Moodle® For Dummies®

Understanding Moodle Basics

If you want to explore Moodle and perhaps are excited to start developing your first Moodle course, you need to know a few details about Moodle to navigate it and speak the language. The following sections help get you started.

Creating a Moodle account and logging in to your course

You need just a couple things to get started with Moodle:

• An account with a username and password: Aren't you glad to learn that Moodle is secure? You need a Teacher, a Course Creator, or an Administrator account in order to have editing privileges and create courses.

  You can contact your system administrator to set up an account for you. If you will be responsible for looking after Moodle, refer to the discussion regarding roles and registration in Chapter 3 and also the discussion regarding Moodle system administrators in Chapter 13.

• A URL: The URL depends on your organization or a third-party company that will host your Moodle site.

If you have an account and a URL, open your Web browser (Moodle works best with Internet Explorer and Firefox) and go to the URL. If this is your first time accessing your Moodle site, you come to a page similar to Figure 1-1.

Next time you return to the course, either you see just the login box as shown in Figure 1-2 (or Figure 1-1) or you go straight to a list of courses on your Moodle site with a login link in the top-right corner. You have a number of options to log in, all quite straightforward and simple.

Figure 1-1: The Login page. ...