Lesson

Hello and welcome Richard!

I have some not very good news for you I'm afraid.Not want you want to hear with an early posting. Mind you, there's usually a way of doing/solving everything in Moodle, with a bit of creativity, even if it's not the ideal method!

The only import option is powerpoint (and if you are using Moodle version 1.9 or below this basically doesn't work anyway).

Firstly copying straight from Word is not great as Word adds tons of extraneous code. There is a Word code stripper in the Moodle editor but this is not infallible, so it's better to copy the Word file, then past into word pad or note pad, convert to plain text and copy that before pasting into a lesson. This is likely to lose you your graphics.

A quick and dirty solution is to save each pdf page (and convert your word files to pdfs too for this same purpose) as an image file and then just have that image file only within a lesson page. I've already posted some info about this in a previous thread (you'll need to read both my posts in here as I've also suggested a way to speed this process up).

If you save pdfs as images and import them, you will retain the crucial formatting and image positioning.

Another alternative is don't have lessons, convert the pdfs (and also save the word docs as pdfs first too) and save/share these as movie files and get the students to work through them screen by screen.

Sorry it's not great; this is a common ask in here. BTW I hope you mean '= 1 lesson page' not '1 lesson' otherwise you must have humungous Word files.

Lynn Scarlet

Hi Richard,

Lynn's given you some good advice but I'm just going to add a couple of alternative thoughts:

• your PDF files can be split into chapters; there are free utilities that will do this. Google "pdf splitter" and you'll find a bunch. In your situation, you might want to attach the chapter as a resource in this form. You can also, obviously split the PDF more granularly (if that's a word?) than chapter, and some of the utilities probably have a feature to automatically split all the pages. This might be preferable to exporting as an image; the quality of the resulting small PDFs is usually higher than the same PDF exported as an image. Your PDF can be referenced by the lesson in the "pop-to file or web page" option, or as a URL - you obviously need to host the PDF on your moodle site.
• While it's true that Word adds too much cr*p formatting to be "copied and pasted" into Moodle directly, there is a way to create cleaner HTML out of Word and then bring the result in without the extraneous junk:
  1. Start by using Word's "Save As Filtered HTML" option. This had different names in different versions of Word, but basically gets rid of a lot of the Word-specific junk.
  2. Now it's actually pretty good. But you can run a utility on this to make it better. Dreamweaver has a great "Clean up Word formatting" option, if you have that, or google "clean word html" and you'll see a bunch of free tools on line. But the "granddaddy" of these tools is HTMLTidy. Here's a nice little blog post on using HTMLTidy options to deal with Word HTML. http://www.rogerobeid.com/2011/02/24/clean-up-microsoft-word-html/
  3. At this point you have a really good html document as your source. If you copy and paste it You still may have to chop it up into "chapters", if I understand you correctly, but you could then:
  • use the "popup to file or web page" for the lesson to reference that "chapter" (IOW host the HTML you created; see next point).
  • add the file as a URL resource if you host what you have created (NB: do *not* forget the folder of images that is created in tandem with the HTML file)
  • copy and paste into the Moodle editor after opening the cleaned HTML in Word or browser -- I'm pretty sure you'll have to re-insert/upload the images, however
• You can also export (Save As) Word documents as PDFs, and then chunk them up and use directly as embedded resources. I would recommend this, because it will give you one process to follow for all these documents if you handle them *all* as PDFs, whatever you decide that process should be.
• Assuming it works for you (Moodle 2), the Import Powerpoint option in Lesson might be a great option for you. While Word doesn't have a direct "Save As PPT/PPTX" option, if your documents use standard header/outlining styles, Powerpoint can import the outlines. Copy and paste into Powerpoint from Word for the rest of the content after the outline is prepared is tedious but will preserve all your formatting and your "pagination" scheme. I personally don't have any experience with Lesson's Import Powerpoint feature, though.

HTH,

>L<

Thank you Lynn, Lisa , Mary and of course Richard!

Some really good suggestions to a common issue.  Decided to create a moodle doc page in 2.2 called Inserting_content_into_a_lesson_activity.  Please feel free to edit or add more.  

Really belongs in FAQs, more than just Lesson.   Page name may not be the best, so it could change. 

Chris