I'm quite new to moodle. Please tell me I'll still have hair by the time I figure this out!!! Where does someone with no budget and a graphics background go to learn moodle on-line or in print? (I already have most of Joomla! figured out so I figure I have a chance with moodle!!!)
Sorry, Dan, you will lose all your hair before figuring this out. See my balding head? I had a full head of hair two hours before that!
Do you want to learn Moodle as a teacher or as an admin? If you want to see how to set up a course and add modules as a teacher, get a course you can set up and invite some students to. Ninehub provides a free, secure site for if you put up with some ads. If you want to be an administrator or learn the site set up, then go to the one-click packages of Moodle and set one up on your PC or Mac. These packages are not secure, but serve as a great training ground.
Cheers! Don
Hey- I've still got loads of hair so there is hope for you There is a free online book Using Moodle that you can read and if you go to youtube and search for Moodle tutorials there are loads of them that will take you through the basics. (Oh and unless they have run out, a Moodle partner is giving away some free books for learning Moodle at the moment)
Wow! This was a good time to start to moodle!!! I got the ebooks for free. I'm a visual learner and those two seem to be more along my way of learning. Thanks!!! I'll be watching those youtube vids you put up.
To be honest, the goal of my company is to provide total media for educational organizations. One client I'm working with has already produced 3 full-length class videos in their field and we are adding the moodle to the website for continuing ed credits. I'm focusing on the medical field right now. E-Learning is the future of education and this is the ground floor.
Thanks for all you do and have done for those of us newbies!!!
Dan
I still have hair on the top, sides and bottom of my head! We'll see how that goes in a few weeks!!! I currently have the latest version of moodle on my VPS and have been playing with it. So far...it hasn't blown up....
Dan,
Hair today, gone tomorrow.
Well, you figured Joomla, so you have had a head-start compared to 90% of newbies. The best way to learn Moodle and to lose hair over the next 3 months is to sign up for a Linux Virtual Private Server (faster than shared hosting, but cheaper than a dedicated server). Get your web host company to install Moodle 1.9.10 on it. They'll take care of the PHP and MySQL as well.
Well if you're new to Moodle, you can go ahead and start off with Moodle 2.0.2. But at the moment Moodle 1.9.10 has more mods and plugins written for it than 2.0.2. But Moodle 2.0.x is the direction of the future, once the Moodle boffins figure some performance issues and also a way to get Moodle 2.0.x to import courses of earlier versions of Moodle!
Okay once your Moodle is setup. Go ahead and buy a Pact book on Moodle. Mary Cooch's books are a good read, as are many others. Oh yeah, head over to Youtube and watch Ms Mary's excellent video tutorials.
Then also head over to Moodle.org, read the forums and download all the mods, blocks and filters that you think will be useful for you and your users. It'll be fun, trust me. Moodle allows you to customise to your heart's content!
The VPS account guarantees you a root access where if you are feeling adventerous, you can download and use Putty to login. You can then use Linux commands to do what you want, including corrupting your Apache, MySQL and PHP. Make sure you backup your container first before doing any experimenting.
Frankie Kam
Melaka, Malaysia
A brief history about me. I've been using Moodle since 2009 - mostly free Moodle services from ninehub.com and moodlehub.com (i.e., KeyToSchool.com). Then it was only 4 months ago that I started with a shared hosting account for my Moodle site. 3 months ago, I switched over to a Virtual Private Server and I have less hair than previously. But because I enabled compression (Apache's mod_deflate) and PHP Acceleration (eAccelerator) for my site, I am happy as a clam now and the remainder of my hair will last a little bit longer.
Wow... are we on the same page. I've had a VPS server for over a year now and that's backend access sure does help and my VPS uses 'fantastico' so it installed moodle at the click of a button!!! Youtube...I didn't think of that! I'll look for her stuff. THANKS!!!!
Guess what. I once went to school up the coast from you more years ago than I'm going to admit. It was a school on Penang Island. Enjoy some fresh rambutans for me! (You can keep the durian....)
Dan
Greenville, SC
Do you guys use SCORM or prefer something else? What do you guys use? Thanks!!!
We use very little SCORM at my school, preferring to make our own materials using Moodle's built in features. My experience of SCORM is that either you pay for ready made packages which are often overpriced and not always fully functioning with the gradebook or else you use SCORM authoring tools to create your own packages which is fine but why bother when you can do stuff directly in Moodle?
I like doing the stuff myself! I just need to find all the toys to play with. I'm putting in video and then a quiz. Should be simple enough. I just need to make sure people cannot access the video without paying for the class!
You must be down under. It's still Sat night here....
@Dan: I've been moodling for several years and still have loads of hair!
Moodle is well documented, so go to http://docs.moodle.org. If you're more a visual learner, there's some tutorials at http://www.youtube.com/user/moodlehq and http://www.youtube.com/user/mylearningspace