Moodle ALA Online Learning (Continuing Education)

About

Some ALA divisions and offices offer asynchronous continuing education courses to ALA members.  The ALA Online Learning (Continuing Education) site is located at http://classes.ala.org and is configured with an open source Learning Management System called Moodle.  More information about Moodle can be found at www.moodle.org

Instructional materials for Moodle can be located at http://docs.moodle.org/.  ALA Staff can also request a training presentation and overview, with this agenda, to be held live in Chicago or via Adobe Connect.

You can also get a general overview and basic how to by viewing the following training videos, posted on ALA Connect:

What is Moodle?

Moodle Settings: How to Create A Course - Part 1

Add and Assignment to a Course

Overview of Course Components

 

Download a PDF of the excellent bookUsing Moodle- Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster is published by O'Reilly as part of the Community Press series.  A copy of this book is also available in the Chicago Headquarters Network S: Drive at S:\Share\Moodle\Manual.  The book is 6 MB.  When you need a little more explanation then available on Moodle Docs this is the best resource.

ALA program officers are responsible for learning Moodle from the resources mentioned in the About section above so that they can collaborate with and support their instructors.  All decisions about how to utlilize ALA's Moodle installation is handled at the individual unit level within their own unit category.  Each unit that offers Moodle courses has their own category on http://classes.ala.org and it is the responsibility of the unit to identify to ITTS who within the unit should administer their category area and act as subject matter expert (SME) for their courses.  These identified SMEs will all be added to a Sympa Email List called moodlers@ala.org.

News about ALA Online Learning

A course has been created called News about ALA Online Learning  on http://classes.ala.org within the the Faculty and Program Officers category.  

This course is for all ALA Online Learning Teachers and Staff Program Officers to learn about and share information about existing and new features on our Moodle site. The teachers of this course are ITTS Moodle Admins, Pamela Akins and Rob Berquist so we can have a channel of communication with those who are involved in adding and maintaining content on the site.

All ALA Program officers and teachers should be enrolled.  Program officers should make sure that new teachers are enrolled in this course before they begin to create courses or modify existing courses on this site.  The enrollment key for this course is aware.

Special Note for LITA Courses in Moodle

The News Forum is typically only used by teachers and admin to give latest and important news to students.  It is automatically added by Moodle when a course is created and by default, students can NOT post to it.    Usually teachers typically add an activity called "forum" to their courses.  In LITA, they teachers like to have the News Forum settings adjusted so that students can post.  To do this:

  1. Login to the Moodle course as Administrator. Click the "Turn on Editing" button,
  2. Open the News Forum (it might have another name, but it is forum closest to the top of the course page),
  3. Click the "Update Forum" button (in the upper right corner of the resulting page)
  4. Change the Role to override: to Student
  5. Click to move the radio button under the Allow column for each of the settings to Overwrite the standard settings which will now enable students to post to the News Forum:
    • Add newsmod/forum:addnews
    • Delete own posts (within deadline) mod/forum: deleteownpost
    • Reply to newsmod/forum: replynews
    • Reply to postsmod/forum:replypost
    • Split discussionsmod/forum:spllitdiscussions
    • Start new discussionsmod/forum: startdiscussion

Strategy for re-purposing course content and/or cloning courses

Attached below please find a document that outlines some common practices for reusing existing Moodle courses and content. This document assumes that the reader is already familiar with Moodle.

moodlerestoreclonestrategies.pdf
http://www.ala.org/support/moodle
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