Good examples of Moodle sites?

Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Marcel Meth -
Number of replies: 21
I am interested in seeing some good sites in action.  I looked at a number of the site that were are sited on the Moodle site.  So far I have not seen any examples with interesting content.  Can someone point me to a really good example?  I'd like to be able to join for free.
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In reply to Marcel Meth

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Marcel,

most of the courses are closed and only for the students or employees of an institution. Its easier to answer if you tell us a little bit about your interest.


Ralf
In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Marcel Meth -

I am interested in using the web to suppliment math and science teaching.   Multimedia content, quizzes and assignments.  So for example, I would like to have some Ken Burns' style of movies describing the history of certain subjects and Flash or  Quick Time movies that contain explanations to problems.

Love to see the various community aspects, Wki, etc...

Thanks for your help.

In reply to Marcel Meth

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Michael Penney -
One of the best learning content sites anywhere, anytime:

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Simon Cheesman -
Thanks Michael - what a great site, and moodle example thanks.
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Leang Chumsoben -
Totally agree with the example wink
In reply to Leang Chumsoben

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Evrol Bell -
I saw that a wonderful example of what a moodle site should be but I would like to ask if it wise to main page before the logging page for example persons would see the first page then click on a link that take you to the moodle logging page ?
In reply to Evrol Bell

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by E. L. Cooper -
It really is a matter of your intention with the site. If you want people to see the courses and get a feel for your moodle you can show the front page but use keys to secure the classes. I've run them both ways and I do think that having the front page displayed gives the prospective student a clearer idea of what is or maybe involved in classes on line.
In reply to E. L. Cooper

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Agreed - and also, some places such as ours, a school, use the front page as their website open to all and to showcase events and student excellence. Then to get to the actual courses and private stuff you have to login.
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Nicky Glover -

Hi there,

I'm pretty new to the world of VLE's and I'm currently reseaching into them as part of a project for a client. I came across the Open Universities OpenLearn site and thought it was a great example. I was wondering if the features they developed like the nice side navigation course tree down the left hand side is now available for people to use as open source?

My back ground is in web development and front end build, I haven't worked with PHP before as I've worked on .net sites mainly. If I was to work with a PHP/Moodle developer how long would it take to set up something similar to the OpenLearn site? If anyone could give me a rough idea that would be great.

Not sure if this is a daft question or not but any help would be great.

Thanks

In reply to Nicky Glover

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Peter Bruce -
This may be a little off topic - but I had a look at the Open University's resources. Once you get past the cool web pages, the learning resources I looked at were one dimensional, relying principally on text.
Average of ratings: Useful (3)
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Eamon Doherty -
Hi Michael. This may be a stupid question but can I check that the Open Learning site was developed using Moodle, is it a good illustration what a Moodle site can look like?
In reply to Eamon Doherty

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Glenys Hanson -
Hi Eamon,

It's not particularly obvious that OpenLearn is a Moodle site unless you're already in the know, is it?

However a Google search lead me to The Problem With OpenLearn... an article which poses a lot of pertinent questions aboutOpenLearn and also makes it clear that it's a Moodle site :

"As to the delivery of OpenLearn content via Moodle, I do think this represented something of a lack of vision. The idea of making OpenLearn content in a learning environment, rather than just releasing it via lists of materials in an opencourseware micro-site, was something of a novel initiative at the time, I think, Connexions aside, maybe? (which doesn't say much for the rest of the OER community's efforts in this area... wink

But as far as innovating in the delivery of online course material, I'd agree that OpenLearn/Moodle was as boring as hell. And not particularly well executed (the navigation is lousy; the search is poor; the aesthetic is pretty mundane, the usability is questionable, and so on (my browser shortcut to a Moodle test server I used to run was 'muddle'wink.

This is all pretty much par for the course across a lot of "elearning" though, so I won't labour the point here (maybe I'll do another post about that in the next week or two...?wink

Anyway - is OpenLearn making right content available?, and is it just another document dump?"

Though it's not fair to make Moodle responsible for OpenLearn being a "document dump" (I think it's actually a bit more than that) when some Moodle courses are not. "A bad worker blames his tools", Moodle will do what a teacher wants: an interactive, constructivist course is certainly possible on Moodle even if they aren't yet the norm.

Cheers,

Glenys

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Clive Richards -

Many people are familiar with the open learn site - the problem is for most users is that the OU spent a small fortune on developing their site. Probably more than most institutions would spend on a commercial vle in several years.  For many people starting small they want to see good example installations that come "out of the box" (to use a commercial analogy)

In reply to Clive Richards

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Jon Witts -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
There are many great themes that you can add to your "out of the box" install of Moodle to get a great look; but I would argue that a good Moodle is more to do with content and institutional acceptance than looks...
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Marcel Meth

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Lewis Carr -
We've got a guest area you can take a look at:
http://moodle.parklane.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=123
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In reply to Lewis Carr

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Gordon McLeod -
Thanks for sharing this - I was looking for example sites to illustrate how you can present Moodle more creatively and visually than the traditional list of links.
In reply to Marcel Meth

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Shailesh AK -
We are using Moodle for the OurSubject Specialist Online Community (hosted at University of Huddersfield, UK). I agree that Moodle is very flexible and it is doing what we want.

I must say that there are some errors/problems and I had to do some cheeky hacks to get it to do what we want quickly; not Moodle’s fault though. Also, our requirements allowed the freedom to fix the number of sections to 3 and have fixed number of resources in each section, etc. (though all of these can be expanded).

We have 1000s of users from multiple institutions across UK and use different authentications for different institutions (shibboleth, external database, etc.). In general, we had good feedback from our users on many aspect of the site.

Visit http://oursubject.hud.ac.uk. Click the ‘about OurSubject’ logo at the footer to see the link to the Demo area (some blocks and functions are not available in this guest area). Also see a pdf document explaining various functions.

Hope it will be of some use to the Moodle community.
Thanks
Shailesh
In reply to Shailesh AK

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Jon Witts -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
I like it a lot!

Are you in a position to release your theme and changes back to the community through the Moodle site?

Jon
In reply to Jon Witts

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Shailesh AK -
Of course Jon. I had a look through the code again (it’s been a year now) and currently, the theme has some site specific tweaks (as I mentioned earlier) and is not fully documented for the general community users. Now that Moodle 2 is coming out, I am thinking about upgrading the theme. Once it is done I will try and post a more generic version to the Moodle Themes database too.

Note: the tabbed look was inspired by tabbed course format posted by Jeremy FitzPatrick though it would need some coding to make it work for recent versions of Moodle.

Many thanks for your kind words.
Shailesh
In reply to Shailesh AK

Re: Good examples of Moodle sites?

by Danny Wahl -
Hey, is that "cometchat" knock off available anywhere? I'd really love to be able to add something like that.

I've been working on a facebook-style forced bottom div block, but the cometchat thing is exactly what we want!