Yikes, I am addicted to Moodle. I love creating courses on Learning Management Systems (LMS) Am I crazy?
My Moodle course site is expanding beyond the “requirements” but I can’t help myself.
Adding Forums
I am currently adding ‘help forums’ all in all modules. I really like how ETEC 565 has discussions for each tool so I thought it would be a good idea to put forums in each module so students can help each other (just in case the prof is not available). It really sets up a nice community of practices where peers can share their learning/knowledge with classmates.
Working with HTML and CSS
Linking to an outside web server
I am also going crazy (a good crazy) with HTML and CSS. Originally I just linked to my webworkshop on my web server. The workshop has over 60 html pages so adding them individually to a Moodle course would take forever and I was also worried that the links to my css and images would not work. The only problem with this approach is that the students cannot be tracked. The students will be tracked if they click on the link to the workshop but moodle can’t track which pages were visited inside the workshop.
Working with HTML & CSS inside of Moodle
In the File Management module, I built the web pages outside of Moodle, zipped them up and uploaded them. I then added each page individually. This means the students will be tracked for each page. So if a student comes to the prof and says “I didn’t get this part”, the prof can go to the reports and see if the student even visited the page on that subject.
Once loaded, I had to make some teaks… I always have to make teaks. I like how moodle lets you edit the file inside of moodle. I know HTML so it wasn’t a big chore for me to change things but I can see that it might be for those who use WYSIWYGs like Dreamweaver. I guess they would be constantly be uploading files everytime a change needs to be made. I designed my html pages so that the design (look and feel) is controlled by the CSS. I only had to change one file to change the design on all the web pages. This came in handy when I noticed that the colours I choose for the pages were wrong. Since I had a hard time figuring out the colours the moodle’s wood theme was using, even after downloading the CSS for the theme, I used a FireFox add-on, Colorzilla, to pick out the colours in the theme. I changed my CSS and bam! The design for all my web pages in the File Management module changed. I love CSS! Like everything else, it takes time to learn but once you got it, it is such a time saver.
Possible Problem
While tweaking the web pages, I constantly had to “Reload the Frame”. This makes me nervous. I have run courses before where what the students see isn’t the last updated version of a html page. It causes a lot of confusion. It is unrealistic to ask the students to reload pages especially if the web page is inside a frame. I guess the course should be totally built and tested before going live, but realistically that does not happen where I work. Online courses are built and tweaked on the fly. So how can we stop the caching of web pages? Internet Explorer is nortourious at caching pages and not letting go. In my web design courses, I always instruct the students to test their web pages in Firefox. Reloading and/or refreshing a page is usually not a problem in FireFox.
One reply on “Addicted to Moodle”
Here’s a tip for you, since you’ve already figured out most of the tricks I use: when you unzip a file in Moodle it automatically creates a folder with the zip file’s name.
So when I build a course site I create one zip file for each topic/week. Then when I unzip each in Moodle, the file folders are already organized! Then I just use the “link to file” function to add each page to the bloc in question.
Vista allows us to “drop” an entire set of html pages into a learning module, and then builds out tables of contents and navigation buttons. So it’s more efficient than Moodle’s one-at-a-time adding of pages. But the result’s the same.
Leveraging web design and then bringing the pages into Moodle is the way to go, eh?