Lately I’ve seen a number of blog posts talking about being interested in using moodle. Additionally, I’ve recently installed moodle for a couple of people and done training on how to use some of the basic features for one person. I’ve done this numerous times in the past and been paid for it. Obviously I do have some success because the only way I get new work is via referrals from past clients. The point I’m trying to make here is that I thought I would post about how I use moodle with my students.

Using Moodle
I use my moodle installation as a way to provide course information for my students outside of class time. I do this by making announcements via the news forum - email goes out to all students or alternatively you can decide to send it out to only one class. I also add information or downloads to the front page of the site.

students download handouts before classInside the course you can organize your material in 3 different ways; social format, topic format, or weekly format. For my university course I find weekly format to be the best. Each week I post a summary of what we will be covering in class and links for the students to visit if any. One of the most useful things for me is uploading all of my handouts and having students print them before class. No more extra handouts at the end of the day, no more guessing how many to copy.

The final section for each week is the homework assignment. With the homework assignment you have choice of several different formats, these include: message forums, chat, dialogues, exercises, glossaries, lesson, quiz, workshop, wiki and more. I have limited myself to using forums, dialogues, glossaries and quizzes. This is primarily due to not having enough time to devote to learning how to properly use the other features. I use forums the most as most of the homework I give is reflective and involves replying to a prompt based on something covered in class. I do occaisionally use dialogues as that allows the students to submit basically the same thing but privately so that no other students may read their assignment.

Glossaries can be prepared entirely by the teacher or allow students to submit entries. The best part of glossaries is that you have the option to have entries auto-linked throughout your site and/or course. What this means is that if a term in the glossary is used in the course or site it will be automatically hyperlinked to the definition. A couple of years ago I made a vocabulary exercise where students submitted definitions to words they didn’t know to the course glossary. The students liked it and I thought it was pretty good though I stopped doing the classroom activity associated with the glossary and haven’t done it since.

Quizzes are probably what most teachers are interested in using. I use them, but for me I don’t assess the online quizzes. Instead I have them in my course as self practice for the students. The quizzes are self-scoring and will tell students which answers they got wrong. If you are familiar with hot potatoes you will be familiar with what you can do in moodle. Multiple choice, short answer, long answer, matching, integrated audio in quizzes, timers - it’s all there. Additinally moodle will store your questions and make a test bank for you with categores of questions allowing you to reuse questions in the future easily. Finally when students take quizzes you have the option to have questions ordered randomly as well as having multiple choice answers randomly placed making it more difficult for students to cheat.

other stuff
Do the features ever end?Moodle also comes with a number of blocks that can easily be added to the side bars of your site and then reposition with a couple of mouse clicks. Standard blocks include a calendar (with info at the personal, course, and site level), quiz results, online users, activities and an HTML block. The HTML block is fantastic because it allows you to add snippets of code such as word a day, live search dictionaries etc to your site. I’ve added wikipedia, merriam webster and a word a day. There are also several other non-standard blocks which can be found by looking through the forums at moodle. While looking at the moodle site I also recommend visiting moodle for language teachers and Korean moodle.

Some of the best features for the teacher are the logs. It is possible to track every single thing every user does on your site. logs are arranged on a daily basis which shows a simple one line per action per user of the entire site. Or you can view on a course by course basis. I however, usually only look at the individual users. At the end of the semester it is very easy for me to check how much homework each student did and the quality of each homework submission.

One great feature for saving time is the ability to add ratings to entries. this allow the teacher to have a drop down bar next to each student submission with a scale that you determine. I’ve used this when reading student homework instead of replying to each individual student. The scale could be something like:
1 - excellent
2- good
3 - fair
4 - poor

One time I had a scale where I just added submission read by my name so that students would know I had read what they wrote. I do weekly homework and have had upto 175 students at a time. That makes it almost impossible to read and respond to all student homework. What I have done the last couple of semesters though is let students know that I read all submissions but will respond to a random 20-25% of entries each week.

Other useful features which I have not looked at include a gradebook, attendance module, appointment, and questionaire.

Language Packs
There are currently 73 language packsThere are currently 73 language packs. My moodle site is defaulted to Korean language with Chinese and Japanese added as options in addition to English. You might be wondering why I would default the language to Korean when I am teaching English and that would be a valid question. I choose to have Korean as default so that students do not get bogged down in navigating the site or changing thier profile due to language problems. I want them to focus on the tasks and information I present them with. If students have trouble navigating the site by the time they get to the activity they will be tired and not interested in trying. Additionally for particularly weak students they may never actually be able to do the homework due to frustration.

One great feature is the ability to force the language pack. One time I taught a class of high level students and the course they were in forced all users to use English regardless of the language specified in their profile. But the majority of my students are not advanced and I choose to let them choose the language of the site.

hosting
First you’ll need a server if you know how to run one or much easier paid hosting. Your host should provide you with php 4.1.0 or higher and MySQL database. php and databases are pretty much standard for most hosts, but some budget hosts don’t run the latest or restrict you in ways that may affect how you use your moodle. For hosting I recommend Site5 which meets or exceeds these standards plus offers a lot of incredible features with fantastic service that you don’t see elsewhere. The lowest end plan, which is more than the average person will need, runs only $65.54 per year.

The installatin of a moodle is fairly basic and strait forward, but to the novice can be daunting. If you do not want to install moodle many hosts will have the option to install by fantastico. Fantastico will do auto installs for many different kinds of scripts, but there is the risk of a faulty install and sometimes upgrades can be difficult.  I recommend installing it yourself if possible or having someone else installing it rather than using fantstico if at all possible.

final thoughts
I know that I under utilize the potential available in moodle, but I also feel that it isn’t necessary to use every feature. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll have a semester where I am only working the minimum number of hours in my contract which will allow me the time to develop new content for my classes.  My final recommendation for new moodlers is to take your time when starting your site. Only use a couple of modules the first time around. the following semester try something new and tweak what you did the first time. If you try to do too much the first time, it will be overwhelming and you wont’ have enough time to sleep. I look forward to comments by other moodle users and those interested in using moodle.