Moodle Course Design Best Practices

Design and develop outstanding Moodle learning experiences, 2nd Edition

Susan Smith Nash

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789349603
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Content Management Systems
• Index: Computer Science

Fast-paced guide for designing effective Moodle courses; experiment with Moodle's features for free using MoodleCloud

Key Features

• Apply principles of instructional design to create great Moodle learning experiences
• Enhance collaboration and spur creativity with Moodle
• Bring together instructional materials, social interaction, and student management functions in your courses

Book Description

Moodle is a leading virtual learning environment for your online course. This book incorporates the principles of instructional design, showing you how to apply them to your Moodle courses. With this guidance, you will develop and deploy better courses, content, and assessments than ever.

This book will guide you as you learn how to build and incorporate many different types of course materials and dynamic activities. You will learn how to improve the structure and presentation of resources, activities, and assessments. All this will help you to create better for self-led courses, instructor-led courses, and courses for collaborative groups. The use of multimedia features to enhance your Moodle courses is also explained in this book.

Our goal is to encourage creativity, and the free MoodleCloud hosting option is an ideal place for teachers, students, trainers, and administrators to jump in and play with all the new features, which include powerful new plug-ins, new resources, and activities.

Moodle can be your sandbox as well as your castle of learning! With this book, you will build learning experiences that will last your learners' lifetimes.

What you will learn

• Build a course structure that fits your goals
• Design a unique appearance
• Manage the resources and activities
• Tips for better organization of your course content
• Select and set up assessments
• Include effective instructional strategies
• Incorporate competency frameworks
• Run and archive webinars
• Motivate learners by incorporating badges
• Explore MoodleCloud

Who this book is for

If you create courses with Moodle, this book is for you. It can be used by teachers, instructors, training managers, Moodle administrators, instructional technologists, instructional designers, and e-learning entrepreneurs. Prior experience with Moodle will be helpful.

Designing Self-Paced Independent Study Courses

Being able to take a course at any time, any place, and at your own pace makes online course offerings very popular. While many courses are instructor-led and may involve extensive interaction with other students, there are also many courses that are self-guided and contain self-scoring and adaptive assessments that do not require interaction with an instructor or other students.

With Moodle, you can create standalone, self-paced, and independent study courses that can be used in many settings and for various purposes. They may be short training courses that all employees must take for safety, health, or regulatory compliance purposes. They could be review courses on certain subjects or courses that are created for a wide audience or just for fun.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to develop a consistent look and feel for all your self-paced independent study courses. We'll review plugins, resources, and activities that you will find useful to include. We'll then learn how to set up the courses at the individual course level and review the best ways to add resources, activities, and assessments. We'll also discuss how to make sure that your students can track their progress and how to automatically generate customized certificates upon course completion. Finally, we'll learn how to set up badges, build them, and also enable social media so your students can display them.

In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:

• Configuring global settings for self-paced independent study courses
• Selecting ideal plugins, activities, resources, and assessments
• Tracking progress and checking grades
• Designing customized, automatically generated certificates

• Incorporating badges and social media
• Creating an effective assessment strategy
• Developing self-paced independent study

Self-paced independent study

Self-paced independent study means that your students are working on their own and that they will not have any direct interaction with an instructor or other students. Thus, there are a number of elements in Moodle that you will not need to include in your course website. For example, you will not need a forum and activities that require grading by an instructor.

At the same time, if students are working on their own, you may need to include self-help elements. You'll definitely need tools, such as a progress tracker, to help students know where they stand in the course, and you'll need to make sure that your instructional material, activities, and assessments tie together very clearly. You can build in activities such as low-stakes self-grading quizzes that keep students engaged and motivated. Keeping students motivated is critical because self-paced classes require students to motivate themselves and there is no teacher or tutor to provide external structure.

You can learn more about how building in automated feedback can motivate students in the Five Principles of Successful Course Redesign article on the National Center for Academic Transformation page at http://www.thencat.org/PlanRes/R2R_PrinCR.htm.

Self-paced independent study courses can vary widely in their length, scope, complexity, and "stakes." Some can be completed in less than an hour, while others may be intended for completion over a semester. They can be offered by colleges, universities, corporations, not-for-profit organizations, retailers, and other organizations that need to provide educational courses and training. With the advent of mobile-friendly interfaces, such as Moodle's responsive skins which are designed to work on all kinds of tablets, smartphones, and laptops, self-paced independent study courses are more convenient than ever.

Here is an example of how the courses can look on your smartphone:

Courses displayed on a smart phone

They are designed for clear presentations and easy-to-access content. Be sure to keep the fact in mind that some students will be using the course with their cell phones when you select graphics and make sure they are smartphone-friendly.

Configuring your course – Global settings

The more consistent you can make your courses, the better. There may be a bit of a learning curve the first time a student takes a course, but if the second course has the same look, feel, and functionality, chances are, the student will feel more confident. The student's user experience is very important.

We can make sure that our courses are consistent by configuring the courses in the Site administration, which will assure us that the settings we apply are site-wide and are, essentially, global. So, let's get started by looking at the best way to configure the global settings.

Theme selection

If your students are accessing your course using a wide array of devices, including laptops, desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets, you may wish to select a responsive theme that "flows" across devices. A responsive theme will be displayed appropriately across multiple devices.

This section shows you how to get started with developing the ideal look and feel for your independent study course. Fundamental to the course design is the selection of a theme, which may seem odd; however, in this case, selecting the theme is critical for many reasons ranging from the course being displayed across multiple devices to being easy to navigate.

The Boost theme was released for Moodle 3.2 and is available as a core theme in Moodle 3.4. It is highly recommended because it automatically displays across multiple devices and also comprises very little formatting/styling. Let's select the Boost theme and configure the settings as follows:

1. From the Site administration menu, click on Appearance.
2. Click on Themes.
3. Click on Theme settings.
4. On the Theme settings screen, click on the default selections for all the menu items. Make sure that the Default: Yes checkbox is checked for Enable device detection.
5. Click on the Save changes button.

For more information on the Boost theme, you may visit the Moodle documentation page for Boost at the following URL: website: https://docs.moodle.org/35/en/Boost_theme.

If you are using MoodleCloud, you may wish to use the MoodleCloud theme, which is also responsive. Please note that for this course, I've been using the MoodleCloud theme, which is very similar to the Clean theme.

To change your theme, Go to Site administration | Appearance | Themes| Theme selector:

1. Click on the Select theme button next to the type you wish to c...