Moodle 3.0x Masterclass: Complete Educator's Guide to Moodle

You will get your first feel of Moodle in this lesson. In my particular case, I am running Moodle out of my local workstation but in your case this might be different. The first thing I expect you to notice - is that your Moodle might look significantly different from what you see here. But be assured that this will be mostly superficial. If it looks different, it will be only because your site administrator would have customized the Moodle installation to reflect your institution's branding - so do not worry about this! Very soon you will be navigating Moodle with style. 

In the previous lesson, we logged into Moodle for the first time. And in this lesson, we will become familiar with the interface within Moodle and learn how to navigate comfortably within Moodle. The very first thing you have to notice and get very familiar with are these rectangular areas called as "Blocks". These blocks are the most fundamental interface units in the Moodle design. Blocks provide various functionalities which can be highly customized and much of your interactions with Moodle will occur through various Blocks.

It is a very good practice that you as a teacher keep your profile in Moodle updated as early as possible. So, in this lesson, we will see how you can update your profile. In Moodle 3.x, the profile page is available primarily through the drop down available at the top of the page. When I open the drop down menu, you can see the "Profile" link.

The preferences page allows you to configure literally all possible personal settings allowed by Moodle in one convenient location. For example, you can change your password, editor settings and language settings. We will explore a few of them in later classes but in this lesson, we will look at "Messaging".

For most of this course, we will be logging in a Teacher role to learn Moodle functionality in depth. Additionally, I will also be showcasing other role functionalities - such as the Manager, Course Creator and Admin also - to give you a well rounded perspective on multiple roles and how they all function together in a whole picture. In this lesson, you will see how you can edit and customize different aspects of Moodle - particularly the course that you will be teaching. 

In this lesson, we will do our first bit of editing of the course layout. If you look at the course homepage, by default, Moodle adds a "News forum" as the first item on the course layout. This is a fully functional social forum that can be of great value to your students. You can of course choose to re-position it to any other place by using it's move handle.

Now we are going to jump into the meat of course layout and customize exactly how we want our course to be structured. By default, when you create a new course - if you do not do any changes, Moodle will create a course with a Weekly formatted sections for your course - with 10 weekly sections - starting from the default start date of the course.

We will see how to start building out the sections to reflect our own curriculum. 

As the teacher of this course, you will have the ability to modify the look and feel of your course homepage to a great extent. And in this lesson, we will see how you can manipulate blocks. When I look at the course homepage, I see that I would like to add a calendar to the course. This will be a great piece of functionality - as you can then configure the calendar to show various important dates and events as pertaining to your course - to your students.

Now we will explore Moodle's Role Based Access Control. Moodle has a well designed role based system that controls what every user on the system can see or do on Moodle - based on the role assigned to them.

In this lesson I will explain more about the underlying permissions that make up the roles. Moodle provides about 500 individual, high granular permission settings - however as a teacher you will almost never have to worry about this screen. But, if you want some special access to some area of Moodle - you should request the System Administrator to grant you permission - which they can then enable here.

In the previous lesson we saw the default role names given by Moodle are - Teacher, Manager, Course Creator, Non-editing Teacher and so on; Now, your institution may use different titles. And if the online titles are different from the offline ones - it may be a little disorienting to the students. There is an easy way provided by Moodle to resolve this situation. At the course level - you can just change the labels to anything that you choose for your own course.

So far, we have built a robust scaffolding for our course. The real value of the Learning Management System is when we now start providing Learning Content on to the course. This is also the part where Moodle really shines as it is both extremely powerful and very simple in providing great tools for managing learning content of your course.

Throughout this section, we will focus on creating different types of learning content for your course. In this lesson, we will start with the most rudimentary and most commonly used type of content - a file resource. Basically, you will make a document available to the student from a particular section of your course homepage. You might want to add such resources to share presentations, or share source code with the class, autocad draft files and literally any other type of content.

Continuing with our section of adding different types of learning resources for your student in Moodle - in this lesson we will see how to add a HTML page with learning content directly into our course. Contrast this with the previous lesson where you learnt how to add a downloadable PDF file.

What tool do we use when we have learning content several pages long? A great tool for this is Moodle's Book resource - which lets you create a multipage resource in a book-like format, with chapters and sub-chapters. For a change, we will see this example on a live version of the Moodle. The look and feel in this example is going to be different just because I am using a different theme on this site. But all the logic is going to remain exactly the same.

Video is a very powerful tool to use in a Moodle course, allowing students, for example to catch up on lectures they missed, learn from a "how to" screencasts, or improve their language skills by watching native speakers interact. In a flipped class model, they are very useful to get the learners to be prepared on a topic before attending classes. The great thing about videos is that a feeling of one-on-one learning can be created with the student. In the lesson on adding webpage resources we had already seen how to embed a video into a added webpage resource.

In this lesson, we will see how to create links to external learning content. The tool to do this is called as the "URL resource". A URL stands for Universal Resource Locator - and is a link on the internet to a website or online file. For example, you might like to link to a Wikipedia page or a Youtube video. This is simple yet quite powerful. Let us see some things that we can do with the URL.

Now, that we have added several types of resources, the section 1 of this course is taking shape well. In this lesson, we will see how to add the "label resource" and also a few nifty formatting tricks. Labels have more usages - they are commonly used to display an embedded sound file or video directly on the course page. These media files can be inserted from the editor we saw in the creation page just now. 

In the previous section, you learnt about a whole lot of different learning resources that you can add to your course. In this section, we will learn about activity resources. An activity is something that a student will do that interacts with other students and or the teacher. And we will start with the Quiz activity.

Quizzes are one of the most powerful tools available in Moodle - and can be used both as learning tools as well as assessment tools. In both cases they can be configured as automatic self evaluation and can save hours together for you - because the grades can be configured to automatically enter into the Gradebook provided by Moodle.

In the previous lesson, we saw quiz creation is done in 2 parts - first we create and configure the quiz itself - and then we add questions into the quiz.. This lesson we will explore quiz question creation. Moodle provides you with a very powerful concept called as the "Question Bank". You can see the link to this in the "Administration" block, under "Course Administration".

We will explore the Forum also known as the Discussion Forum. This is an activity type that's just great for encouraging peer interaction. The forum can also be designed as a Q&A forum where a student must first post before they can see other student's posts. Moodle's Forum is very versatile and you can configure it in a variety of ways. Simplest is the discussion format where anyone can post at any time. Or you can restrict student participation to exactly one post only. Forum posts can be graded or non-graded - in fact, grading can also be allowed by students - that is peer evaluation.

Over the last two sections and several lessons, you have seen how to add a variety of activities and shortcuts. Once you get familiar with all the tools and are pressed for time - there is another faster way to add activities and resources into our course.

The only pitfall is that you do not have the nice descriptions that each tool was presented with in the pop-up window.

Now that we have built up the course it is time that we started enrolling students into the course.

There are 4 fundamental ways by which students can be enrolled into courses. The first method is only by administrators or managers through a bulk enrollment mechanism - you can see this in the bonus section of this course. The second is through student self enrollment - the next lesson will show how this is enabled. The 3rd method is through teacher's manual enrollment - and this lesson demonstrates it. The 4th method is batch enrollment and we will see this also in another lesson in this same section.

For some courses you will want to allow student self enrollment. This means that the user will see a list of courses that allows self enrollment and then enroll themselves into the course by submitting up an enrollment form in Moodle.
In this lesson, we will see how to enable student self registration.

We have seen manual and self enrollment in the previous lessons - and in this lesson we will see another fast method of adding students into courses- the batch enrollment method.

In this new section, we will explore the communications tools provided by Moodle. You are already that the Moodle system itself generates several email notifications if it so configured - for example when a new account is created. Apart from this, you as the teacher can initiate several types of communications either directed at individual students - or to the entire class.

In this lesson, we will explore the "News Forum".

In the previous lesson, we saw the "News Forum" and "Latest news" block - which provided a convenient way to make announcements to all the participants of a class without exception.

In this lesson, we will see the Messaging feature. Messaging can be used to communicate 1-on-1 or 1-to-many with either the students or any user on the entire system.

The upper right hand corner of the screen at all times hosts the "My Profile" area - where you can conveniently access all your personal links. Amongst the links there you will see the "Messages" link.

I will click on this and be led to the messaging centre. Here you can see that I already have a message waiting for me. And when I click on the message, you can see the profile pictures with a indented message history.

And then I can just add a reply too if I want. This has demonstrated the 1-on-1 messaging. How you will be notified of a new message will depend upon what you have configured as your preference in the profile section - either a popup message or an email or both.

Now, to create a new message I can select from this "Message Navigation" drop down, make an appropriate selection. For example I will select the C course and from the participants list, select a student and send in a message.

The student will then get a message according to their notification settings.

OK, now let me return to the course homepage and I will now show how to make a 1-to-many message.

Under Navigation > Current course > click on Participants.

This will get us a list of all participants of the course. The good thing here is this list is sortable. For example, I can select only students, only teachers or everyone. Furthermore, I can sort alphabetically. I can also select everyone.

When I am finished picking who I want to send a message to, I will click on the "Select All" button. With selected users, I can then send a message.

In the next screen that follows - I have a message ready that I will paste in. Before you send the message you can remove any names from the list if you want - and then you can preview the message.

OK, fine, this looks good to me - and I will click on the "Send Message" and a message will be sent to all the recipients.

From the English language definition of the word, a GROUP is a collection of some sort of entities. The Moodle concept goes a little beyond that.

In this lesson, lets see some common situations when you will want to use Groups feature in Moodle. This will, in no way be an exhaustive list - as the possibilities are endless - but these are the most common cases.

In the previous lesson, we created 5 groups using Moodle's auto-create functionality. Now, let us reap the benefits of groups by applying it into our course. I am now back on the course dashboard. I will now show some examples of using groups on activities in the course.

The Gradebook is a one of the most powerful features on Moodle. We have previously seen in this course the Question Bank, configuring quizzes and assignments. The Gradebook where the complete evaluation results are available is where all of this comes together. Everytime we have created a test or an assignment, an entry is automatically created by Moodle into the Gradebook for that assessment item.

 And also everytime a graded assessment feature is attempted by the student ALSO, an entry is made into the Gradebook. For this lesson, we will be looking at my live Moodle site, so that I can see some actual results in the Gradebook.

Continuing with our section on the Gradebook, in this lesson, we will see another commonly used report called as the "User report".

One more thing that I want to touch upon in this lesson is that we have seen how to export data. But what if you want to IMPORT data into gradebook? That is also possible from this same screen - the most commonly used simple technique is from a CSV file. We will not be looking at this in depth as it is an admin feature. However it is great for you to be aware of this feature.

Further, I have a CSV example of importing users into Moodle in the Admin section of this course and it uses the same screen interface - so it will give you a heads-up of how this works.