Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Community Press) [Paperback]

Jason Cole (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596008635 | ISBN-13: 978-0596008635 | Publication Date: August 1, 2005 | Edition: 1

Developed by an extremely active open source community, Moodle is a sophisticated course management system that's ideal for creating dynamic online learning communities and for supplementing face-to-face learning. Used in more than 115 countries and supporting over 60 languages, Moodle can scale from a single-teacher site to a 40,000- student university.

Teachers who use Moodle have access to an array of powerful tools such as assignments, forums, journals, quizzes, surveys, chat rooms, and workshops. Using Moodle is a comprehensive, hands-on guide that explains how the system works, with plenty of examples and best practices for its many features and plug-in modules. Authored by a member of the Moodle community, this authoritative book also exposes little-known but powerful hacks for more technically savvy users. For anyone who is using-or thinking of using-this CMS, Using Moodle is required reading.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jason Cole is currently the academic technology manager at San Francisco State University, where he's responsible for managing a Blackboard implementation that has over 15,000 users. A member of the Moodle community, he has developed a student data integration tool for the system, and contributed to discussions regarding a document management system and object model for version 2.0. Jason earned a Ph.D. in educational technology from the University of Northern Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596008635
• ISBN-13: 978-0596008635
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,148,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very basic, adds nothing that's not in the manual, August 1, 2006

By 

C. Cutler (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Community Press) (Paperback)

I was very disappointed with this book and will be returning it.

If you have spent a few minutes playing with Moodle and read even a little of the online manual, this book adds nothing new. The system is easy to figure out, as most items are pretty self-explanatory and each option has a handy pop-up help screen that explains anything that you don't understand. The online documentation is very good.

I was hoping this book would explain how to do more advanced things in Moodle - how the many available add-on modules work and what they contribute to a finished system, tips and tricks to add videos and flash files to your courses, best practices for course development, advanced customizing, etc. But there was none of that in the book - only the same information that is already included free with Moodle. Save your money!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as it gets, July 2, 2006

By 

Declan Hayes "Declan Hayes" (Tokyo Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Community Press) (Paperback)

Executive Summary: Good, well written overview, buy if you can afford it, a good book by the standards of how to publishing but not critical as a lot of stuff is on Moodle's site.
................

Moodle has about 50% of the education market now and there are a lot of people working on it and a ton of information available through moodle's site. Mooodle 1.6, which I am using, has yet to stablizie properly and there are all kinds of bugs needing to be tackled. These vary depending on what level of Apache you use and what your level of admin access is. So, though it is more focused than a lot of other books, your milage will obviously vary depending on your logistics.

Moodle itself is easy enough to use and it helps to be familiar with it before reading through the book. Like most of the other books in this range, I just skim it as I more or less know how to use the admin panel; the book concentrates on front end classroom stuff, not on setting up Moodle and as all classes vary and teachers uses different methodologies or none, it is hard to write a definitive book on a pliable tool. The book is written in very clear and cogent Engish and this is not always the case with how to geek books, so that is a big plus.

Also, there are a few interesting teaching insights in the book, more than most others I have read and they are valuable. It gives for example, novel ways to use Wikis. But you would probably hit on these yourself after a while.

There are different ways of using the functions (different levels of access for teacher only, groups of students and teacher, or everyine doing the class). There are also different ways of teaching; I prefer a more informal approach and beleive in giving the students a lot of rope. This means I will use some functions and ignore others.

I have skipped the set quizes/ exams section for examole as it seems like a lot of useless work unless you have hundreds in your class. But again YMMV. I give it 5 stars as it is a well written book that is more focused than some others I have reviewed here.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The way to do course management, August 27, 2005

By 

Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Community Press) (Paperback)

If you want to operate an online educational course one of the most important choices you will have to make is choosing a good program to manage the course and all of its requirements. Moodle is an open source course management system that can handle anything from a single course through a university system with thousands of students and courses. The Moodle system is a complete system with a student registration and login, calendar, student forums, help system, online quiz system, the ability to upload and download files and assignments, and course content control. This book provides the reader with all the background and detail information they need to install and configure the software as well as and setup your courses. I was able to follow the book and setup a course and test it easily enough. It wasn't perfect the first time through but I did get it working correctly without having to refer to any other source of documentation.

Although installation is traditionally done on an Linux Apache system it will work on most systems that have a webserver, PHP, and SQL database. Using Moodle is highly recommended to anyone interested in learning this software or establishing an online course management system.