Makerere University
Moodle Teacher Training
Version 1
Presented by
Craig Meltzer
Table of Contents
1 MOODLE INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................3
2 GENERAL ADVICE .......................................................................................4
3 CREATING A COURSE ..................................................................................5
3.1 EDITING COURSES ....................................................................................... 5
3.2 COURSE FORMATS ....................................................................................... 6
3.2.1 Weekly Format .................................................................................. 7
3.2.2 Topic format ..................................................................................... 7
3.3 ROLES ..................................................................................................... 7
4 ADDING RESOURCES ..................................................................................8
5 BLOCKS ......................................................................................................9
6 CREATING ACTIVITIES .............................................................................11
6.1 ACTIVITY MODULES .................................................................................... 11
6.2 ASSIGNMENTS .......................................................................................... 12
6.3 ASSESSMENTS (QUIZ) ................................................................................ 13
6.3.1 Steps involved in creating an Assessment ........................................... 14
6.3.2 Important Settings ........................................................................... 14
7 COLLABORATION TOOLS ..........................................................................15
7.1 FORUMS ................................................................................................. 15
7.2 SELECTING FORUM TYPE ............................................................................... 16
7.2.1 A standard forum for general use ....................................................... 16
7.2.2 A single simple discussion ................................................................. 17
7.2.3 Each person posts one discussion ...................................................... 17
7.2.4 Question and Answer forum .............................................................. 17
7.2.5 Important Settings ........................................................................... 17
8 CHAT ........................................................................................................19
8.1 IMPORTANT SETTINGS ................................................................................. 19
9 CHOICE ....................................................................................................20
9.1 IMPORTANT SETTINGS ................................................................................. 20
10 LESSONS ................................................................................................20
11 GRADES ..................................................................................................22
12 GROUPS..................................................................................................23
13 USEFUL RESOURCES ...............................................................................23
1 Moodle Introduction
The Learning Management System (LMS) is a software application which, in
its simplest form, is responsible for the launching and tracking of e-learning
content and assessments.
Although there are numerous LMS's (both commercial and open source) that
will fulfill most requirements, Moodle stands out from the rest for its
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capabilities, stability and simplicity. Hence, for the majority of organisations,
the Moodle open source LMS is the most prudent solution.

Moodle provides powerful learning functionality to deliver and manage
content and the user experience.

The system includes progress tracking, reporting, assessments, and
forums for collaboration between learners and instructors.

The open source model means that the only costs incurred are for system
services such as installation, configuration and maintenance. There are no
expensive software licenses.

Moodle has a large, vibrant community behind it who offer invaluable
support and advice for novices and experts alike.

Moodle is an acronym for “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning
Environment”.
2 General Advice

Don't be afraid to experiment: feel free to play around and change things
in your test courses. It's hard to break anything in a Moodle course, and
even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.

Subscribe yourself to all of the forums in your course so that you can
keep in touch with your class activity.

Encourage all of the students to fill out their user profile (including
photos) and read them all - this will help provide some context to their
later writings and help you to respond in ways that are tailored to their
own needs.

Use the Logs link (under Administration) to get access to complete, raw
logs. In there you'll see a link to a popup window that updates every sixty
seconds and shows the last hour of activity. This is useful to keep open on
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your desktop all day so you can feel in touch with what's going on in the
course.

Use many reports. Reports in the Administration block, Activity Reports
(next to each name in the list of all people, or from any user profile
page). These provide a great way to see what any particular person has
been up to in the course.

Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later - do it right away. Not
only is it easy to become overwhelmed with the volume that can be
generated, but it's a crucial part of building and maintaining a community
feel in your course.
Use the navigation bar at the top of each page - this should help remind you
where you are and prevent getting lost.
3 Creating a Course
Create a course by doing the following:
In the Site Administration menu:

Click on “Courses”

Click on “Add/edit courses”

Underneath the course categories, click on “Add a new course”
3.1 Editing courses
To add or alter activities or resources a teacher must use the "Turn editing
on" button on the course homepage. The same button will also turn editing
off.
The "Switch Role to…" button allows the teacher to see the course page as a
student would see it.
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To add items to a section, you will use the pull down boxes for activities and
resources.
When editing has been turned on, a variety of editing icons appear next to all
editable objects in the course. Your icons may look different because of your
Theme. Below is a brief list of common icons:
Icon
Effect
Help
Edit item
*
See all weeks/topics
*
See one week/topic
Make Current (highlight) week/topic
Delete/Remove
Move (up/down)
Move here
Indent/shift right
*
Close/Hide item
*
Open/Show Item
Note that some icons will toggle a setting on and off (denoted with a *
above). For example, the open eye indicates that the resource is visible to
students, while clicking it changes it to a closed eye, making it invisible to
students.
3.2 Course Formats
There are several course formats, but two are used in the majority of
instances.
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3.2.1
Weekly Format
Choosing weekly format from the format selection menu, will automatically
fill in the dates, starting with whatever date you specify as your first day for
the course, and incrementing each week by seven days thereafter. So if you
start your course on Wednesday, each week will run from Wednesday to
Tuesday. You may wish to start the week on Sunday or Monday prior to the
actual first day of class, so that weeks will reflect the actual work/study week
of your lesson (if applicable).
3.2.2
Topic format
Formatting course sections with topics lends itself to rolling enrollment, or
courses whose duration changes often, or where sequence is less important
(though these are only suggestions). Often teachers will think about their
course in terms of "modules" so topics work well - one topic per module.
Remember that it is possible to have many activities and resources in any
given section.
3.3 Roles
Assigning roles is how we add students to the course, and also how we add
additional teachers.
A summary of the roles generally available:
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
Administrators can usually do anything on the site, in all courses.

Course creators can create new courses and teach in them.

Teachers can do anything within a course, including changing the
activities and grading students.

Non-editing teachers can teach in courses and grade students, but may
not alter activities.

Students generally have fewer privileges within a course.
4 Adding Resources
Moodle supports a range of different resource types that allow you to include
almost any kind of digital content into your courses. These can be added by
using the “Add a resource” dropdown box when editing is turned on.
Labels allow you to add more information between activity or resource links
in your course.
A Text page is a simple page written using plain text from a link in the
course. Text pages aren't pretty, but they're a good place to put some
information or instructions. If you are after more options for your new page
then you should be thinking about adding a Web page and making use of
Moodle's WYSIWYG editor.
Of course the resource may already exist in electronic form so you may want
to link to an uploaded file or external website or simply display the complete
contents of a directory in your course files and let your students pick the file
themselves.
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5 Blocks
Each course homepage generally contains blocks on the left and right with
the centre column containing the course content. Blocks may be added,
hidden, deleted, and moved up, down and left/right when editing is turned
on. "Latest News", "Blogs", "Upcoming Events", and "Recent Activity" are a
few examples.
The “add blocks” menu:
A wide range of over 16 different block types can provide additional
information or functionality to the learner by the teacher. The standard
blocks that come with Moodle are shown above.
Course administration block
A teacher with editing rights will also have a course administration block.
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This is an important tool for a teacher. It has sub menus for course: backup,
restore, assign roles, grades, activity logs/reports, files and the useful Course
settings.
A student's course administration block typically lists only Grades and Profile
options.
6 Creating Activities
6.1 Activity Modules
There are a number of interactive learning activity modules that you may add
to your course with the "Add an activity" drop down menu. Most of these
activities can push information to a course gradebook.
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Communication and collaboration may take place using live Chats or
asynchronous discussion Forums for conversational activities. You can also
use Choices to gain group feedback. Adding Wikis to your courses is an
excellent way to allow students to work together on a collaborativelyauthored project.
Work can be uploaded and submitted by students and scored by teachers
using Assignments.
Online Quizzes offer several options for automatic and manual scoring.
Lessons and SCORM activities deliver content and offer ways of
individualizing your presentation based upon a student's choices.
Glossaries of keywords can be set up by the instructor, and can be
configured to allow students to edit, add, or rate entries.
Databases are also very useful document repositories additions to any
course.
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6.2 Assignments
The assignment activity module allows teachers to collect work from
students, review it and provide feedback including grades.
Students can submit any digital content (files), including, for example, wordprocessed documents, spreadsheets, images, audio and video clips.
Assignments don't necessarily have to consist of file uploads. Alternatively,
teachers can ask students to type directly into Moodle using an online text
assignment. There is also an offline activity assignment which can be used to
remind students of 'real-world' assignments they need to complete and to
record grades in Moodle for activities that don't have an online component.
There are 4 types of assignments:

Upload a single file

Advanced uploading of files (1.7 onwards) - options include: multiple file
submission, allowing students to type a message alongside their
submission & returning a file as feedback.

Online text - students type directly into Moodle, teachers can provide
inline feedback.
Offline Activity - teachers provide a description and due date for an
assignment outside of Moodle. A grade & feedback can be recorded in
Moodle.
6.3 Assessments (Quiz)
The Quiz activity module allows the teacher to design and set quizzes
consisting of a large variety of Question types, among them multiple choice,
true-false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in the
course Question bank and can be re-used within courses and between
courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically
marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback and/or show
the correct answers.
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Feedback on performance is a critical part of a learning environment and
assessment is one of the most important activities in education. As
educators, we can’t tell what’s going on inside the heads of students, so we
need a way for them to demonstrate what they understand and what they
don’t. A well-designed test, even a multiple-choice test, can give you critical
information about student performance. If the feedback is rapid enough, it
can also be a critical tool for students to gauge their own performance and
help them become more successful.
Moodle’s quiz module has a large number of options and tools, making it
extremely flexible. You can create quizzes with different question types,
randomly generated quizzes from pools of questions, allow students to have
repeated attempts at a question or retake quizzes multiple times, and have
the computer score it all.
These features open up a number of strategies which usually aren’t practical
with paper based testing. It’s hard enough to score one batch of quizzes, and
nearly impossible to score it 10 times for each student. When the computer
does the work for you, it’s easy to give students a chance to practice taking a
test, or to give frequent small quizzes.
6.3.1
Steps involved in creating an Assessment
Creating a new quiz is a multi-step process. Firstly you create the quiz
activity and set its options which specify the rules for interacting with the
quiz. In a second step you will then edit the quiz to add questions to it from
categories.

In the relevant course, click on “Turn Editing On”

In the Add Activity dropdown, select “Quiz”

Create a Category for your questions

Create Questions
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
Add the questions to the quiz

Preview the quiz
6.3.2
Important Settings
Timing
Used to define when the quiz is available as well as the time limit for
the students to complete the quiz.
Display
How questions are placed on pages and whether the questions and
answers are shuffled. It is very difficult for students to copy form one
another when both questions and answers are shuffled.
Attempts
Specify number of attempts allowed.
Review options
These options control what information users can see when they review a
quiz attempt or look at the quiz reports. Immediately after the attempt
means within two minutes of the attempt being finished by the user
clicking 'Submit all and finish'. Later, while the quiz is still open means
after this, and before the quiz close date. After the quiz is closed means
after the quiz close date has passed. If the quiz does not have a close
date, this state is never reached.
Overall feedback
The overall feedback is some text that is shown to a student after they
have completed an attempt at the quiz. The text that is shown can
depend on the grade the student got.
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7 Collaboration Tools
7.1 Forums
When you decide to use a discussion forum as an activity in an e-learning
environment it is important to be aware that your time will be needed in
some sense in order to make the activity successful. If your goal is to
encourage discussion, the forum will only work if:
a.) participants feel there is a need/reason to participate and they will gain
something from the experience. Incentives for learning, gathering support,
etc. should be explored and encouraged early on in order to clearly convey
the purpose of the forum to others.
b.) a sense of community and purpose can be fostered amongst participants.
This sense of community can be fostered through tutor/teacher initiative and
scaffolding, or primarily through the students/participants themselves
depending on the intentions of the activity.
7.2 Selecting forum type
Moodle has four kinds of forums each with a slightly different layout and
purpose.
Which of the forums will best suit your needs for a particular activity? In
order to answer this question it is useful to think how you might lead such a
discussion in a face-to-face environment. Would you throw the question out
to the class and sit back to observe them in their answers? Or would you
break them up into smaller groups first and ask them to have discussions
with a partner before bringing them back to the main group? Or perhaps you
would like to keep them focused on a particular aspect of a question and
ensure that they do not wander away from the topic at hand? All of the
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above approaches are both valid and useful, depending on your learning
outcomes, and you can replicate all of them in Moodle forums.
7.2.1
A standard forum for general use
The standard forum probably most useful for large discussions that you
intend to monitor/guide or for social forums that are student led. This does
not mean that you need to make a new posting for each reply in each topic
although, in order to ensure that discussion does not get 'out of control', you
may need to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time finding the
common threads amongst the various discussions and weaving them
together. Providing overall remarks for particular topics can also be a key
aspect of your responsibilities in the discussion. Alternatively, you could ask
students to summarize discussion topics at agreed points, once a week or
when a thread comes to an agreed conclusion. Such a learner-centred
approach may be particularly useful once the online community has been
established and, perhaps, when you have modeled the summarizing process.
7.2.2
A single simple discussion
The simple forum is most useful for short/time-limited discussion on a single
subject or topic. This kind of forum is very productive if you are interested in
keeping students focused on a particular issue.
7.2.3
Each person posts one discussion
This forum is most useful when you want to achieve a happy medium
between a large discussion and a short and focused discussion. A single
discussion topic per person allows students a little more freedom than a
single discussion forum, but not as much as a standard forum where each
student can create as many topics as they wish. Successful forums of this
selection can be active, yet focused, as students are not limited in the
number of times they can respond to others within threads.
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7.2.4
Question and Answer forum
The Q & A forum best used when you have a particular question that you
wish to have answered. In a Q and A forum, tutors post the question and
students respond with possible answers. By default a Q and A forum requires
students to post once before viewing other students' postings. After the
initial posting, students can view and respond to others' postings. This
feature allows equal initial posting opportunity among all students, thus
encouraging original and independent thinking.
7.2.5
Important Settings
Forum type
4 types as described above
Force everyone to be subscribed
When a person is subscribed to a forum it means that they will be sent
email copies of every post in that forum (posts are sent about 30
minutes after the post was first written). People can usually choose
whether or not they want to be subscribed to each forum. However, if
you choose to force subscription on a particular forum then all course
users will be subscribed automatically, even those that enroll at a later
time.
This is especially useful in the News forum and in forums towards the
beginning of the course (before everyone has worked out that they can
subscribe to these emails themselves).
If you choose the option "Yes, initially" then all current and future
course users will be subscribed initially but they can unsubscribe
themselves at any time. If you choose "Yes, forever" then they will not
be able to unsubscribe themselves.
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Note how the "Yes, initially" option behaves when you update an
existing forum: Changing from "Yes, initially" to "No" will not
unsubscribe existing users, it will only affect future course users.
Similarly changing later to "Yes, initially" will not subscribe existing
course users but only those enrolling later.
8 Chat
The Chat module allows participants to have a real-time synchronous
discussion via the web. This is a useful way to get a different understanding
of each other and the topic being discussed - the mode of using a chat room
is quite different from the asynchronous forums. The Chat module contains a
number of features for managing and reviewing chat discussions.
8.1 Important Settings
Next chat time
If you wish to schedule chat sessions for or with your learners, then
you can use this setting to publish a time and date for the next chat.
The date you select here will be displayed on the course calendar
along with a link to the chat room. Realize that setting a date and time
here will not restrict access to the room at other times, it is merely a
tool to communicate with your learners; to let them know when they
can expect to find you or other learners in the chat room. If you wish
to make the chat room unavailable, you must hide it from the learners.
Repeat sessions
Allows a chat to be shown as regular session in the course calendar.
Save past sessions
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When users (two or more) participate in a chat session, a record, or
complete transcript of the session is created. As the instructor, you
can choose how long these transcripts are saved and available for
viewing. You may wish to never delete the messages from a special
chat room used for discussions between learners and visiting authors,
but you may choose to keep transcripts from an open, informal chat
room for only 30 days.
9 Choice
A choice activity is very simple – the teacher asks a question and specifies a
choice of multiple responses. It can be useful as a quick poll to stimulate
thinking about a topic; to allow the class to vote on a direction for the
course; or to gather research consent.
9.1 Important Settings
Limit the number of responses allowed
This option allows you to limit the number of participants that can
select each particular option.
Publish results
Defines when and how results are shown, if at all.
Privacy of results
Allows anonymous results.
10 Lessons
The lesson module presents a series of HTML pages to the student, who is
usually asked to make some sort of choice underneath the content area. The
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choice will send them to a specific page in the Lesson. In a Lesson page's
simplest form, the student can select a continue button at the bottom of the
page, which will send them to the next page in the Lesson.
There are 2 basic Lesson page types that the student will see: question
pages and branch table pages. There are also several advanced navigational
pages which can meet more specialized needs of the Teacher. The Lesson
module was designed to be adaptive and to use a student's choices to create
a self directed lesson.
The significant difference between a Lesson and other activity tools available
in Moodle comes from its adaptive ability. With this tool, each answer to a
question may send the student to a different series of pages in the lesson.
The teacher's response and the next page the student will see has already
been thought out by the teacher. Thus Lesson can deliver content in
interesting and flexible ways to each student, with no direct or time sensitive
action required by the teacher once the lesson has been created.
11 Grades
The two central ideas of grading in Moodle are:

Grades are scores attributed to participants in a Moodle course

The gradebook is a repository of these grades: modules push their grades
to it, but the gradebook doesn't push anything back to the modules
The gradebook collects items that have been graded from the various parts
of Moodle that are assessed, and allows you to view and change them as well
as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways. When
you add an assessed item in a Moodle course, the gradebook automatically
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creates space for the grades it will produce and also adds the grades
themselves as they are generated, either by the system or by you.
The grades displayed are initially displayed as the raw marks from the
assessments themselves, so will depend on how you set those up e.g. an
essay out of 36 will appear as however many raw marks that student got,
not a percentage (although this can be changed later, see below).
Note that various default options for the gradebook are set at system level
by the administrator and can be marked as being overridable by you, or
fixed. This means that the options will not always be set up the same way for
every user when they see the grader report for the first time.
As an overview: Grades can be calculated, aggregated and displayed in a
variety of ways, the many settings having been designed to suit the needs of
a great variety of organisations.
Many activities in Moodle, such as assignments, forums and quizzes may be
given grades. Grades may have numerical values, or words/phrases from a
scale or rating system.
12 Groups
The Groups feature allows a teacher to assign teachers and students to one
or more groups within a course. This will allow the teacher to create
separation of students in the course or in one or more specific activities.
To create a group, click on the "Create group" button below the left column.
Type the group name in the text box, a description. If you define a group
enrolment key then, not only will entering that key let the user into the
course, but it will also automatically make them a member of this group (For
this to work you will need to define a separate course enrolment key in your
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'course settings'). You can also define an icon for the group by uploading an
image - this icon will appear on the participants listing, forum posts by those
group members and other places. The "Save" button will take you back to
the Features Groups page.
To add a member(s) to a group you need to select the group name in the left
column, then select the participants (use shift or ctrl for multiple selections),
from the right column. Click the "Add" button to move them to the selected
group.
To remove participants from a group, select the appropriate group to view
members, select the participants to remove and click the "Remove selected
members" button.
13 Useful Resources
Main site
http://moodle.org/
Forums
http://moodle.org/forums/
Documentation
http://docs.moodle.org
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Demonstration site
http://demo.moodle.org/
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