Using Moodle | O'Reilly Media

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If you teach, you’ve probably heard for years about the revolution the Internet was supposed to bring to teaching and learning. As with so many promises of revolution, the changes haven’t materialized. Instead, there has been a slow evolution toward using the Web to enhance teaching and learning. A suite of tools called Course Management Systems (CMSs) supports this new practice. You can use CMSs to enhance your teaching by taking advantage of the Internet without replacing the need for a teacher.

CMSs are web applications, meaning that they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser. Your Moodle server is probably located in your university or department, but it can be anywhere in the world. You and your students can access the system from any place with an Internet connection.

At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. CMSs also offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

Uploading and sharing materials: Most CMSs provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTML editor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want.
Forums and chats: Online forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats, on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for project discussions between groups of students or for last-minute questions the day before an exam.

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CMSs are web applications, meaning that they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser. Your Moodle server is probably located in your university or department, but it can be anywhere in the world. You and your students can access the system from any place with an Internet connection.

At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. CMSs also offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

Uploading and sharing materials: Most CMSs provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTML editor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want.
Forums and chats: Online forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats, on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for project discussions between groups of students or for last-minute questions the day before an exam.
Quizzes: Online quizzes can be graded instantaneously. They are a great tool for giving students rapid feedback on their performance and for gauging their comprehension of materials. Many publishers now provide banks of test questions tied to book chapters. A professor teaching a marketing class at San Francisco State uses weekly mini-tests to keep students engaged with the lectures and reading. He then uses proctored online testing to give the final exam using the same question banks.

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We’ve both spent time researching different CMSs, and we have become fans of Moodle because it is open source, is built on a sound educational philosophy, and has a huge community that supports and develops it. It can compete with the big commercial systems in terms of feature sets and is easy to extend. Let’s take a closer look at some of these advantages and why they are important to you and your institution.

The phrase “open source” has become a loaded term in some circles. For those who are outside of the techie culture, it’s hard to understand how powerful this idea has become, and how it has forever changed the world of software development. The idea itself is simple: open source simply means that users have access to the source code of the software. You can look under the hood, see how the software works, tinker with it, share it with others, or use parts of it in your own product.

So why is this important? For one, open source software is aligned with the academic community’s values of freedom, peer review, and knowledge sharing. Just as anyone can download and use Moodle for free, users can write new features, fix bugs, improve performance, or simply learn by seeing how other people solved a programming .

Secondly, unlike expensive proprietary CMSs that require license fees and maintenance contracts, Moodle costs nothing to download and you can install it on as many servers as you want. No one can take it away from you, increase the license cost, or make you pay for upgrades. No one can force you to upgrade, adopt features you don’t want, or tell you how many users you can have. They can’t take the source code back from users, and if Martin Dougiamas decides to stop developing Moodle, there is a dedicated community of developers who will keep the project going.

Martin’s background in education led him to adopt social constructionism as a core theory behind Moodle. This is revolutionary, as most CMS systems have been built around tool sets, not pedagogy. Most commercial CMS systems are tool-centered, whereas Moodle is learning-centered.

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In this chapter, we’ll cover the basics of the Moodle interface and some of the options you have when setting up your course. Then we’ll start adding some content to your first Moodle course.

As mentioned in , Moodle is a web-based tool you can access through a web browser. This means that in order to use Moodle, you need a computer with a web browser installed and an Internet connection. You also need to have the web address (called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL) of a server running Moodle. If your institution supports Moodle, it will have a server with Moodle up and running. You can then get the server address from the system administrator. If you don’t have access to a server with Moodle installed, and you’d like to set up your own, you can download a Moodle package from http://moodle.org/.

When you first visit your Moodle site, you’ll see the front page with the site news and the courses you are teaching or taking (see ).

Figure : Moodle front page

Take a moment and familiarize yourself with the interface. Moodle uses a number of interface conventions throughout the system. Important information is usually presented in the middle of the screen. On the lefthand side of the screen you’ll see several blocks that list available courses and site news. There are a number of useful blocks installed by default on a Moodle server. Your system administrator may install additional optional blocks to add different functionality.

In the upper-right corner, you may see a drop-down menu with language options. As of September 2007, Moodle has been translated into over 70 languages by the developer community. The number of languages is now so large that Moodle only loads one language by default. Your system administrator can download additional language packs to provide support for new languages. Moodle also supports UTF-8, a standard for the display of non-Latin character sets, like Chinese or Arabic characters. The language features can be useful for learning foreign languages or supporting students from different countries.

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As mentioned in , Moodle is a web-based tool you can access through a web browser. This means that in order to use Moodle, you need a computer with a web browser installed and an Internet connection. You also need to have the web address (called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL) of a server running Moodle. If your institution supports Moodle, it will have a server with Moodle up and running. You can then get the server address from the system administrator. If you don’t have access to a server with Moodle installed, and you’d like to set up your own, you can download a Moodle package from http://moodle.org/.

When you first visit your Moodle site, you’ll see the front page with the site news and the courses you are teaching or taking (see ).

Figure : Moodle front page

Take a moment and familiarize yourself with the interface. Moodle uses a number of interface conventions throughout the system. Important information is usually presented in the middle of the screen. On the lefthand side of the screen you’ll see several blocks that list available courses and site news. There are a number of useful blocks installed by default on a Moodle server. Your system administrator may install additional optional blocks to add different functionality.

In the upper-right corner, you may see a drop-down menu with language options. As of September 2007, Moodle has been translated into over 70 languages by the developer community. The number of languages is now so large that Moodle only loads one language by default. Your system administrator can download additional language packs to provide support for new languages. Moodle also supports UTF-8, a standard for the display of non-Latin character sets, like Chinese or Arabic characters. The language features can be useful for learning foreign languages or supporting students from different countries.

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Right above the language selection list, you’ll find a hyperlink that says “Login.” Click the link and Moodle will present you with the login to the site page, as shown in . Your username and password will depend on how your system administrator set up the system. Moodle has a number of options for user authentication, including email-based self-registration, where you create your own account. If you are logging in to a server run by your university or department, check with the Moodle administrator to see if you need to create an account. As use of Moodle grows, more institutions are automatically creating accounts for all of their users, so you may already have a login.

Figure : Login to the site

If you need to create your own account:

Click the “Create new account” button.
Fill in the new account form by creating a username and password for yourself (see ).
Enter a valid email address. The system will send you an email to confirm your account. You won’t be able to log in again until you confirm your account.
Click “Create my new account.”
Within a few minutes, you should receive an email at the account you specified on the form.
Click the link in the email (or copy and paste it into the address window in your browser) to confirm your account.

Figure : New account

You now have a verified account. Your account isn’t automatically associated with the courses you’re teaching. Most likely, your system administrator will assign you the role of teacher in the courses you’re teaching.

This section covers the following MTC (Moodle Teacher Certificate) skills: 7.2 Profiles

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On the left side of the front page, you’ll see the My Courses block, which includes a list of all the courses you are teaching or taking as a student, as shown in . You can access your courses by clicking on the course name in the block.

Figure : My Courses block

Let’s start with the upper-left corner of the course page, as shown in . There you’ll see the name of your course as entered when the course was created. Your system administrator either entered your course name by hand or she got it from your institution’s course database. (Read the ” section later in this chapter if you need to change the name.)

Figure : Course page

Below the course name is a navigation bar that fills with the hyperlinked names of pages as you navigate from one page to another. Frequently, the best way to return to your course page is to click on the course short name in the navigation bar. For example, in , you would click on Features to go back to the course page from another page in the course.

Below the navigation bar are three columns. The far-left and far-right columns contain tool blocks, while the center column contains your course content and activities. The topmost tool block on the left is the People block. From here, you and your students can view the individual profiles of other participants in the course and check who is a member of student workgroups.

Beneath the People block is the Activities block. As you add forums, quizzes, assignments, and other activities to your course, the activity types will be listed here. By clicking on the activity type, students can view all activities of that type that are currently available to them. For example, if you gave a quiz every week, each content section would list a quiz, and if you clicked the Quizzes link in the Activities block, it would list all of the quizzes in the course.

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By now, you’re probably wondering, “When the heck do I get to add stuff to my course?” We’ve provided a lot of background so you’ll understand some of the available options. But now’s the time to start building your course.

Let’s start with a news item to announce to everyone that your online materials are coming soon. The News Forum is a special type of forum (for a full description of forums, see ). It is automatically created when the course is first generated. Everyone in the course can read the postings and the news is automatically emailed to them. It’s a good tool for making general announcements and sending reminders to students about upcoming assignments.

To add a news item:

Click the News Forum link near the top of your course page.
Click the “Add a new topic” button. You’ll see the page to add a new topic, as shown in .
Type your new message to your class.
Click the “Save changes” button. You will be returned to the News Forum page.
Click on your course name in the navigation bar at the top to return to your course page.

Figure : Add a new discussion topic

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In this chapter, we’ve looked at how to create an account and personalize your profile. We’ve become acquainted with Moodle’s user interface and tools, and we’ve chosen a course format. In the next chapter, we’ll start adding different types of content to your new Moodle course.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 4.1 Resources

The first thing most people want to do when they create a course in Moodle is add some content, such as a syllabus or a course outline. As we explained in , you can add content to your course using the “Add a resource” drop-down menu in the center sections of your course (see ). In this chapter, we’ll use all of the tools in the resource menu. Future chapters will cover the tools in the “Add an activity” menu.

Remember that you need to turn editing on to see the “Add a resource” and “Add an activity” menus.

The first tool, “Insert a label,” creates a label directly on your course page. The next two tools, “Compose a text page” and “Compose a web page,” can be used to develop content directly in Moodle. The following two, “Link to a file or web site” and “Display a directory,” are used to manage content developed in other programs, such as Word or PowerPoint. You can also add content from other web sites and take advantage of the rich library of information available on the Web. Finally, “Add an IMS Content Package” enables you to add prepackaged content from sites around the Web.

Let’s begin by creating a simple label for your course.

This section covers the following MTC skills: 4.6.1 Labels

Labels enable you to add additional text or graphics to your course page. Labels can be used to add banners to courses, label sections of resources and activities, or provide quick instructions on the front page of your course. To add a label:

Click the “Turn editing on” button.
Select “Insert a label” from the “Add a resource” menu.
Create your label using the HTML editor (see the following section ” for more details on this).
Select whether to make your label visible by selecting Show or Hide from the Visible menu.
After you have created your label, click the “Save changes” button.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 4.1 Resources

The first thing most people want to do when they create a course in Moodle is add some content, such as a syllabus or a course outline. As we explained in , you can add content to your course using the “Add a resource” drop-down menu in the center sections of your course (see ). In this chapter, we’ll use all of the tools in the resource menu. Future chapters will cover the tools in the “Add an activity” menu.

Remember that you need to turn editing on to see the “Add a resource” and “Add an activity” menus.

The first tool, “Insert a label,” creates a label directly on your course page. The next two tools, “Compose a text page” and “Compose a web page,” can be used to develop content directly in Moodle. The following two, “Link to a file or web site” and “Display a directory,” are used to manage content developed in other programs, such as Word or PowerPoint. You can also add content from other web sites and take advantage of the rich library of information available on the Web. Finally, “Add an IMS Content Package” enables you to add prepackaged content from sites around the Web.

Let’s begin by creating a simple label for your course.

This section covers the following MTC skills: 4.6.1 Labels

Labels enable you to add additional text or graphics to your course page. Labels can be used to add banners to courses, label sections of resources and activities, or provide quick instructions on the front page of your course. To add a label:

Click the “Turn editing on” button.
Select “Insert a label” from the “Add a resource” menu.
Create your label using the HTML editor (see the following section ” for more details on this).
Select whether to make your label visible by selecting Show or Hide from the Visible menu.
After you have created your label, click the “Save changes” button.

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Uploading content is only half the battle of content management in Moodle. You’ll need to ensure that your uploaded content is current, and you’ll occasionally want to replace or delete files. Fortunately, Moodle has some useful features to help you manage your content once it’s on the server.

This section covers the following MTC skills: 8.4 Files

Once you’ve uploaded your files, they are stored in the files area. When you create a link to a file, you store the file in the files area and create a link for your students to access it.

To access the files area, click the Files link in the course Administration block, as shown in .

Figure : Course Administration block

The files area, as shown in , has a checkbox beside each uploaded file and folder. You can select one or more files and then move or archive them using the tools in the “With chosen files” drop-down menu on the lower-left side of the file list. If you click on the menu, you’ll see three things you can do with your chosen files:

Move to another folder

To move uploaded content to another folder in the files area:

Select the file(s) you want to move.
Select “Move to another folder.”
Navigate to the folder where you want to move the selected files.
You’ll see a new button at the bottom of the screen that says “Move files to here.” Click the button, and the files will move to the new location.

Delete completely

This option removes all trace of the file from your Moodle site.

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There are a few effective practices that can make life easier for you and your students. First, there are file format tricks to ensure your students can download and use your content. Second, make sure the bit size of your files is as small as it can be, so your students won’t grow old waiting to download tomorrow’s lecture notes. Third, there are creative ways to use static content in your courses to help you and your students succeed.

This section covers the following MTC skills: 6.2 Audio and video; 6.3 Documents and resources; 6.6 Other multimedia formats

Every file you create and save on your computer has a specific file format. For example, Word files are saved in Word format, and can be opened only in a compatible version of Word. However, this can cause problems if your students don’t have the same version of Word you do. A solution is to continue to create your documents in Word but save them as Rich Text Format, or RTF, a format that a wide variety of word-processing programs can open. In most versions of Word, you can save a file as RTF by following these steps:

Select “Save As” from the file menu.
Choose RTF from the file type drop-down.
Save the RTF copy of your document.

There are a number of file formats for displaying text and images that almost everyone can open, regardless of their computing platform, and you should strive to use these whenever possible. These formats include RTF, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Portable Display Format (PDF), and picture formats, including PICT, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and PNG.

describes some common file formats.

Table : File types
File type

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Ultimately, the content you develop and share in your Moodle course is up to you. Static Moodle content provides resources for students as they engage in the learning process. In this chapter, we’ve looked at how to upload and create content for your Moodle course. In the following chapters, we’ll discuss some of the dynamic activities you can add to your class to make it truly compelling.

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Now that we have covered the basics of setting up a course and adding content, we need to take a look at some of Moodle’s underlying capabilities. At first glance, this may seem like administrivia, but understanding roles and groups is one of the keys to unlocking Moodle’s full potential as a learning environment. A person’s role in a course determines what he can do—in other words, what capabilities he has. It’s a very powerful system, but it does have a bit of underlying complexity. You can use groups to create student workgroups, recitation sections, or any other arbitrary grouping you need to realize your learning design.

We will start by discussing roles, since anyone who wants to do something in your course needs to be assigned a role.

This section covers the following MTC skills: 7.1 Enrolling participants; 7.5 Roles

The new roles and permissions system in Moodle provides you with a huge amount of flexibility for managing how students and other people interact with your course. In older versions of Moodle (prior to 1.7), there were only six roles possible: guest, student, non-editing teacher, editing teacher, course creator, and administrator. Whilst the new system supports these roles out of the box, it also allows you to create and customize roles, and to change what a given role can do in each activity. For example, you can now create permissions in individual forums, which allows you to let students act as moderators in one forum while you retain the moderator role in all of the other forums in your course.

If it seems a bit daunting, don’t worry. Using roles and permissions is something you can take slowly. You can start the usual way, assigning people as students, teachers, and other roles specified by your institution. Later, when your course design grows more elaborate, you can begin to experiment with overrides and assigning specific roles in specific contexts.

We’ll start simply, by assigning users to predefined roles in your course. Then we’ll take a look at the roles and capabilities system and later discuss how to use the advanced features.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 7.1 Enrolling participants; 7.5 Roles

The new roles and permissions system in Moodle provides you with a huge amount of flexibility for managing how students and other people interact with your course. In older versions of Moodle (prior to 1.7), there were only six roles possible: guest, student, non-editing teacher, editing teacher, course creator, and administrator. Whilst the new system supports these roles out of the box, it also allows you to create and customize roles, and to change what a given role can do in each activity. For example, you can now create permissions in individual forums, which allows you to let students act as moderators in one forum while you retain the moderator role in all of the other forums in your course.

If it seems a bit daunting, don’t worry. Using roles and permissions is something you can take slowly. You can start the usual way, assigning people as students, teachers, and other roles specified by your institution. Later, when your course design grows more elaborate, you can begin to experiment with overrides and assigning specific roles in specific contexts.

We’ll start simply, by assigning users to predefined roles in your course. Then we’ll take a look at the roles and capabilities system and later discuss how to use the advanced features.

Most of the time, students will enroll themselves or be added automatically by your university’s enrollment system, so there shouldn’t be much need for you to manually enroll students. However, if you need to add a teaching assistant, an outside guest, or a student who is having a problem with financial aid, you must manually enroll them, i.e., assign them a role in your Moodle course.

By default, teachers are only allowed to assign the roles of non-editing teacher, student, and guest. If you want to assign the role of teacher, you will need to ask your system administrator for this to be allowed.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 8.1 Using and managing groups

Moodle has an unusual but effective way of managing small student workgroups within your course. You can define groups at the course level, then set each activity to a group mode or leave it available to everyone. The group mode you choose may also determine the behavior of the module. Think of groups as a filter. If you are a member of a group within a course, and an activity is set to group mode, Moodle will filter out any work from anyone who is not part of your group. You are all looking at the same activity, but you can’t interact with anyone who is not in your group.

There are three group mode options:

No groups: Everyone participates as part of the class. Groups are not used.
Separate groups: Each group can see only their own work. They can’t see the work of other groups.
Visible groups: Each group does their own work, but they can see the work of the other groups as well, as shown in .

Figure : Visible groups in a forum

Once the group mode is set for the course or activity, students will interact with your Moodle course as they normally would. The only difference will be the people they meet in certain activities, such as forums. For example, if you set the group mode of a forum to separate groups, Moodle will create a forum for each group. Each student will see the same link to the forum, but she will be able to access only the discussions for her particular group. You need to create the forum only once; Moodle takes care of creating the individual group forums.

To utilize the group mode, you first need to create the student groups:

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 8.6.1 Backup

After spending a lot of time setting up your course and delivering it to your students, you’ll want to make sure you don’t lose your work. Fortunately, Moodle gives you a backup tool to create archives of your courses. Backups can also be used to copy course resources and activities from one course to another.

To make a backup:

Click Backup in the Administration block.
The “Course backup” page, as shown in , lists all the modules and in your course.

Choose which activities you want to include in the backup, and whether to include user data, by using the Include All/None links at the top of the page and/or by selecting the checkboxes next to each module or activity name. User data consists of all student files, submissions, forum postings, glossary entries, etc.
Select the following backup options:

Meta course

If your course is a meta course, this option will preserve the setting in the restored course.

Users

This backs up the user accounts for everyone in the course. If you select None, then no user data will be backed up.

Logs

This backs up all course activity logs.

User files

This backs up all student submissions for assignments and other file uploads.

Course files

This backs up any file stored in the files area for the course.
When you have selected your options, click the Continue button to start the backup process.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 8.7.1 Restore

Your backup ZIP file can be restored to create a new course or to copy activities into an existing course.

You will only be allowed to restore to a new course if you have been given appropriate permission at the course category or site level. your system administrator if necessary.

To restore a course:

Either upload a backup ZIP file to your course files area (as covered in ) or click Restore in the Administration block to access the backupdata directory, as shown in .
Click the Restore link opposite the file you want to restore.
On the next page, click Yes to the question “Do you want to continue?” to start the restore process.
Click the Continue button at the bottom of the next page, listing details of the backup.
On the next page, as shown in , select whether you want to restore to the existing course, adding data to it or deleting it first.

If you have permission to restore to a new course, the restore page will contain additional options for setting the new course category, short name, full name, and start date.

Restoring a course without user data and changing the short name and start date is a good way to roll forward a class you want to use in another semester. An alternative method is to reset the course using the Reset link in your course Administration block.
Choose which activities you want to restore and whether to include user data.
Select course users if you are including user data.
Select appropriate role mappings. The options depend upon the roles you are allowed to assign. By default, teachers are only allowed to assign the roles of non-editing teacher, student, and guest.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 8.3.1 Logs

Once your course is up and students are working, Moodle provides you with detailed logs and participation reports of student activity.

To access course reports:

Click Reports in the Administration block.
On the Reports page, choose from the following:
Logs

Select any combination of group, student, date, activity, and actions, then click the “Get these logs” button.

You can see what pages the student accessed, the time and date she accessed it, the IP address she came from, and her actions (view, add, update, delete), as shown in .

You can choose to display the logs on a page (as shown in ) or download them in text, ODS, or Excel format.

The Logs page contains active links enabling you to access the student’s profile page or a particular page that the student was viewing. The IP address link provides an estimate of the student’s location.

Current activity

The “Live logs from the past hour” link in the middle of the Reports page opens a pop-up window listing all course activity in the past hour, which refreshes every minute.

Activity report

This lists how many times each course activity has been viewed and the last time it was viewed.

Participation reports
To generate a participation report:
Select an activity module, the time period to look back over, to show only student reports, and the actions you are interested in (views, posts, or all actions), then click the Go button.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 5.4 Forums

Forums are a powerful communication tool within a Moodle course. Think of them as online message boards where you and your students can post messages to each other while easily keeping track of individual conversations. Forums are the primary tool for online discussion and are the central organizing feature in the social course format. You’ve already posted your first message to a forum back in . When you posted your news item, you were posting to a special forum used in every course for announcements and news.

Forums allow you and your students to communicate with each other at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Students don’t have to be logged in at the same time you are to communicate with you or their classmates. demonstrates how conversations are tracked through time, and readers can review the history of a conversation simply by reading the page. The technical term for this type of communication is asynchronous, meaning “not at the same time.” Asynchronous communications are contrasted with synchronous forms such as chat rooms, instant messaging, or face-to-face conversations.

Figure : A forum discussion

Because forums are asynchronous, students can take their time composing replies. They can draft and rewrite until they are happy with the results instead of feeling under pressure to respond immediately. A lot of research indicates that more students are willing to participate in an asynchronous forum than are willing to speak up in class. For students whose primary language is not that of the course, people with communicative disabilities, and the just plain shy, forums offer a chance to take as much time as they need to formulate a reasonable reply. Other students, who might be afraid of embarrassing themselves by making a mistake when they speak up in class, can double-check their responses before they send them in.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 5.4 Forums

Forums are a powerful communication tool within a Moodle course. Think of them as online message boards where you and your students can post messages to each other while easily keeping track of individual conversations. Forums are the primary tool for online discussion and are the central organizing feature in the social course format. You’ve already posted your first message to a forum back in . When you posted your news item, you were posting to a special forum used in every course for announcements and news.

Forums allow you and your students to communicate with each other at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Students don’t have to be logged in at the same time you are to communicate with you or their classmates. demonstrates how conversations are tracked through time, and readers can review the history of a conversation simply by reading the page. The technical term for this type of communication is asynchronous, meaning “not at the same time.” Asynchronous communications are contrasted with synchronous forms such as chat rooms, instant messaging, or face-to-face conversations.

Figure : A forum discussion

Because forums are asynchronous, students can take their time composing replies. They can draft and rewrite until they are happy with the results instead of feeling under pressure to respond immediately. A lot of research indicates that more students are willing to participate in an asynchronous forum than are willing to speak up in class. For students whose primary language is not that of the course, people with communicative disabilities, and the just plain shy, forums offer a chance to take as much time as they need to formulate a reasonable reply. Other students, who might be afraid of embarrassing themselves by making a mistake when they speak up in class, can double-check their responses before they send them in.

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 5.2 Chat

The Moodle chat module is a simple synchronous communication tool allowing you and your students to communicate in real time. If you’ve ever used an instant messaging system like AOL, MSN, or iChat, you’ve used a system similar to the Moodle chat. In the forums, you and your students don’t have to be logged in at the same time. In a chat, everyone needs to be logged in at the same time in order to communicate.

To use the chat tool, you will need to create a chat room for you and your students and set a time when everyone will log in and meet. You can create one session for the entire course or set up repeating sessions for multiple meetings.

To create a chat session:

Click the “Turn editing on” button.
Select Chat from the “Add an activity” drop-down menu in the course section where you would like to add the chat.
In the resulting page, shown in , give the chat room a name and provide directions on how to use the room in “Introduction text.”
Set the time for the first chat session in “Next chat time.”
Select the general options for the chat room:

Repeat sessions

There are four options here:

Don’t publish any chat times

Creates a chat room that is always open and has no specified meeting times

No repeats

Creates a one-time chat room that will meet only during the time specified in step 4

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This section covers the following MTC skills: 3.7 Messages

Messaging is a private communication tool between student and teacher or between two students.

If these instructions don’t work, contact your system administrator and ask if messaging between site users is enabled.

Unlike forums and chats, messaging is not course-specific; users may send messages to each other regardless of whether they are enrolled in the same course. Your profile page contains a Messages button for opening the Messages window (see ).

Figure : Messages window

To encourage the use of messaging in your course, you may wish to add a Messages block (see ) and/or an Online Users block to your course page.

Figure : Messages block

To add a Messages block to your course page:

Click the “Turn editing on” button.
Select Messages from the “Add blocks” menu.
If appropriate, move the Messages block up and/or left, using the arrow icons under the block title.

The Messages link in the Messages block provides another way of opening the Messages window.

Sending messages

To send a message:

Open the Messages window, either using the button in your profile page or via the link in the Messages block.
In the Messages window, click on the Search tab to search for the person. If appropriate, check the box “Only in my courses,” then click on the person’s name.
Type the message in the text field in the pop-up box (see ), then click the “Send message” button. A copy of your message will appear above the text field.

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Moodle provides various channels of communication for you and your students. are an asynchronous, public method for sharing ideas. Chats are a great way to have simultaneous conversations online with a group of people. Messaging provides a private channel for you to communicate directly with your students. Communication is key to success for any class, and it’s even more important in an online environment.

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Sending messages