FREE – Moodle, Creating Online Schools
Posted by LisaHill - 02/11/09 at 03:11 pm
Subject Matter: Virtual Schools, eLearning
Grades: All ages, Homeschooling, Businesses, Nonprofits
Growing Open Source Learning Network
I was reading the Economist newspaper this morning, and glanced at an article regarding textbooks. Moodle was mentioned. Hmmm…what’s this? Moodle provides free software for web-based teaching. And its SCORM 1.2 Compliant.
Instead of being tied down to textbooks, increased class sizes (distraction, noise, limited support from the teacher), many schools and students are branching out into virtual learning programs. However, internet based eLearning can be regimental too, since online publishers desire students and teachers to follow their format.
Moodle offers free software for online teaching. As reported in the Economist, “Oxford, Cambridge, the Open University, Harvard, MIT, the British Library, and other research funding bodies, ar putting vast libraries on open access.” Moodle is one source to this vast knowledge base.
Here is detailed information describing Moodle’s design, overview and assignment module.
Overall Design
- Promotes a social constructionist pedagogy (collaboration, activities, critical reflection, etc)
- Suitable for 100% online classes as well as supplementing face-to-face learning
- Simple, lightweight, efficient, compatible, low-tech browser interface
- Easy to install on almost any platform that supports PHP. Requires only one database (and can share it).
- Full database abstraction supports all major brands of database (except for initial table definition)
- Course listing shows descriptions for every course on the server, including accessibility to guests.
- Courses can be categorised and searched – one Moodle site can support thousands of courses
- Emphasis on strong security throughout. Forms are all checked, data validated, cookies encrypted etc
- Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor
Overview
- A full teacher has full control over all settings for a course, including restricting other teachers
- Choice of course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focussed social format
- Course Themes. A course can have its own theme of colors and layout.
- Flexible array of course activities – Forums, Quizzes, Glossaries, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops
- Groups – teacher(s) and students can be placed in one or more groups
- Recent changes to the course since the last login can be displayed on the course home page – helps give sense of community
- Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor
- All grades for Forums, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file)
- Full user logging and tracking – activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed “story” of each students involvement including postings etc on one page.
- Mail integration – copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text.
- Custom scales – teachers can define their own scales to be used for grading forums and assignments
- Courses can be packaged as a single zip file using the Backup function. These can be restored on any Moodle server.
Assignment Module
- Assignments can be specified with a due date and a maximum grade.
- Students can upload their assignments (any file format) to the server – they are date-stamped.
- Late assignments are allowed, but the amount of lateness is shown clearly to the teacher
- For each particular assignment, the whole class can be assessed (grade and comment) on one page in one form.
- Teacher feedback is appended to the assignment page for each student, and notification is mailed out.
- The teacher can choose to allow resubmission of assignments after grading (for regrading)
- Allowing resubmissions can allow the teacher to progress monitor student projects/assignments as they evolve.
- Advanced assignments can allow multiple files to be uploaded. This could keep together preplanning maps, outlines, research papers and presentations. (Not for beginners)
Additional information can be found at Features. Moodle offers forums, chats, a chance to share and collaborate lessons online, free and in different languages.
Learn more, and sign up at www.moodle.org.
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Apache, MySQL, PHP); Windows (all versions reported)
Cost: Free
