Moodle E-Learning Course Development: A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle

Editorial Reviews

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. Moodle is relatively easy to install and use, but the real challenge is to develop a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively onto the content established learning situation. This book guides you through meeting that challenge.

This unique book gives you more than just a guide to the Moodle software; it uses Moodle as a route to better teaching, more motivated students, and more successful courses. Moodle is the leading Open Source learning management system. Using Moodle, teachers can easily construct richly textured web based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons, with each lesson including reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and group work between students.Moodle E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. It will help you analyse your students' requirements, and come to an understanding of what Moodle can do for them. After that you'll see how to use every feature of Moodle to meet your course goals.

The social constructionist learning philosophy is at the heart of Moodle: we all "construct" knowledge through interation with one another and with learning materials in a social way. Moodle E-Learning Course Develelopment will show you how to add static learning material, interactive activities, and social features to your courses so that students reach their learning potential. Whether you want to support traditional class teaching or lecturing, or provide complete online and distance learning courses, this book will prove a powerful resource throughout your use of Moodle.

- Understand what Moodle can do, how it compares to other e-learning packages, and how it can support your teaching strategies
- Install the Moodle software on your own computer or a server, and understand your way around it
- Know how to create different kinds of courses. Moodle can support courses where the group works through the classes with a shared schedule, or where individual students work through at their own pace, or courses where students are free to explore the different topics in their own time. This book will show you how.
- Understand all of Moodle's learning features. Moodle provides features for managing course content, interactive resources, and social activities such as forums and wikis. This book explains what each of these features are, how they work, and most importantly how and when to use them effectively.
- Manage students – so that you can ensure that the right students are going to the right classes; allow students to enrol themselves, or invite students to join a course. You can even set up commercial courses where students pay to sign

William Rice is an experienced trainer and expert on learning and teaching practices. This experience and expertise forms the foundation of his approach: What do we want to teach? How would this best translate into a course? How best can Moodle support these course objectives?Of course, the book contains everything you'd expect from an introduction to Moodle: clear step-by-step instructions, plenty of screenshots, explanations and guides through the many features and options that you have to choose from. Throughout the book, William develops an example course. He uses this example to explore the sort of decisions, design considerations, and thought that goes into developing a successful course.

This book is written for everyone who wants to get the most from Moodle. Beginners to the software will get a thorough guide to how the software works, and some great ideas for getting to a good start with their first course. More experienced Moodlers will find powerful insights into developing more successful and educational courses.

Customer Reviews

Add a Comment

Average Customer Review




Mostly Worthless, June 14, 2008
By Excelsior (CO, USA)
I found this book to be little more than the help that is already included in Moodle. There are a lot of screenshots, but very few have callouts, so they're not nearly as helpful as visuals could be -- however, the images take up about half of the book. At around 230 pages, half of that screenshots, I expected more for a $40 (list) book.



Plain, clear and exhaustive, March 28, 2008
By Jan Kloczko (Warsaw, Poland)
I found this book very useful, it allowed me to set up a full Moodle site and course for my training company within less than a week. Clear, easy to read, with good structure, and exhaustive - in terms that it allows one to install and setup moodle, shows multiple possibilities of creating courses and lessons, as well as good examples. Everything is written in a language just one level above a layman - which means that even a computer semi-troglodyte like me can understand even the setup part easily, and everyone can make a good course out of it. It's an example of a very well written manual.
I recommend it highly. One star less - because it is already slightly out of date. Moodle is updated monthly, and many of minor options are not described in the book - however, nothing that could not be understood and learnt by an average user. Good resource.



Great for the right need, March 1, 2008
By Dennis Dow (Colorado)
The book is a well written solid book that has clear and fairly complete examples on using Moodle. The book is ideal for the user who has just started, or will start using Moodle to teach a course. The book doesn't cover installation or administration - and doesn't claim to. The book doesn't cover advanced educational methodologies - Moodle Teaching Techniques by the same author will.

If you are a Moodle administrator, recommend this book to your beginning instructors, but you won't need it. If you have developed a course or two, and are looking for information about features you haven't figured out, or want more clarity about how Moodle works, this book will help. If you are just starting, this book is a definite.



Pretty good, October 19, 2007
By D. B. Hopkins (Gulf of Thailand)
I have to be fair and admit that I haven't read the whole book. I have skimmed it, and read some parts very carefully. It is a fairly good guide to this learning program, but it's a steep learning curve for a non 'techie.' I am a teacher who is looking to put coursework on line. A note in the beginning to start with chapter three would have been very helpful here. As it is, the book has convinced me that it would take me considerable time to use this program. I was hoping for short cuts, and instead, the book provided more details than I needed to know to just hoist my courses up on line. While I am not a techie, my son is a professional and teaches this stuff, and he says it not very transparent for him either. Obviously, my lack of technical computer knowledge is getting in the way of my understanding of this text, but the text certainly didn't make it easier. If anything the text was harder than 'click and see' with the real program.



All at one place at least, October 17, 2007
By Manoj Navalkar (India)
Just the fact that there is one place away from the online medium where one can access information on moodle is good enough to give this book kudos - to be able to read it when not in front of the computer. On first glance through (and in that, this may not be termed a review), the books seems quite expansive. Complimented by the online documentation, the prospect of working on moodle looks exciting - now there are two sources against just one online documentation source.

As mentioned, this is just a first impression. Hope to add more to this as I get deeper into the book.