Product Description

Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions

• Applying your teaching techniques through Moodle
• Creative uses for Moodle's standard features
• Workarounds, providing alternative solutions
• Abundantly illustrated with screenshots of the solutions you'll build
• When and how to apply the different learning solutions
• Especially good for university and professional teachers

In Detail

Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. It is the world's most popular online learning system. It has many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit.

What you will learn from this book?

• Using forums to motivate students and give them one-on-one attention
• Keeping forum discussions on track
• Managing chat sessions
• Using quizzes for student self assessment
• Adding immediate feedback, time limits, and location restrictions to quizzes
• Making creative use of lessons
• Using wikis for individual and group activities
• Making creative use of glossaries
• Using choices for quick reviews, surveys, and reminders
• Organizing courses
• Building better courses with blocks
• Making expectations clear with workshops

The learning solutions are based on proven, accepted instructional principles and traditional classroom activities, such as Distributed Practice, Self Monitoring, Pre-correction, and more. This book will help you to motivate team work in your students.

Approach

This book has a friendly approach and even experienced trainers will benefit a lot from it. It uses copious screenshots, for you to get a feel of the course site even while you are learning by building the solutions.

Who this book is written for?

If you are a teacher or a corporate trainer with a desire to design effective and innovative Moodle courses, then this book is your best choice. The book assumes that you have a basic understanding of Moodle, but it does not need any programming knowledge. It's all about teaching and not programming. If you are new to Moodle, start with Moodle E-Learning Course Development by the same author.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #113509 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-20
• Released on: 2007-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author

William Rice

William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading sites like slashdot and 43folders. His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, rock climbing, and edible wild plants (a book on that is coming someday).

William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society: how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, and has two amazing sons.

For more updates on him and his work, you could visit his online blog: williamriceinc.blogspot.com

---

Customer Reviews

"It's time for software manuals to evolve." Mission accomplished!
William Rice, in Moodle Teaching Techniques, has created a resource that goes beyond the basic "keystroke and click directions" provided by many introductory manuals. Rice provides a variety of practical suggestions for teachers and trainers and avoids the discussion of technical issues which are often irrelevant to Moodle course creators.

The book begins by introducing the instructional principles he uses as the basis for the ideas and activities shared throughout the book. Those without formal educational training will find these few pages informative and helpful, while those with an instructional design or educational background benefit from a reinforcement of those principles we learned, but sometimes forget when the development begins. For example, Rice discusses the value of forums and collaboration among course participants, an important element in good course design, but one which is lacking in many Moodle courses. I was pleased to see this principle reinforced and think it is helpful for readers to be reminded.

The core of the book consists of chapters dedicated to various Moodle tools and specific applications; all presented with the expectation that the reader is familiar with Moodle basics. As I started reading, I was skeptical that Rice was going to present any unique ideas that I had not seen or thought of before--I've been using Moodle for over four years and have worked with hundreds of schools, companies, and organizations through which I've heard many interesting and unusual ideas for the implementation of Moodle activities. As I read, however, I found some ideas that really made me think again about how I had been doing things. In some cases, there was new information that I didn't realize was useful until after the fact. For instance, there are several pages dedicated to network or IP addresses as they relate to proctoring quizzes. As I read the information, I thought initially that too much space was dedicated to the concept; thinking that most readers would contact their network director or that they would know the information themselves. A few days later though, as I was conducting a training and discussing IP addresses, I realized that the information I picked up made me aware of some nuances surrounding proctored quizzes and activity tracking that I had not considered before.

In addition to the ideas Rice presents for the application of the various modules, one of the biggest strengths of the book is that he includes instructions for "real" teacher tasks. Readers will find one section of the book dedicated to tracking participant activity, which is a skill that many teachers and trainers will utilize. Rice mentions using everything from the activity logs to course reports to see what learners are doing. The book also addresses more obscure, under-used features such as splitting forums, using groups and custom scales. Rice hit the mark here in identifying these more advanced topics as being especially valuable.

The other feature that will benefit readers is that Rice presents the "why" behind his choices. For example, he explains his selection of a forum over a wiki for one activity. In another section, he explains why he would use a wiki instead of an assignment, blog, forum, or journal. In my experience, course creators do not struggle as much with which button to click, but rather more in deciding which tool is best for a specific learning activity. Rice's explanations provide the reader insight to help guide them through those decision-making processes.

While Moodle Teaching Techniques is a valuable resource for Moodle users, there are some caveats that should be mentioned. First, as Moodle 1.9 is released later this month, I recognize that many readers will be looking for information to help them make the transition. Though this book makes mention of being based on 1.9, it is really based on 1.8 functionality. For most of the content, the version is not significant as the information is true for both 1.8 and 1.9 and the book is more about big ideas than buttons. However, there are a few pages that mention groups and the gradebook, both of which have seen large changes in 1.9. The good news is that the suggestions still apply and the functionality exists in both 1.8 and 1.9, but the steps will be a bit different. In the case of the gradebook example, the reader will likely have to spend some time finding their own solution to the suggested implementation.

Aside from the version difference, my only other complaint is that while Rice professed that this book was not going to go step-by-step and was going to make some assumptions about prior knowledge, it seemed a bit inconsistent. In many places the instructions were detailed and very clear; I had no doubts that even a fairly novice Moodle user would be able to follow along. In other places though, I found myself wanting more information. For example, the lesson and the workshop are pretty complex tools and while the information presented was helpful, it could have been more so. While Rice generally follows his premise throughout the book, the lesson and workshop are tools that many people struggle with and readers may have benefited from a bit more detail about them.

Despite these minor complaints, I recommend this book without reservation. Moodle Teaching Techniques is a great companion resource to other more basic Moodle texts and manuals and provides many ideas to help teachers and trainers take their Moodle courses to the next level.

Excellent, A Great Resource for Moodle Teachers
This book is on target with the Moodle teacher. The author, William Rice spends very little time covering installation and configuration of modules. Instead, he assumes that you are already somewhat familiar with the Moodle software.

Beginning with chapter one and throughout the book the author focuses on how to get the most from each of the features that Moodle has to offer and how to avoid common errors. I have found them to be time saving and relevant. You can easily see the depth of his personal experience and knowledge by his easy to understand examples and explanations of which there are generous amounts of.

You will appreciate his lack of technical jargon and how the author breaks down his techniques and explanations into simple step by step procedures with lots of pictures for those of us who are digitally challenged and need our hands held. The author's instructions were very clear and simple to understand making it easy for me to follow along with him in each of his examples.

If you are teaching with Moodle then you will definitely want to add this book to your library and keep it within arms reach. It is another invaluable resource to the Moodle community. This book opened my imagination to teaching methods through Moodle that otherwise I would not have thought of.

Practical and Useful Moodle Strategies
Rice is his previous book, Moodle E-Learning Course Development, also by PACKT, covered all the how-tos of the online software. In this book, he demonstrates how to take advantage of this powerful medium.

After reading about the philosophy behind Moodle in the first chapter, I looked with anticipation to the techniques. I didn't have to wait long. The first technique shows how to set up a one-on one forum with a student to provide a channel for communication that is private, while keeping the thread of the discussion for future reference. I was hooked.

In the rest of the book you'll find plenty more useful suggestions to making the most of Moodle.

Highly recommended!