Very basic training program help?

Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -
Number of replies: 18

Hi Folks,

I'm brand new to Moodle, in fact I'm so new to Moodle it took me a while to just figure out how to post on this forum!

At any rate, here's what I want to do:  I'm looking to develop a web based training program.  The program will include one course, and that course will include a series of on line lessons.  At the end of each lesson will be a test and upon successfully completing that test the student can then go on to the next lesson.  Since I am adding this as part of my business I want to charge students to take the course, and nicely enough I found that Moodle has a plug in to take PayPal enrollments.  Perfect.  I also want to use WordPress (if possible) as my company's website uses WP and I find it very easy to maintain.  Lastly, I want to be sure that only paying students are able to access the course material and that those students can only access the lesson they have yet to complete.

Sound simple enough?  The problem is that I've looked at a couple of dozen Moodle tutorials and watched a half dozen Moodle videos but still haven't the foggiest where to begin.  Might there be a template or example course already created that comes close to what I'm looking for?  At this point I'm impressed with Moodle, I think it will do everything I need Moodle to do, but I just can't find what I'm looking for to help me build it.

Anyone?

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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> I've looked at a couple of dozen Moodle tutorials and watched a half dozen Moodle videos but still haven't the foggiest where to begin.

Why don't you try with a good book http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=7246 ?
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

Thanks for the reply.

I'm hoping to find something that helps me get this off the ground as quickly as possible.  I want to spend as much of my time as I can writing content rather than learning Moodle.  From my perspective, right now Moodle looks to massive and bloated to allow me to do what I want to do quickly.  I think for a school with thousands of students, hundreds of teachers and hundreds of course that massive power makes sense.  But for my tiny little course it may be over kill.  Any other alternatives out there?  Something that's either cheap or free?

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Richard Oelmann -
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Paul,

I'm sure you're right in that, with the right server to handle the load, moodle can cope with thousands of students, hundreds of teachers and courses. But it can also be an ideal tool for a single teacher and a small class - I've used it in the past to set up a small one class course on a laptop running XAMPP. I don't really think a tool that donwloads in about 23Mb but packs in the power of Moodle can be  called 'massive and bloated'!

It sounds as if Moodle would be ideally suited to your needs - it has, as you said, a Paypal  integration. It also has conditional activities based on completion (I haven't personally used these, so can't give you any guidance, but they are here to read about).

I can appreciate your desire to write content, but as I'm sure you will be aware, you need to learn the tools you are using as well, if you are not already familiar with them. As you are looking for a suitable tool, obviously the ones you are most familiar with do not do the job you want and that probably is going to mean spending some time with whatever tool you eventually do go with - or paying someone to setup your course for you.

Either way, I would highly recommend the books link that Visvanath posted above - there are many very useful titles there and its probably a lot cheaper (even costing in your own time) than paying someone to write the course for you! And a very good investment if setting up a business too, as with a little knowledge and a bit more experience, you may be able to start expanding and adding more courses to your business.

Good Luck with your venture

Richard

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Mary Cooch -
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I think Moodle will do what you want and do it very well. You do need to spend some time learning it but you can get started pretty quickly. Have you got a Moodle site? Log in and go to "Settings>site administration>courses>add/edit courses" and add a course with a name of your choice. If you choose "topics" in the format you will then get (when you save it  -and for the time  being, ignore all the other settings and enrolments) several blocks in the centre of your page where you can add content. If  you turn on the editing top right or in the Settings link (usually on the left) you then get drop downs in each section "add a resource" which allows you to add static content - more information here and "add an activity" which allows you to add interactive content  -more information here 

Play about and make your content  -and then come back and ask about Paypal and getting users on board.

If you want to see examples, then log in with one of the sample logins to demo.moodle.net and look at the Moodle Features Demo course.

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

Thanks Mary and Richard.  I actually have a pretty extensive background in CBT and multimedia applications for training, and I appreciate your advice but to be perfectly honest I find the Moodle website enormously un-intuitive.  Could be that I'm pretty used to linear, step by step training without all the social networking do-dads. I will take your advice to heart and give Moodle a galent try, but just in case, are there any other options out there I might want to take a look at?  Seems like the easiest to use LMS systems are also the most expensive and my particular project just doesn't warrant that kind of investment.

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Re: Very basic training program help?

by Michael Stapleton -

Hang in there if you can Paul. Two years ago I made the mistake of purchasing one LMS for $1000 + and then found out, the hard way, about all the stuff it "couldn't" do. Tried another one with a subscription of over $100/month and that too... Then I hit on Moodle. After the learning curve there is no going back.

My father-in-law refuses to shop at the big grocery store down the street. Instead he shops at a little mom-pop store because (in his words) "They don't offer as many choices as the big store so I can get my shopping done in less time and steps". Moodle is like the big store, loaded with tons of stuff you may very well appreciate once you get rolling.

In the mean time I would suggest starting with one "Activity" to display your content. A nice one to start with is one of the Forum Activities called "Each person posts one activity". What I like about it is that you (the teacher) has access to the top 1/2 of the page. There, since you have multi-media expertise, could insert say a little bit of text to introduce the movie, followed by an embedded video/YouTube/PDF and then a little more text something like "Tell me your thoughts on the video". The students will open the page, view the video and then they will see a "Reply" link in the lower right corner. They won't see the other student's comments until they submit theirs. They type their reply, hit submit and you get an email telling you about it. Once they submit their reply they will then see what the other students said. (Until of course they figure out that they can submit, see the other's replies, and then hurry back before the 30 minute delay kicks in, edit their original, and resubmit smile)))

The nice thing about this "Each person posts one..." concept is that Moodle will not allow the students to create more threads. This prevents the run-on that can often happen in standard forums. They only get one. If you have 8 students you should get 8 replies. This might not be a bad place to start.

I had done a lot of trial and error and am coming close to a decision on how I am going to present my content in Moodle. This "Each person..." forum is on the top of my list. I have lots of PowerPoint presentations that I will be convertint to Flash and then embeding them in the top half of this forum. On the other hand, my students are in the course optionally so I do not need to grade them. If I did I would do the same thing only I would use the Lesson activity and/or the Quiz.

My thoughts for what they are worth...

Mike

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Paul,

Why don't you try Dokeos?  It has a free version and it is more focused on corporate training than school education. But I have a feeling you might want its 'pro' paid version, or find yourself coming back to Moodle.  smile

Cheers,

Don

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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

Thanks Don, will do.  Seems to me that eLearning has become so much more sophisticated (overly so IMO) than when I developed CBT with Director and Authorware years back.  All I want to do is have a series of lessons.  Each lesson contains several pages of text and maybe a few videos.  Then at the end of each lesson is a quiz/test.  Once the student achieves a passing grade on that lesson he is prompted to continue on to the next lesson and the previous lesson is marked as "completed".  That, plus make sure that only students whose account is "paid" have access to the lessons and track what lessons each student has completed.  That's it.  Nothing else.  If this were to be CD delivered I could probably shell out the code for this in a day or two.  I've not done anything like this on the web so I was hoping to find a turnkey tool that already did this.  Maybe my head is on screwy but all the eLearning tools I've seen spend more effort setting up inter-student community building than just delivering content.  That would be great for a distance learning college course, but not for what I want to do.  Just navigating the Moodle website is confusing to me, I can only imagine how my clients would react.  Keep in mind my average customer will be a middle aged computer phobe, so I need to keep things easy-peasy.

Edit:  Just visited the Dokeos site, and although it looks a bit easier to get up to speed with the user forums seem to have tons of spam posts everywhere (indicating that the product is either not supported very well or the forums just aren't moderated).  I'll give it a look but that's not a very good sign.

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Samer Faissal -

Paul,

You need the following:

  1. Moodle installation
  2. Hosting
  3. Payment gateway
  4. Training
  5. Support

It's critical to develp the system yourself if you don't have an IT background. You must find a Moodle consultant to help in the beginning and then you get the ball rolling.

Samer Faissal (Human Logic, Moodle Partner)

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In reply to Samer Faissal

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

"It's critical to develp the system yourself if you don't have an IT background. You must find a Moodle consultant to help in the beginning and then you get the ball rolling."

Methinks something was lost in the translation, you're contradicting yourself.  ;)

Unless you're willing to work for beer nuts, then I'm afraid "must find a Moodle consultant" doesn't apply to me.  Sorry.

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Richard Oelmann -
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Paul,

As you say a Moodle consultant wouldn't be an option, then I would again recommend the link to the books that was posted earlier, particularly the E-Learning Course Development one here, although there are other equally good resources there. At under $20 for the ebook download this must surely be a small but probably essential investment for a business proposition such as yours.

You say you could knock out the code for a cd delivered version in a day or two - but I'm presuming that means that over the past few years you have at some stage invested the time and effort in learning the development of that kind of system. I would have to say that finding your way around Moodle, in my experience, is far more straightforward than that. Its wide spread use through education and business, right the way from Primary schools on up  - and certainly not restricted to IT people would support that.

Richard

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

Thanks Richard, I'll keep that book in mind.  I'm pretty much convinced Moodle will do what I want to do, but my concern at this point is that it may be overkill for the task at hand.  I've searched for an example of what I'm looking for done in Moodle and I've come up empty handed.  Every Moodle site I've found so far has all the community bits that would be counter productive to my goals.  I created a CBT system back in the DOS days that did exactly what I want to do now:  student logs in, completes a lesson, that lesson is then marked as completed, then continues on the the next lesson.  The results were saved in a database file for the instructor to keep as a record.  I'll keep that book in mind but I'm thinking now that it might just be as fast to roll my own system using HTML and Javascript.  I probably need less than 1% of Moodle's capabilities.  Seems silly to me to spend a week to learn how to use Moodle then another week to dumb it down to my purposes.  But then again, maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective.

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In reply to Paul Vorn

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Guido Gautsch -

Paul, I was in the same situation as you and I just went for it.

Moodle is more intuitive then you may initially think.

Yes, it does take a bit of getting used to, but the rewards are well worth it in the long run. 

Google 2-minute Moodles and other tuts ahould be able to get you where you need to be; plus there's an amazing community here willing to help you. Feel free to adopt whichever platform you like and welcome back when you end up back here ;)

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In reply to Guido Gautsch

Re: Very basic training program help?

by ben reynolds -

Hi Paul,

There's a free Using Moodle 2nd edition (it's for 1.9, but still quite useful). And look for Moodle Fairy on YouTube (that's Mary Cooch) who does great vids and runs at least two blogs.

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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Very basic training program help?

by Glenys Hanson -

Hi Paul,

I'll second Don, and say that Dokeos not Moodle is probably what you need. I left Dokeos for Moodle 8 years ago because I didn't just want to put up content and tests. But if that's what you do want, Dokeos is much quicker to get your head around: took me about 3 hours. It's no doubt got a bit more complex since then but I imagine with your background, it wouldn't be take you much more time. That is just not true for Moodle: took me months even with my familiarity with other Learning Management Systems - I'd tried WebCT before Dokeos.

Dokeos also has a community of helpful and dedicated folks - just like the people here. big grin

Cheers,

Glenys

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Re: Very basic training program help?

by Paul Vorn -

Thanks to all for some great replies.  I'm looking at Dokeos but am leaning towards rolling my own system at this point.  Dokeos doesn't really support paid enrollments yet so they're kind of out for now.  I've re-designed my course content in a way that I think I can pretty much live without a LMS altogether.  But if that fails I'll be back.  Got some great feedback and support here.  Thanks very much!

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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Very basic training program help?

by William Hamilton -

...here, here, there's a lot of smart here on Moodle, best stay here and get the support you deserve and need!

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In reply to Samer Faissal

Re: Very basic training program help?

by William Hamilton -

Paul,

I agree with much of what's been said, especially the simplified process that Samer just pointed out. I too have been shooting for something of a blend or flavor of a Moodle and Wordpress. WP, besides a place for blogs, has something called WP e-commerce and can compliment an LMS with other e-ecommerce inititatives.

Time is always an issue for ambitious people, as is free hosting! I would consider myself a brown belt (working on black belt) as far as creating content (one weak point being working directly with Flash creation software vice wusiwug); my serious weapon of choice is Adobe eLearning Suite (Ninja stuff) which allows me complete flexibility of format, interactiveity, content, etc.

But to your main question... while not yet finished, have a look here http://hamiltonlms.mdl2.com this site (mdl2.com) can take care of most of Samer's list. If you want it free, you must deal with advertising but if you pay some, the ads go away-- I still have ads. In the intro area of the site, I used to have links to a Word Press e-commerce site and blog (the blog's still there)-- left it hanging too long and the WP e-commerce site was deleted; I used a train station concept, meaning my main site (Moodle) was Central Station and the WP site was a station named after another station- Hyde Park Station.

I've started utilizing Central Station with course work, including a virtual classroom! The link to the WP station would have taken you to an unfinished WP e-commerce station (blended stuff); you asked how that might work

I would say with the mdl2.com hosted site and your knowledge of course creation, you're well over 2/3 there! The other third has to be you sitting down and taking a serious three day or so head start and read of at least the free e-Moodle book for starters-- there's just no other way! 

As a very important side note, mdl2 always seems. to keep up with upgrades (as we speak, it's upgrading to 2.2).

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