Teaching with Moodle

Hi David,

From what I know most institutions use a single moodle. That is what we do just because it's easier to manage user accounts--only one user account to create, instead of one per department.

You have all sorts of freedom with how much access you give your instructors. In the beginning I'd suggets not giving them creator access, and managing the course admin for yourself, just for a while.

We had some traffic problems, especially with chats, until we put moodle on a dedicated server. You might want to plan on that if you'll have lots of users on the site at once.

We used the course categories as a way to create divisions between departments. There is a category for each department, and all these categories are visible to students. Then there is another category, blind to non-admin users, where we store courses not in use, and a third for my testing and support, building quizzes, building questionaires, stuff like that.

Another thing we didn't plan on is so many people wanting to use moodle for things that are not courses--like administrative committee forums and document storage, student worker log books, student clubs. Many times we've wished we had one moodle for that sort of thing, which we could run at a lower level of security, and let users create their own accounts. And then run a separate, more secure moodle for legitimate classes.

We're in different countries, and I don't know whether you're K-12 or higher ed, so this may not apply, but some info to kick around, at least.

Amy