I need your help in understanding moodle...how must i start learning it! what is the right approach?
I need your help in understanding moodle...how must i start learning it! what is the right approach?
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Hi Alifiyah, and welcome to Moodle....
What Mary and Alan have said are important so please do them.
The next step is to ask what it is you actually want from Moodle?
The trouble with this is that you do not yet know what Moodle is capable of. My suggestion is that set up a Moodle and play with it. If you have a server somewhere, or access to a computer that has server software on it, install Moodle. Don't forget both PHP and MySQL first. If you do not know how to do this, there are plenty of tutorials around to help you. These are not big issues and will, ultimately, be taken care of your network manager and tech staff. If you talk to one of them, they may help, may even do it for you on their server - if you ask nicely. I have had a Moodle running on my laptop, but that was an interesting experiment that did not work as I wanted it, I really did not understand the network requirements of servers and Moodle so it didn't work as I wanted, but I actually used that as my test and demonstration Moodle when I was in the rural areas of my home state.
Once you have an operational Moodle you can just add courses, add categories add activities and resources to your hearts content. Use them to learn how to do things. Most pages have a link to a Moodle Doc of some description, so if you get stuck, you have a doc to help you. Initially, concentrate on resources and activities. Start with what you users are going to be using first to see what is possible. From there you can look at the internal management of your Moodle, with things like Users, Roles, appearance, themes, then move on to more demanding tasks, Capabilities, groups and groupings, cron, plugins and so on are really for those people who are running the site, the Administrators.
Once you have an idea of what Moodle can do, then you can start to ask the right questions in how you can apply Moodle to suit your needs.
The learning curve is not that steep, really, just practice and understanding the docs are often helpful, but sometimes not. About a week should be enough to get the basics of Moodle, then it is just a matter of refining what you need to know.
It's a whole new adventure, and when things get tough, it is usually that you are asking the questions from a more traditional "computer-software" perspective rather than "server-application" perspective. Well, that is what I found, and it really did amaze me when I realized that using Moodle was not simple, but it was easy.
Good luck.
Thankyou collin for such a detailed response,it has really helped me find a path towards learning...i would be obliged if u send me some links of good free moodle tutorials.
i also wanna ask u something ...the development of moodle site should be done on one server or can it be opened anywhere i.e any other lap top apart from mine? And can more than one person make changes to the same moodle site? i am asking this coz we friends are working in a group for this project.
If you're all wanting to work on developing code within the Moodle site, then you should definitely learn how to use git (great starting points: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 and https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Git_for_developers ). That is the version control system used whilst developing Moodle itself and will allow you each to work on different parts of the code and then pull the changes that each of you have made together.
If you are wanting to work on the site content together, then you could work on activities separately, then use backup & restore (either of a whole course, or just some activities) to bring the work together. You would not be able to merge activities together that way (e.g. if you both wanted to edit a wiki, you could not merge the changes via backup & restore), but if each of you develops content in a separate activity, then that could work.
Ahh, don't we just love group projects!
To add to what Visvanath has already said, if you install a Moodle server to your laptop, then you will need to set it up so that it can act as a server on a network. We didn't do that, so never got it working like I wanted it to because the laptop never had a static IP address, which I did not know was important, at that time. This can be a difficult process but can work none-the-less. You would be better off if your tech guys can set up a separate PC as a server, then using that as your test Moodle. This does not interfere with your main server, and if your security is set correctly, unless someone knows about it, they can't access the server, let alone the Moodle. Talk with your tech guys as to the best way of doing this. You don't need a new superdooper PC just anything capable of running Windows XP or Linux, or an older Mac, I think should be sufficient.
For everyone to have access to the Moodle server, and the codebase, all they need be is Administrators for that server. To access all areas of the Moodle, make them all Administrators, and that should allow you to do what you need to do.
There is just one difficulty with this model. Documentation. People do not always provide sufficient documentation about what they are doing, so they change something and the site stops working. Always happens. Inevitably, someone gets upset and problems arise, so you must absolutely insist that anyone who has access to the codebase and the site as an administrator documents everything they do while they are doing it, NOT afterward, its too late then. Good luck...