Using Moodle

Effective Content Practices

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.

File 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 can be opened by a wide variety of word processing programs. In most versions of Word, you can save a file as RTF by following these steps:

1. Select Save As... from the file menu.

2. Choose RTF from the file type dropdown.

3. 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 ), Postscript Display Format (PDF), and picture formats, including pict, tiff, jpeg, gif, and png.

Table 3-2 describes some common ...