Cole Jason R. - Using Moodle: [teaching with the popular open source course management system]

Moodle is an open source Course Management System (CMS) that universities, community colleges, K12 schools, businesses, and even individual instructors use to add web technology to their courses. More than 30,000 educational organizations around the world currently use Moodle to deliver online courses and to supplement traditional face-to-face courses. Moodle is available for free on the Web (http://www.moodle.org), so anyone can download and install it. More on that later in this preface.

The name Moodle has two meanings. First, its an acronym (what isnt these days?) for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle is also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity.

Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, a computer scientist and educator who spent time supporting a CMS at a university in Perth, Australia. He grew frustrated with the system and learned that engineers, not educators, had built it. Martin realized that a system built by someone who started with the educational process, rather than an engineering process, would be infinitely better than what he had to work with. He put his postgraduate degrees in Education and Computer Science to work and started developing Moodle as an alternative. Martin now works on Moodle full-time. A community of dedicated open source developers from around the world works with him in a collaborative effort to make Moodle the best CMS available. Martin lives in Australia with his wife, daughter, and son.

This book is for people who want to teach a course using Moodle. You can use Moodle to teach a fully online course or to supplement a face-to-face course in a traditional setting. It doesnt matter if you teach at a primary school, a secondary school, in higher education, or in a corporate setting; you can use the tools and features available in Moodle to create an effective class.

The first edition of this book was written for Moodle 1.4. This second edition has been updated to cover all the features in Moodle 1.8, such as the new roles and permissions system, blogs, messaging, and the database module.

Also included in this second edition are references to the Moodle Teacher Certificate (MTC) skills. The Moodle Teacher Certificate is a way for people to demonstrate their skills in using Moodle as a teacher through a course project, a narrative document, and an online exam. The content of the certification is designed by the Moodle community, and the certification process is administered worldwide by Moodle Partners. Further details of the MTC can be found in the MTC area on Moodle.org: http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=48.