Glossary of common terms

The areas within a course that hold activities are known as sections. This is a generic term that covers weeks and topics.

This is where your web site or database, or both, resides. You may choose to run your own server or have a hosting provider look after this for you.

Short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client (or a program like Moodle) to a mail server.

Social constructionism is a term that defines a particular view of education. It acknowledges constructivism as a description of what each learner experiences, while focussing on the power of constructing artifacts (like text) within a social environment.

From this point of view, education is best served by creating experiences that would be best for learning from the learner's point of view, rather than just publishing and assessing the information you think they need to know. Each participant in a course can be a teacher as well as a learner. A 'teacher' in this environment is an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with others in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

Moodle tries to promote this view, but is not constrained by it.

To move your files from a personal computer "up" to a server. Also see FTP and download.

A Uniform Resource Locator is the address that is used to reach a website. For example, http://moodle.org/

The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can achieve tasks in a particular environment of a product. High usability means a system is: easy to learn and remember; efficient, visually pleasing and fun to use; and quick to recover from errors.

With software, the usability is very dependent on the interface.

This is the setting inside config.php that tells Moodle where it is installed.  It has to be a full URL to the web site's "natural" address.  Some web sites may work under more than one address (for example www.example.com and example.com) but you should pick the main one.

XHTML will eventually replace HTML as the language used to program web pages for display in your web browser. It's actually very similar to HTML, but has stricter rules about the formatting. As the world moves to XHTML web browsers will display pages more consistently, and the web will also be more accessible to people with disabilities.

short for 'Structured Query Language'


(I entered this entry only because a forum search for 'firebird' also brought up ALL the entries that included 'sql' even as a substring as e.g. in 'mysqladmin'.)