core material consists of web pages that the students view. These pages can contain text, graphics, movies, sound files, games, exercises— anything that can appear on the World Wide Web can appear on a Moodle web page. Chapter 6, Adding Resources covers adding this kind of material, plus links to other websites, media files, labels, and directories of files. This chapter also helps you determine when to use each of these types of material.

In this context, interactive means an interaction between the student and the teacher, or the student and an active web page. Student-to-student interaction is covered in a later chapter. This chapter covers activities that involve interaction between the student and an active web page, or between the student and the teacher. Interactive course material includes lessons that guide students through a defined path, based upon their answers to review question, and the assignments that are uploaded by the student and then graded by the teacher. Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, tells you how to create these interactions, and how each of them affects the student and teacher experience.

In Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, you'll learn how to evaluate the students' knowledge with a quiz. The chapter thoroughly covers creating quiz questions, sharing quiz questions with other courses, adding feedback to questions and quizzes, and more.

Social course material enables student-to-student interaction. Moodle enables you to add chats and forums to your courses. These types of interactions will be familiar to many students. Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums shows you how to create and manage these social activities.

Moodle enables students to work together to create new material. For example, you can create glossaries that are site-wide, and glossaries that are specific to a single course. Students can add to the glossaries. You can also allow students to contribute to and edit a wiki in class.

Moodle also offers a powerful workshop tool, which enables the students to view and evaluate each other's work.

Each of these interactions make the course more interesting, but also more complicated for the teacher to manage. The result is a course that encourages the students to contribute, share, and engage. Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, and Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, help you rise to the challenge of managing your students' collaborative work.

Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, shows you how to use groups to separate the students in a course. You will also learn how to use cohorts, or site-wide groups, to mass-enroll students into courses.

Every block adds functionality to your site or your course. Chapter 13, Extending your Course by Adding Blocks, describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them. You can use blocks to display calendars, enable commenting, enable tagging, show navigation features, and much more.

Moodle offers several tools to help teachers administer and deliver courses. It keeps detailed access logs that enable the teachers to see exactly what content the students access, and when. It also enables the teachers to establish custom grading scales, which are available site-wide or for a single course. Student grades can be accessed online and can also be downloaded in a variety of formats (including spreadsheet). Finally, teachers can collaborate in special forums (bulletin boards) reserved just for them. This is a part of Chapter 14, Features for Teachers.

Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called social constructionism. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material. The difference between a traditional philosophy and the social constructionist philosophy is the difference between a lecture and a discussion.

Moodle does not require you to use the social constructionist method for your courses. However, it best supports this method. For example, Moodle enables you to add several kinds of static course material. This is the course material that a student reads but does not interact with, such as the following:

However, Moodle enables you to add even more kinds of interactive and social course material. This is the course material that a student interacts with, by answering questions, entering text, or uploading files, which includes the following:

Moodle also offers activities in which the students interact with each other. These are used to create social course material, such the following:

In addition, some of Moodle's add-on modules add even more types of interaction. For example, one add-on module enables the students and the teachers to schedule appointments with each other.

The front page of your site is the first thing that most users will see. This section takes you on a tour of the front page of a demonstration site.

Arriving at the site

When a visitor arrives at the demonstration learning site, the visitor sees the front page. You can require the visitor to register and log in before seeing any part of your site. Or, you can allow the anonymous visitor to see a lot of information about the site on the front page, which is what I have done in the following screenshot:

One of the first things that a visitor will notice is the announcement at the top and center of the page, Moodle 2.0 Book Almost Ready!. Below the announcement are two activities: a quiz, Win a Prize: Test Your Knowledge of E-mail History, and a chat room, Global Chat Room. Selecting either of these activities will require the visitor to register or log in with the site, as seen in the following screenshot:

The main menu

Returning to the front page, notice the Main menu in the upper left corner in the following screenshot. We added these two documents to the menu. They tell the user what the site is about, and how to use it:

In Moodle, the icons tell the user what kind of resource will be accessed by a link. In this case, the icon tells the user that the first resource is a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) document and the second is a Web page. Course material that a student observes or reads, such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files are called resources. In Chapter 5, Resources, Activities and Conditional Access, you will learn how to add resources to a course.

Available courses

You can choose to display the available courses on the front page of your site. Looking at the screenshot a few pages back, you can see that in my demonstration site, I've chosen to display the available courses on the front page to anyone who visits the site. On the demonstration site run by Moodle, they have chosen to hide the courses from the users who are not logged in. Their front page displays the information about their site, and links that enable the visitors to proceed to the login page, as seen in the following screenshot:

When a course is displayed in a list, clicking on the information icon next to a course displays its Course Description in a popup window. Clicking on a course's name takes you into the course. If the course allows anonymous access, you are taken directly into the course. If the course allows guest access or requires registration, you are taken to the login screen.

Now, let us take a look inside a course:

The navigation block

The Navigation block shows you where you are and where you can go in the site. In the demonstration, you can see direct links to the topics in the course. This enables the student to jump to a topic that is much further down on the page, without scrolling.

At the bottom of the Navigation block is a link to the My courses page. Clicking this link displays the courses the student is enrolled in and notices if the student has anything due in those courses, as seen in the following screenshot:

We will cover how to create assignments in Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices.

Sections

Moodle enables you to organize a course by Week, in which case each section is labeled with a date instead of a number. Or, you can choose to make your course a single, large discussion forum. Most courses are organized by Topic, such as the one seen in the next screenshot:

Notice that the first topic is not numbered. Moodle gives you a Topic 0 to use as the course introduction.

Teachers can hide and show sections at will. This enables a teacher to open and close resources and activities as the course progresses.

Topics are the lowest level of organization in Moodle. The hierarchy is: Site | Course Category | Course Subcategory (optional) | Course | Section. Every item in your course belongs to a Topic, even if your course consists of only Topic 0.

Joining a discussion

Clicking on the link for a discussion takes the student into the forum. Clicking on a discussion thread opens that thread in the forum. You can see in the following screenshot that the teacher started with the first post. Then a student replied to the original post:

The student's message in the preceding screenshot doesn't serve our students. Fortunately, the teacher has editing rights to this forum, and so he or she can delete posts at will. The teacher can also rate posts for their relevance, as shown in the following screenshot:

Because Moodle supports an interactive, collaborative style of learning, students can also be given the ability to rate forum posts and the material submitted by other students. You'll find out more about forums in Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums.

Completing a workshop

Next, the student will enter a workshop called Observing the Familiar.

In this workshop, the student writes and updates some defined observations. These observations are then rated by other students in the course. When the student first enters the workshop, he or she sees directions for completing the workshop, as seen in the next screenshot:

After reading these directions, the student continues to the workshop submission form, which is seen in the next screenshot:

Notice the online editor that the student uses to write the assignment. This gives the student basic What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) features. The same word processor appears when the course creators create web pages, when students write online assignment entries, and at other times when a user is editing and formatting text.

Moodle can be configured to use several different kinds of editors. Depending upon your exact version and how your site administrator configures your site, yours might differ slightly from what is shown here.

We've been looking at Moodle from a student's perspective. Students usually don't edit course material. Let us see what happens when you turn on the editing mode to make changes.

When a Guest user or a registered student browses through your learning site, Moodle displays the pages normally. However, when someone with a course editing privilege enters a course, Moodle offers a button for switching into editing mode:

Clicking Turn editing on puts Moodle into editing mode:

Let's walk through the icons that become available in editing mode.

The edit icon

Clicking the edit icon enables you to edit whatever that icon follows. In this example, clicking the edit icon that follows the paragraph enables you to edit the section description:

Clicking the edit icon next to the quiz Win a Prize: Test Your Knowledge of E-mail History, takes you into the editing window for that quiz. In that window, you can create, add, and remove quiz questions, change the grading scheme, and apply other settings to the quiz.

The course material that a student observes or reads, such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files are called resources. Course materials that a student interacts with, or that enables interaction among students and teachers, are called activities. Now, let us see how to add some resources and activities to your Moodle site or course.

In editing mode, you can add resources and activities to a course. Moodle offers more activities than resources, such as chat, forum, quiz, wiki, and more.

Adding resources and activities

You add resources and activities by using the drop-down menu that appears in editing mode, as seen in the following screenshot:

Selecting an item brings you to the editing settings page for that type of item. For example, selecting URL displays the window seen in the following screenshot. Notice that you can do much more than just specify a hyperlink. You can give this link a user-friendly name, a summary description, open it in a new window, and more.

Every resource and activity that you add to Moodle has a description. This description appears when a student selects the item. Also, if the item appears in a list (for example, a list of all the resources in a course), the description will be displayed.

When building courses, you will spend most of your time in the edit settings pages for the items that you add. You will find their behavior and appearance to be very consistent. The presence of a description is one example of that consistency. Another example is the presence of the help icon next to the title of the window. Clicking this icon displays an explanation of this type of item.

Also, the edit settings pages are divided into sections. Some sections are present for almost every resource and activity that you add. These sections are covered once in this book, in order to avoid repetition.

The contents of the Administration menu change depending upon who is logged in. For example, the next screenshot shows the Administration menu when a student is in one of our courses:

The following screenshot shows the teacher's view of the Administration menu:

The choices on this menu apply to the course itself. If a teacher, administrator, or course creator selects an activity or resource in the course, the user is taken inside that activity/resource. Then, the Administration submenu for that item will appear. In the example seen in the following screenshot, the teacher has selected an assignment and is looking at the Administration submenu for that assignment:

This short tour introduced you to the basics of the Moodle experience. The following chapters take you through installing Moodle and creating courses. If you work through those chapters in order, you will discover many more features that are not mentioned in this tour. And, because Moodle is open source, new features can be added at any time. Perhaps you will be the one to contribute a new feature to the Moodle community.

The following screenshot shows you my Moodle application directory. Without even knowing much about Moodle, you can guess the function of several of the directories. For example, the admin directory holds the PHP code that creates the administrative pages, the lang directory holds translations of the Moodle interface, and the mod directory holds the various modules:

The index.php file is the Moodle home page. If a student was browsing my Moodle site, the first page that the student would read is the file http://moodle.williamrice.com/index.php.

On my site, the free course Basic Botany for Foragers happens to be course number 4. Only the Moodle system knows it as course number 4; we know it as Basic Botany for Foragers. When a student enters that course, the URL in the student's browser reads http://moodle.williamrice.com/moodle/course/view.php?id=4. In the preceding screenshot, you can see that /course is one of the directories in my Moodle installation. As the user navigates around the site, different .php pages do the work of presenting information.

Because each of Moodle's core components and modules is in its own subdirectory, the software can be easily updated by replacing the old files with new ones. You should periodically check the https://www.moodle.org website for news about updates and bug fixes.

Moodle stores the files uploaded by the users in a data directory. This directory should not be accessible to the general public over the web. That is, you should not be able to type in the URL for this directory and access it using a web browser. You can protect it either by using an .htaccess file or by placing the directory outside of the web server's documents directory.

The preceding screenshot shows you that in my installation, the web document directory for moodle.williamrice.com is /www/moodle. Therefore, I placed the data directory outside /www/moodle, in /www/moodledata_for_moodle.williamrice.com, as seen in the following screenshot:

On my server, the directory /www/moodledata corresponds to the subdomain www.moodledata.williamrice.com. This subdomain is protected from open access by a .htaccess file. The directory /www/www corresponds to the root domain, www.williamrice.com.

While the Moodle data directory stores the files uploaded by students, the Moodle database stores most of the information in your Moodle site. The database stores objects that you create using Moodle. For example, Moodle enables you to create web pages for your courses. The actual HTML code for these web pages is stored in the database. Links that you add to a course, the settings, the content of forums and wikis, and quizzes created with Moodle, are all examples of data stored in the Moodle database.

The three parts of Moodle—the application, data directory, and database, work together to create your learning site. Backup and disaster recovery are an obvious application of this knowledge. However, knowing how the three parts work together is also helpful when upgrading, troubleshooting, and moving your site between servers.