Product Description

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. Moodle is relatively easy to install and use, but the real challenge is to develop a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively onto the content established learning situation. This book guides you through meeting that challenge. This book is for anyone who wants to get the best from Moodle. Beginners will get a thorough guide to how the software works, with great ideas for getting off to a good start with their first course. More experienced Moodlers will find powerful insights into developing more successful and educational courses.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329022 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading sites like slashdot and 43folders. His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, rock climbing, and edible wild plants (a book on that is coming someday). William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society: how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, and has two amazing sons. For more updates on him and his work, you could visit his online blog: http://williamriceinc.blogspot.com

Customer Reviews

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development
Despite its claim to being a 'complete guide' this book is little more than a general overview for Moodle users. An excellent general introduction, it provides little in the way of practical guidance for someone setting up a Moodle site from scratch. The book is especially disappointing on the details of configuring a new site and making sense of the databases that underpin the system. Prospective administrators would be better combing the excellent Moodle internet site, downloading the available documents and finding answers to technical questions on the forums.

An Excellent Introduction To Moodle
As an independent maths tutor I wanted to investigate on-line learning for the 2007-2008 academic year. Moodle was the obvious choice for a VLE and I came across this excellent little book completely by chance. I found the examples incredibly useful in helping me design my courses - especially the detailed screenshots (although the text sometimes misses out explaining how the layout shown in the screen shots is achieved - hence 4 stars instead of 5). If you are a Moodle newbie then this is well worth considering.

A good introduction to Moodle
I'm a little wary of any book that talks about online learning tools, as I'd like to think that if the tools are any good, then I really should be using the tools themselves to learn. Having said that, I actually learn best from books (although that may well be down to the quality of the tools available) so the idea of a book that shows me how to get the best from Moodle was worth a read.

This book is a good introduction to the whole Moodle and E-Learning concept, and contains a lot of useful instruction and ideas as to how to get the best out of it. It provides good explanations of the main tools available to Moodle users, and identifies a number of problem areas that users are likely to struggle with, so will undoubtedly save readers a lot of time.

Where the book was less useful for me is that it focusses heavily on an academic environment, and is less easy to translate into how the tool could be used effectively in a corporate environment, which is my area of interest. I'm aware that the academic environemt is where Moodle is heavily used, but the book claims that it's written for "a teacher or a corporate trainer" and I found it less useful from a corporate perspective.

If you learn best away from a computer screen, or want a guide you can read in the bath (or anywhere else of course) then this will be a really useful book. If that's not you, then you'll find better resources online.