Many settings that are made after the installation process affect the student and teacher experience in Moodle when they use the site. The focus of this chapter is on helping you create the user experience that you want by choosing the right settings. By configuring your site to enhance the user experience, you'll enhance their learning experience as well. In this chapter, you will learn how to configure your Moodle site. Specifically, we will learn how to set permissions, select default options, enable site administration, configure permissions, and enroll students.
Here's a screenshot using the MoodleCloud clean theme showing the front page, with the navigation bar on the left and available courses in the center:
As you prepare to consider your user experience, take a moment to reflect on how the user experience affects the student's ability to learn. You'll want to keep the learning objectives and outcomes first and foremost in the learner's mind. Then, you'll want to ensure that you clearly map the learning objectives to the course content, activities, and assessment. They need to make sense, and your learner should have an idea of how the activity or content will lead to the ability to perform the task and demonstrate skill or mastery.
An easy way to maintain mindfulness of the user experience is to think of the mnemonic CORN:
C Clear: Your outcomes should be clear, as should the process of working through the course. Think of a map and how it guides one to a final destination. A clear map contains just the right amount of information, is not superfluous, and provides help when needed.
O Outcome-focused: Ensure that you're always tied to the learning outcomes, which are clearly stated at the outset. Then, ensure that each unit or module also contains objectives. Also ensure that you organize your course in a way that provides sufficient scaffolding so that the sequence makes sense.
R Relevant: Although it can be interesting to include materials or activities that are not totally related to the course as enrichment, keep in mind that you could confuse or derail the student. The material should tie directly to the learning outcomes and should help students successfully complete the assessments. Likewise, the assessments need to be relevant and meaningful.
N Needs-based: Provide the tools your students need to be able to perform their tasks. Also, ensure that their learning preferences are acknowledged and you're focused on meeting their needs. A prime determinant of user satisfaction is the degree to which the student feels in charge of their own destiny, something that requires one to develop a high degree of self-efficacy and an "I can do it!" attitude. Further, to motivate your students, you'll need to satisfy their needs. They may need a sense of recognition, and so building in rewards and recognition will be part of the way you configure your site.
In this chapter, we're focusing on the settings. Later, we'll go into more depth about how to design and arrange the content, activities, and assessments.
In all of these, you have choices.
Many of the choices in settings that you make will be easy to decide. For example, will you allow your users to select their own time zone? Other choices are not so obvious. You can spend a lot of time trying different settings to see how they affect the user experience. These are the settings that we will focus on in this chapter. The goal is to save you time by showing you the effects that key settings will have on your site.
If your system administrator or webmaster has installed Moodle for you, you may be tempted to just accept the default configuration and skip this chapter. Don't do that!
Even if you did not install Moodle or are using MoodleCloud instead of Moodle on-premise, we encourage you to read the configuration sections in this chapter. If you want, work with your system administrator to select the settings that you want. Your administrator can create a site administrator account that you can use for configuring Moodle, or they can make these configuration settings for you.
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This chapter primarily focuses on an on-premise installation that is fully customizable. However, what if you're using MoodleCloud, Moodle's cloud-based solution? The good news is that MoodleCloud is extremely customizable, and you will have a great deal of flexibility in the site administration area of the course.
MoodleCloud (http://www.moodlecloud.com) is very economical and is a perfect site for teachers, instructional designers, and instructional technologists to develop templates, try out new designs, and pilot an entirely new curriculum or approach. In MoodleCloud, there is no limit to the number of courses you can set up. Your only limitation is the number of active users. Moodle is free for up to 50 users. After that, the pricing increases based on the number of users. For the free version, you will need to allow ads to appear.
MoodleCloud is cloud-based, as the name indicates, and so you do not have to install anything on your computer or on a server. You will need the latest versions of your browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari). Ensure that cookies are enabled for your site. MoodleCloud has been designed to be very efficient, and it is also responsive.
One advantage of MoodleCloud is that you always have the latest version of Moodle, and when new capabilities emerge, you will be able to use them. For example, you are now able to configure your courses to be compatible with smartphones as well as with tablets, laptops, and computers, for a truly mobile solution.
A potential disadvantage of MoodleCloud is that you do not have the same number of design options because there is a limited number of built-in themes, as opposed to an on-premise solution.
Even though there are a few limitations, MoodleCloud includes features that are valuable to all designers, and you can add a wide array of multimedia resources and activities that include assessment and automatic badge and certificate generation.
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While this chapter describes the effects of different configuration choices, there is no substitute for experiencing them yourself. Don't be afraid to experiment with different settings.
You can try the following method:
- While installing Moodle, you created an account for the site administrator. Now, create test accounts for at least one teacher and three students.
- Install three different browsers in your computer; for example, Fire...
