Hi, Moodle newbie here (moobie?), in need of reassurance...
I've hearn about moodle for a while now, but never had an excuse to try it. Now I've got a friend who does trainings for citizen vollunteers (think people who vollunteers for a town committee or other vollunteer board). He wants to know if he can store his course materials online so that if someone misses one of his trainings, he can direct them to the web version to catch up, or even take the whole course without him.
So I suggested that Moodle might be the answer, and I am looking into it for him. I have downloaded and got it running on a local machine. Look cool - almost too cool(!) What I'm wondering now if it is overkill for our purposes?
He doesn't need his courses to be graded... this is vollunteer information for vollunteers to help them do their vollunteer jobs better. Basic functions needed would be to list courses for self-paced learners, allow users to sign up for a course, and complete it on their own schedule. There would probably be a few different courses on different topics, but no more than 5 or 6. The one thing that would be cool to have is a certificate at the end of a course to say that they've completed the particular course.
That seems like a tiny sub-set of Moodle's functionality. Are there examples of simple sites that use Moodle to do this sort of thing? Also, at the moment I am just helping him with getting the server set up. He would be uploading the course materials himself. Is there a good resource I can give him (i.e.for a non-techie) to learn how to upload your own (very simple) course to Moodle?
thanks in advance for any feedback,
sacha
Moodle is overkill for what you want to do. However, it will do the job, and if you want to do more later, then Moodle gives you scope to expand. For example, with Moodle you could easily add a discussion forum so the students can ask each other for help with things they don't understand. Or one day you might decide to make a simple quiz to help people memorise some key facts, with Moodle, those possibilities are there.
All the documentation is on http://docs.moodle.org/. For example, http://docs.moodle.org/en/Getting_started_for_teachers might be a good place to start.
All the documentation is on http://docs.moodle.org/. For example, http://docs.moodle.org/en/Getting_started_for_teachers might be a good place to start.