What this book covers
Chapter 1, A Guided Tour of Moodle, tells you what Moodle can do and what kind of user experiences you can create for your students and teachers. You will also learn how the Moodle philosophy shapes user experience. This helps you to decide how to make the best use of Moodle and plan your learning site.
Chapter 2, Installing Moodle, teaches you how to install Moodle on your web server.
Chapter 3, Configuring Your Site, explains how to configure your site so that it behaves in the way you envision. It also helps you to create the user experience you want. If someone manages your Moodle site for you, you can use this chapter to learn about various configuration options that will make creating and teaching courses easier for you.
Chapter 4, Creating Categories and Courses, shows you how to create course categories and new courses. It covers course settings that affect the behavior of a course. It also shows you how to enroll teachers and students in a course.
Chapter 5, Resources, Activities, and Conditional Access, covers some common settings that you will need to choose for all the resources and activities that you add. It also shows you how to control the flow of students through a course using conditional access. Also, you will learn how to hide, show, and rearrange items on your course's home page.
Chapter 6, Adding Resources, talks about resources as course materials that students read, but don't interact with, such as web pages, graphics, and Adobe Acrobat documents. This chapter teaches you how to add these resources to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 7, Adding Assignments, Lessons, Feedback, and Choices, covers course activities that enable students to interact with the instructor, the learning system, or each other. In this chapter, you will see how to add several kinds of interactive course material: assignments, lessons, choices, and feedback.
Chapter 8, Evaluating Students with Quizzes, shows you how to evaluate your students' knowledge and attitude.
Chapter 9, Getting Social with Chats and Forums, covers how Moodle excels at peer interaction. This chapter teaches you how to add social resources activities to a course and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter 10, Collaborating with Wikis and Glossaries, provides insights on how to add wikis and glossaries to your course. These activities enable students to work together in order to build a body of knowledge.
Chapter 11, Running a Workshop, talks about a workshop that provides a place for students in a class to see an example project, upload their individual projects, and see and assess each other's projects.
Chapter 12, Groups and Cohorts, explains how to use groups to separate students in a course into teams. You will also learn how to use cohorts to mass enroll students to courses.
Chapter 13, Extending Your Course by Adding Blocks, provides insights on how every block adds functionality to your site or course. This chapter describes many of Moodle's blocks, helps you to decide which ones will meet your goals, and tells you how to implement them.
Chapter 14, Features for Teachers, shows you how to use Moodle's gradebook and logs to track student activity.
