Moodle Docs: Teachers Manual

## Teacher Manual

This page is a very quick guide to creating online courses with Moodle. It outlines the main functions that are available, as well as some of the main decisions you'll need to make.

Sections in this document:

1. Getting started
2. Course settings
3. Uploading files
4. Setting up activities
5. Running the course
6. Further information

### Getting started

> This document assumes your site administrator has set up Moodle and given you new, blank course to start with. It also assumes you have logged in to your course using your teacher account.

> Here are three general tips that will help you get started.

> 1. Don't be afraid to experiment:

>    > feel free to poke around and change things. It's hard to break anything in a Moodle course, and even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.

> 2. Notice and use these little icons:

>    > - the edit icon lets you edit whatever it is next to.

>    > - the help icon will provide you with a popup help window

>    > - the open-eye icon will let you hide something from students

>    > - the closed-eye icon will make a hidden item available

> 3. Use the navigation bar at the top of each page

>    > this should help remind you where you are and prevent getting lost.

### Course settings

> The first thing you should do is look under the "Administration" on your course home page and click on "Settings..." (Note that this link, and in fact the whole Administration section is only available to you (and the site administrator). Students will not even see these links).

> On the Settings page you can change a number of settings about your course, ranging from its name to what day it starts. I won't talk here about all these, as they all have a help icon next to them which explains them all in detail. However, I will talk about the most important of these - the course format.

> The course format that you choose will decide the basic layout of your course, like a template. Moodle version 1.0 has three formats - in future there will probably be many more (please send new ideas to martin@moodle.org!)

> Here are some screenshots of three sample courses in each of these three formats (ignore the different colours, which are set for a whole site by the site administrator):

> Weekly format:

> Topics format:

> Social format:

> Note that the weekly and topics formats are very similar in structure. The main difference is that each box in the weekly format covers exactly one week, whereas in the topic format each box can cover whatever you like. The social format doesn't use much content at all and is based around just one forum - this is displayed on the main page.

> See the help buttons on the Course Settings page for more details.

### Uploading files

> You may have existing content that you want to add to your course, such as web pages, audio files, video files, word documents, or flash animations. Any type of file that exists can be uploaded into your course and stored on the server. While your files are on the server you can move, rename, edit or delete them.

> All of this is achieved through the Files link in your Administration menu. The Files section looks like this:

> This interface is only available to teachers - it is not accessible by students. Individual files are made available to students later on (as "Resources" - see the next section).

> As you can see in the screenshot, files are listed alongside subdirectories. You can create any number of subdirectories to organise your files and move your files from one to the other.

> Uploading files via the web is currently restricted to one file at a time. If you want to upload a lot of files at once (for example a whole web site), it can be a lot easier to use a zip program to compress them into a single file, upload the zip file and then unzip them again on the server (you will see an "unzip" link next to zip archives).

> To preview any file you have uploaded just click on its name. Your web browser will take care of either displaying it or downloading it to your computer.

> HTML and text files can be edited in-place online. Other files will need to be edited on your local computer and uploaded again. if you upload a file with the same name as an existing file it will automatically be overwritten.

> A final note: if your content resides out on the web then you don't need to upload the files at all - you can link directly to them from inside the course (see the Resources module and the next section).

### Setting up activities

> Building a course involves adding course activity modules to the main page in the order that students will be using them. You can shuffle the order any time you like.

> To turn on editing, click "Turn on editing" under Administration. This toggle switch shows or hides the extra controls that allow you to manipulate your main course page. Note in the first screenshot above (of the Weekly format course) that the editing controls are turned on.

> To add a new activity, simply go to the week or topic or section of the screen where you want to add it, and select the type of activity from the popup menu. Here is a summary of all the standard activities in Moodle 1.0:

> Assignment
>   An assignment is where you set a task with a due date and a maximum grade. Students will be able to upload one file to satisify the requirements. The date they upload their file is recorded. Afterwards, you will have a single page on which ou can view each file (and how late or early it is), and then record a grade and a comment. Half an hour after you grade any particular student, Moodle will automatically email that student a notification.
> Choice
>   A choice activity is very simple - you ask a question and specify a choice of responses. Students can make their choice, and you have a report screen where you can see the results. I use it to gather research consent from my students, but you could use it for quick polls or class votes.
> Forum
>   This module is by far the most important - it is here that discussion takes place. When you add a new forum, yu will presented with a choice of different types - a simple single-topic discussion, a free-for-all general forum, or a one-discussion-thread-per-user.
> Journal
>   Each journal activity is an entry in the whole course journal. For each one you can specify an open-ended question that guides what students write, as well as a window of time in which the journal is open (weekly course format only). A general rule of thumb is to create one journal per week. Encourage students to write reflectively and critically in these journals, as they are only available to them and you. Afterwards, you will be able to grade and comment all the entries for that week or topic, and students will receive an automatic email informing them of your feedback. Journals are not designed to be continually added to - if you need to do that then add more journal activities.
> Resource
>   Resources are the content of your course. Each resource can be any file you have uploaded or can point to using a URL. You can also maintain simple text-based pages by typing them directly into a form.
> Quiz
>   This module allows you to design and set quiz tests, consisting of multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in a categorised database, and can be re-used within courses and even between courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback or to show correct answers. This module includes grading facilities.
> Survey
>   The survey module provides a number of predefined survey instruments that are useful in evaluating and understanding your class. Currently they include the COLLES and the ATTLS instruments. They can be given to students early in the course as a diagnostic tool and at the end of the course as an evaluation tool (I use one every week in my courses).

> After adding your activities you can move them up and down in your course layout by clicking on the little arrow icons ( ) next to each one. You can also delete them using the cross icon , and re-edit them using the edit icon .

### Running the course

> There are some big plans to extend this document into a more comprehensive tutorial. Until then here are a few ideas:

> 1. Subscribe yourself to all the forums so you keep in touch with your class activity.
> 2. Encourage all the students fill out their user profile (including photos) and read them all - this will help provide some context to their later writings and help you to respond in ways that are tailored to their own needs.
> 3. Keep notes to yourself in the private "Teacher's Forum" (under Administration). This is especially useful when team teaching.
> 4. Use the "Logs" link (under Administration) to get access to complete, raw logs. In there you'll see a link to a popup window that updates every sixty seconds and shows the last hour of activity. This is useful to keep open on your desktop all day so you can feel in touch with what's going on in the course.
> 5. Use the "Activity Reports" (next to each name in the list of all people, or from any user profile page). These provide a great way to see what any particular person has been up to in the course.
> 6. Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later - do it right away. Not only is it easy to become overwhelmed with the volume that can be generated, but it's a crucial part of building and maintaining a community feel in your course.

### Further information

> If you have any particular problems with your site, you should contact your local site administrator.

> If you have some great ideas for improvements to Moodle, or even some good stories, come over to moodle.org and join us in the course called "Using Moodle". We'd love to hear from you, and you can help Moodle improve.

> If you want to contribute to coding new modules, or writing documentation, or papers, contact me: Martin Dougiamas or browse the "bug tracker" site for Moodle, at moodle.org/bugs

> Thanks for using Moodle - and good luck with your teaching!

Moodle Documentation

Version: $Id: teacher.html,v 1.4 2002/08/18 10:00:01 martin Exp $