Product Description

Developed by an extremely active open source community, Moodle is a sophisticated course management system that's ideal for creating dynamic online learning communities and for supplementing face-to-face learning. Used in more than 115 countries and supporting over 60 languages, Moodle can scale from a single-teacher site to a 40,000- student university. Teachers who use Moodle have access to an array of powerful tools such as assignments, forums, journals, quizzes, surveys, chat rooms, and workshops. Using Moodle is a comprehensive, hands-on guide that explains how the system works, with plenty of examples and best practices for its many features and plug-in modules. Authored by a member of the Moodle community, this authoritative book also exposes little-known but powerful hacks for more technically savvy users. For anyone who is using-or thinking of using-this CMS, Using Moodle is required reading.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #333241 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-25
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 238 pages

About the Author
Jason Cole is currently the academic technology manager at San Francisco State University, where he's responsible for managing a Blackboard implementation that has over 15,000 users. A member of the Moodle community, he has developed a student data integration tool for the system, and contributed to discussions regarding a document management system and object model for version 2.0. Jason earned a Ph.D. in educational technology from the University of Northern Colorado.

Customer Reviews

Very basic, adds nothing that's not in the manual
I was very disappointed with this book and will be returning it.

If you have spent a few minutes playing with Moodle and read even a little of the online manual, this book adds nothing new. The system is easy to figure out, as most items are pretty self-explanatory and each option has a handy pop-up help screen that explains anything that you don't understand. The online documentation is very good.

I was hoping this book would explain how to do more advanced things in Moodle - how the many available add-on modules work and what they contribute to a finished system, tips and tricks to add videos and flash files to your courses, best practices for course development, advanced customizing, etc. But there was none of that in the book - only the same information that is already included free with Moodle. Save your money!

The way to do course management
If you want to operate an online educational course one of the most important choices you will have to make is choosing a good program to manage the course and all of its requirements. Moodle is an open source course management system that can handle anything from a single course through a university system with thousands of students and courses. The Moodle system is a complete system with a student registration and login, calendar, student forums, help system, online quiz system, the ability to upload and download files and assignments, and course content control. This book provides the reader with all the background and detail information they need to install and configure the software as well as and setup your courses. I was able to follow the book and setup a course and test it easily enough. It wasn't perfect the first time through but I did get it working correctly without having to refer to any other source of documentation.

Although installation is traditionally done on an Linux Apache system it will work on most systems that have a webserver, PHP, and SQL database. Using Moodle is highly recommended to anyone interested in learning this software or establishing an online course management system.

An interesting look at a quality open source package...
It's always fun when you catch wind of something technical that you didn't even know existed. That's the position I'm in with the O'Reilly book Using Moodle - Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole. This is a very cool software package, and the book covers it very well.

Contents: Introduction; Moodle Basics; Creating and Managing Content; Using Forums, Chats and Dialogues; Quizzes; Workshops; Assignments and Exercises; Journals; Glossaries; Lessons; Wikis; Grades and Scales; Managing Your Class; Surveys and Choices; Putting It All Together; Moodle Administration; Index

I had no idea there was any open source content management systems (CMS) out there, much less ones with a rather quirky and cool name like Moodle. This book is published under the O'Reilly Community Press imprint, which means that people intimately involved in the technology create the documentation that is then put into print and distributed by O'Reilly. It's also licensed under the Creative Commons structure, so it's designed to be used and built on by others. I think O'Reilly should be commended for providing this valuable niche to the technical community. The author has put together some solid documentation on Moodle, supplemented by his warnings and tips based on real world experience. Although you might be able to get a drier version of the documentation online, all it would take is one or two of Cole's warnings to save you more than the cost of the book many times over. Even if you're not necessarily considering Moodle as a CMS, it's worth reading the book to see how elegant an open source software solution can be. It'd be really hard for me to recommend commercial solutions costing tens of thousands of dollars after reading this volume.

This is a well-done book that can open your eyes to what an open source solution can provide, whether it's for a CMS or something else. Worth a read...