Technical Writing and Training Articles
I've rearranged this site to make room for new projects. If you're looking for articles on technical writing and training, you'll find them here.
Moodle Questions
Sometimes, fellow Moodlers send me questions by email. I do my best to answer them, and then post the answers on my Moodle blog there.
Books I've Written about Moodle
Basic: Moodle E-Learning Course Development
A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle
- Straight-forward coverage of installing and using the Moodle system
- Working with Moodle features in all learning environments
- A unique course-based approach focuses your attention on designing well structured, interactive, and successful courses
In Detail
This unique book gives you more than just a guide to the Moodle software; it uses Moodle as a route to better teaching, more motivated students, and more successful courses. Moodle is the leading Open Source learning management system. Using Moodle, teachers can easily construct richly textured web based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons, with each lesson including reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and group work between students.Moodle E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. It will help you analyse your students' requirements, and come to an understanding of what Moodle can do for them. After that you'll see how to use every feature of Moodle to meet your course goals.
The social constructionist learning philosophy is at the heart of Moodle: we all "construct" knowledge through interation with one another and with learning materials in a social way. Moodle E-Learning Course Develelopment will show you how to add static learning material, interactive activities, and social features to your courses so that students reach their learning potential. Whether you want to support traditional class teaching or lecturing, or provide complete online and distance learning courses, this book will prove a powerful resource throughout your use of Moodle.
Read the full Table of Contents for Moodle E-Learning Course Development
What you will learn from this book
Once you read this book, you will:
- Understand what Moodle can do, how it compares to other e-learning packages, and how it can support your teaching strategies
- Install the Moodle software on your own computer or a server, and understand your way around it
- Know how to create different kinds of courses. Moodle can support courses where the group works through the classes with a shared schedule, or where individual students work through at their own pace, or courses where students are free to explore the different topics in their own time. This book will show you how.
- Understand all of Moodle's learning features. Moodle provides features for managing course content, interactive resources, and social activities such as forums and wikis. This book explains what each of these features are, how they work, and most importantly how and when to use them effectively.
- Manage students – so that you can ensure that the right students are going to the right classes; allow students to enrol themselves, or invite students to join a course. You can even set up commercial courses where students pay to sign
Approach
William Rice is an experienced trainer and expert on learning and teaching practices. This experience and expertise forms the foundation of his approach: What do we want to teach? How would this best translate into a course? How best can Moodle support these course objectives?
Of course, the book contains everything you'd expect from an introduction to Moodle: clear step-by-step instructions, plenty of screenshots, explanations and guides through the many features and options that you have to choose from. Throughout the book, William develops an example course. He uses this example to explore the sort of decisions, design considerations, and thought that goes into developing a successful course.
Who this book is written for
This book is written for everyone who wants to get the most from Moodle. Beginners to the software will get a thorough guide to how the software works, and some great ideas for getting to a good start with their first course. More experienced Moodlers will find powerful insights into developing more successful and educational courses.
Intermediate: Moodle Teaching Techniques
Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions
- Applying your teaching techniques through Moodle
- Creative uses for Moodle’s standard features
- Workarounds, providing alternative solutions
- Abundantly illustrated with screenshots of the solutions you’ll build
- When and how to apply the different learning solutions
- Especially good for university and professional teachers
In Detail
Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. It is the world’s most popular online learning system. It has many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit.
What you will learn from this book
- Using forums to motivate students and give them one-on-one attention
- Keeping forum discussions on track
- Managing chat sessions
- Using quizzes for student self assessment
- Adding immediate feedback, time limits, and location restrictions to quizzes
- Making creative use of lessons
- Using wikis for individual and group activities
- Making creative use of glossaries
- Using choices for quick reviews, surveys, and reminders
- Organizing courses
- Building better courses with blocks
- Making expectations clear with workshops
The learning solutions are based on proven, accepted instructional principles and traditional classroom activities, such as Distributed Practice, Self Monitoring, Pre-correction, and more. This book will help you to motivate team work in your students.
Approach
This book has a friendly approach and even experienced trainers will benefit a lot from it. It uses copious screenshots, for you to get a feel of the course site even while you are learning by building the solutions.
Who this book is written for
If you are a teacher or a corporate trainer with a desire to design effective and innovative Moodle courses, this book is the best choice. The book assumes that you have basic understanding of Moodle, but it does not need any programming knowledge. It’s all about teaching and not programming. If you are new to Moodle, start with Moodle E-Learning Course Development.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 1 tells you who this book is for and the approach the book will take to creating learning solutions, and briefly describes the educational principles and practices upon which the techniques are based.
Chapter 2: Forum Solutions
This chapter offers you solutions for managing your forums. The first two sections focus on making the best use of forums. The last two sections focus on managing your forums.
Chapter 3: Chat Solutions
The key to making the best use of Moodle’s—or any LMS’s—chat function is to use chat in a way that takes advantage of its unique strengths, instead of trying to make it act like a face-to-face meeting. In this chapter, we explore the questions “What is chat good for?” and “How can I achieve success in an online chat?” Because Moodle’s chat function is similar to most other chat software, the answers to these questions apply more widely than just to Moodle.
Chapter 4: Quiz Solutions
A quiz can be more than just a test. At its best, a quiz can also become a learning experience. Moodle offers features that help you to accomplish that. This chapter gives you five ways to use Moodle quizzes for more than testing.
Chapter 5: Lesson Solutions
A Moodle lesson can be a powerful combination of instruction and assessment. Lessons offer the flexibility of a web page, the interactivity of a quiz, and branching capabilities.
Chapter 6: Wiki Solutions
We usually think of a wiki as a group activity that students engage in on their own schedule. A wiki is a powerful tool for collaboration, and it does enable students to participate in a group activity from anywhere at any time. However, a wiki can also be a powerful tool for individualized learning. This principle is called “differential learning”. It means that the learning experience should be customized for each student. With individual wikis, you can differentiate the learning experience for your students.
Chapter 7: Glossary Solutions
Most people think of glossaries as nothing more than special-purpose, online dictionaries. But a glossary can also be a fun collaborative activity for your class, and a teaching tool. Let’s look at the capabilities of the Glossary module first, and then ideas for using glossaries for more than just vocabulary building.
Chapter 8: The Choice Activity
Moodle’s Choice is the simplest type of activity. You can use a choice to: Take a quick poll, ask students to choose sides in a debate, confirm the students’ understanding of an agreement, and gather consent.
Chapter 9: Course Solutions
In this chapter, the solutions are focused on making your course easier to navigate. The goal of all these solutions is to reduce the time and effort your students spend figuring out what to do next, so they can get on with the learning. Sometimes, just slightly reducing the effort students spend on navigating through your course requires a great effort on your part. But almost anything you can do to help your students navigate easily through your course is worth the effort. The result is less time spent wondering what to do next, and more time spent on your course content.
Chapter 10: Workshop Solution
Moodle’s Workshop module is one of the most complex, and powerful, activities. This chapter takes you through the process of creating a full-featured workshop. It focuses on helping you to make decisions that create the kind of workshop experience you want for your students.
You may have come looking for the Moodle site used in my books. That site is closed. However, Moodle.org maintains the best Moodle demonstration site on the web.
Thanks for visiting!
William Rice
I use and recommend ICDSoft Web Hosting
Contact me: techcomm@this domain name (replace "this domain name" with "williamrice.com" |