Teaching with Moodle

We have use Moodle as educational portal in North Carelian province, Finland. Site's main purpose is to provide information about adult education, organized by local educational institutes. Site contents are made in cooperation with several institutes, as well as local labour administration. Site is also used as a our project's intranet.

In our website planning (links, texts, navigation) we have modified some of Florida State University's user- and need-based website planning guidelines (Sampson et al. 2001, Panke et al. 2002; see http://www.career.fsu.edu/techcenter/) for user-friendly site structure.

Site itself has been builded using Moodle's courses, modules and blocks. Moodle courses has been used as "user profiles" to provide different contents and links for different user groups. Expect intranet, all courses are open to guest user - logging in is not needed. Most of Moodle's functions are hided to keep user interface as simply as possible.

In front page and inside side each profile (course), most of the contents has been made by Nwiki. Nwiki provides great blocks like content block and search block. There has been some technical problems in Nwikis backup/restore in Moodle 1.6.x, but otherwise it's a great tool for our purposes. We have reported these problems to Wiki discussion as well as to Moodle Tracker.

Our Moodlesite called Akkuna (a Finnish word for window) is http://www.akkuna.fi. Unfortunaly, it's in Finnish only...

Please feel free to add any comments here or with email jani.lemmetyinen@joensuu.fi