Moodle Course Design Best Practices - Second Edition

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.

Table of Contents

1. Preparing to Build an Exemplary Moodle Course
2. Planning Your Course
3. Organizing Your Course
4. Best Practices in Content Delivery
5. Designing Self-Paced Independent Study Courses
6. Developing Cohort-Based Courses with Teacher-Student Interaction
7. Creating Student-Centered Project-Based Courses
8. Moodle for Online Communities

Susan Smith Nash, who has been involved in the design, development, and administration of e-Learning programs and courses since earning her Ph.D. in the late 1990s, has developed and administered online courses on many platforms, using many different learning management systems. She is responsible for developing degree and certificate programs delivered in online and hybrid formats and has worked on implementing e-Learning in universities, corporations, and associations. The author of the award-winning e-Learning blog E-Learning Queen and several books on e-Learning, Susan Smith Nash has focused on developing courses that optimize user experience and enhance performance, outcomes, and course persistence/completion. Her portfolio of publications includes peer-reviewed articles and books, including the following: The video Moodle for Training and Professional Development, Packt Publishing, 2013 The book E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers, Texture Press, 2012 The book E-Learner Survival Guide, Texture Press, 2011 The book Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques, Packt Publishing, 2010"