Moodle-LMS
Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites. It is a global development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. (watch this video clip for more information: http://moodle.org/about/) So for, there are 66675 currently active Moodle sites that have registered from 215 countries. (for more statistical report see here). Moodle was originally developed by Martin Dougiamas to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content, and is in continual evolution. The first version of Moodle was released on 20 August 2002. The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. Moodle was developed for students or teachers to study or teach an online course. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU General Public License). Basically this means Moodle is copyrighted, but that you have additional freedoms. You are allowed to copy, use and modify Moodle provided that you agree to: provide the source to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work. Moodle can be used to create an informational web site or an interactive learning environment online. Moodle features are:
- Communication tools
- Student Collaboration
- 24/7 Access
- Student/teacher interaction
- Online learning
- Digital tools
- Discussion board
- Assessment Tools
System Requirements
Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support an SQL type database (for example MySQL). It can be run on Windows and Mac operating systems and many flavors of Linux. (for more details: http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Installing_Moodle)
Managing Moodle
Role: Moodle uses a fixed set of roles i.e. primary admin, admins, course creators, editing teachers, non-editing teachers, students, and guests. For each role, the capability or actions that they can perform are fixed. For example, the role student allows the user to submit an assignment, but doesn\’t allow the user to browse/edit other users\’ work. By using this setup we limit ourselves to a rather rigid set of capabilities for each role. If we want, say a particular student or group to be able to mark assignments in a particular course, we can\’t do that without giving these users teacher privileges. A user with the role of Administrator is typically in charge of a Moodle site once it has been installed, although some tasks may be delegated to others by assigning them a role such as Manager. The following are about how to manage your Moodle site.
- Authentication - different methods of adding new users to your Moodle
- Managing accounts - how to search for, edit, delete or perform bulk actions on users
- Enrolments - different methods of adding users to courses.
- Roles and permissions - how to add or remove permissions from students, teachers and other users on your Moodle
- Security - how to keep your Moodle safe
- Performance - ways to check the efficiency and smooth running of your Moodle
- Backup - how to backup your site and courses
- Site appearance - ways to change the display and navigation of your site
- Language - how to add new languages and alter the default terms used.
- Server settings - registration, maintenance and default settings
- More features - Blogs, Comments, Tags, Messaging, Notes, RSS feeds, Calendar
Managing a Moodle course A course in Moodle is an area where a teacher will add resources and activities for their students to complete. It might be a simple page with downloadable documents or it might be a complex set of tasks where learning progresses through interaction. Students can be enrolled manually by the teacher, automatically by the administrator, or they can be allowed to enroll themselves for the course. Students can also be added to groups if they need to be separated from classes sharing the same course or if tasks need to be differentiated.
- Courses - how to set up your courses.
- Editing text - how to use the text editor and what the icons mean.
- Activities - how to involve students actively in their learning.
- Resources - how to add static materials to your course.
- Questions - how to create questions for use in quizzes and Moodle’s lesson module
- Course enrolment - how to give students access to your course.
- Grouping users - how to put students into groups and why this is useful.
- Tracking progress - how to control and display progress through a course.
Managing content Moodle is not primarily a content management system but it does offer a range of ways to import, export and manage digital content of any kind to enable and support learning. The following links will provide more information:
- Working with files - how to upload files and folders to Moodle.
- Repositories - how to import content into Moodle from external storage sites like Flickr, Youtube, Google docs etc.
- Portfolios - how to export content from Moodle into external portfolios like Mahara.
- Working with media - how best to upload and display images, sound, video and embedded content.
- Filters - how to display links, media players, Maths symbols, emoticons and more.
- Licenses - how to display and choose an appropriate license for your files.
- Plagiarism prevention - how to check students\’ submitted work is not copied.
You can visit to Moodle Documents to know more about installation, managing courses, pages, and users etc in the Moodle document.
