Week 8 Discussion: Teaching with Online Tools- Moodle

At Centre for Open Learning, Maldives National University, we are using Moodle for our courses which are conducted in blended mode. These courses include two face-to-face tutorials sessions for each subject and all other works are online. All the learning resources are made available online through this system and students do most of their studies online. We also have synchronous and asynchronous discussions and assignment submission and giving feedback through the system. I love the LMS as it has got a user-friendly interface and there are varieties of feature you can use. Also you can embed other tools if you want.

What is Moodle? Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS) / Learning Management System (LMS). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students to manage and promote learning. Many institutions use Moodle as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning). it It can be used to make activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around a subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition). It can also be used to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

The above mentioned activities can promote learner autonomy and to use Moodle you need to install it on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company. If there is any problem, Moodle Docs is a great place to start, especially the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages.

The Moodle demonstration site is a full Moodle site with some sample courses that you can try as a teacher, student or even an administrator.

Demonstration site: http://demo.moodle.net/