1. Teaching an Online Course
through Moodle

2. General procedure for Online
Teaching
1. Create and organize an online course
2. Post course syllabus & schedule, and send out
communication
3. Students enroll into the course
4. Communication between Student – Instructor
5. Tracking the progress of students
6. Giving Assignments
7. Assignment submission by students
8. Conducting Exams
9. Grading student's work
10.Receiving feedback about the course

3. 1. Creating an online course
● An instructor usually considers these factors
while building a course online
– What course material is needed
– In how many different ways we can present our
course material
– How the course can be organized
● Because all students have different learning
styles and respond differently to various
learning activities, it is important to offer them
instructional materials in a variety of formats.

4. Course material
● Moodle supports a range of formats of content
which teachers can add to their courses :-
● Book - Multi-page resources with a book-like format
● File - A picture, a pdf document, a spreadsheet, a sound
file, a video file, a powerpoint presentation
● Folder - For helping organize files and one folder may
contain other folders
● Label - Can be a few displayed words or an image used
to separate resources and activities in a topic section, or
can be a lengthy description or instructions
● Page - The student sees a single, scrollable screen that a
teacher creates with the robust HTML editor
● URL - You can send the student to any place they can
reach on their web browser, for example Wikipedia

5. Course material
● Many websites provide materials and interactive
learning exercises different from and complementary
to Moodle's own resources and activities.
● The External tool module offers a way for teachers to
link to these activities from within their Moodle course
page and where available to have grades sent back
into Moodle.
● Students only need to log in to Moodle; they do not
have to log in a second time to the connecting site.
● Sites which allow connection to Moodle in this way are
known as LTI compliant and are called Tool providers.
● Here is a list of LTI certified tools

6. Course presentation
● The two layouts which are used more
frequently in Moodle to divide the course
syllabus are Topics format and Weekly format.
● The Topics format takes the center section of
your course and breaks it down as a series of
topics that you will be covering, or units that
you are going to be covering, throughout your
course.
● Weekly format breaks down the course and
distributes the topics equally across the time
period set for the course.

7. Course presentation
● Two settings in Moodle allow instructor to
confine the presentation of some course
material
– Conditional activities enable teachers to restrict the
availability of any activity or even a course section
(in Moodle 2.3 onwards) according to certain
conditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activity
completion.
– Hidden sections option allows you to hide some
sections of the course from students.

8. Course presentation
● The content can be delivered in a flexible and
interactive way using the 'Lesson' module.
● The lesson module presents a series of HTML
pages to the student who is usually asked to
make some sort of choice underneath the
content area. The choice will send them to a
specific page in the Lesson.
● 'Lesson' module can be used eg: to introduce a
new topic, interactive fiction, decision-making
exercises .etc.

9. Organization of the course
● Moodle allows the
courses to be grouped
into 'Categories'
● By organizing the
courses into 'Categories',
moodle makes the
courses to be sequenced
and structured in a
manner that enables
learners to achieve the
stated goals.

10. 2. Post course syllabus and
schedule
● Post the course syllabus
and course schedule
along with course
description as
announcement in the
news forum.
● Once posted in news
forum, an email is
automatically sent to the
registered users.
● Or we can manually
send notification to all
registered users using
People block.

11. 3. Enrollment into a course
● Upon receiving news about
the course, students go
and take a look at the
course description and
enroll into the course or
request for enrollment.
● Once a student enrolls, he
becomes a true participant
of the course where he can
access all the contents of
the course.
● There are various ways an
enrollment into a course
can happen.

12. Enrollment methods
● Manual Enrollment
● Self Enrollment → allows
users to enroll themselves
into a course, either
directly or via an
enrollment key.
● The enrollment key is
supplied once payment is
made through phone or
email.
● Guest access

13. Enrollment methods
● Cohort Sync → A cohort is
a set of users which has
been added either to the
site as a whole or to a
particular category and
then made available to a
course.
● Course metalink → This
allows users who are in
another course to be
automatically enrolled into
your course as well.
● Paypal → This allows
users to pay for a course.

14. 4. Student-Instructor
Communication
● Once enrolled, students should be able to
communicate with the instructor so they can
receive prompt assistance when they encounter
problems or have questions.
● Moodle has many ways of keeping the
communication alive between students and
instructor and among students in the course :-
● News forum
● Email
● Discussion Forums
● Real-time chat

15. Email communication
● The Quickmail block, or the Participants list.
can be used to send email to individual course
members or all participants in the course.
● Through automated email notification system -
students can receive an email when a quiz is
graded, instructors can choose to receive
emails when students submit assignments, or
instructors can email students when an
assignment is graded.

16. News forum
● The News Forum a unique forum, automatically
created with the course for instructors to post
announcements.
● Only instructors and TAs can post to the News
Forum.
● By default, posts made to the News Forum are
emailed to class members.
● Moodle gives you half an hour to edit a new
post before it is sent out as email.

17. Live Chat
● The Chat activity allows course members to
hold real-time, text-based conversations with
other course members. Different chat rooms
can be set up for the same course.
● Teachers can also access past chat sessions.
● It can be used to:
● A student temporarily unable to attend in person chatting
with their tutor to catch up with work.
● Students out on work experience getting together to
discuss their experiences with each other and their tutor
● Regular meetings of staff on large or split campuses to
discuss student or curriculum issues;

18. Discussion Forums
● Instructors and students can communicate and
collaborate using Forums, sometimes called
"discussions."
● Instructors can create topics or, depending on
the Forum type, allow students to originate
topics, to which course members can "post" a
reply, or "message."
● By default, course members can subscribe to
receive emails containing content posted to the
Forums of their Moodle courses.

19. Discussion Forums
● There are five built-in forum types, however some are
more suited for content sharing and assessment while
others work better for collaboration.
● Forums for Content Sharing and Assessment
● A single simple discussion - allows for only one topic
started by the instructor. This is best suited for short-
term, focused conversations.
● Each person posts one discussion - allows each student
to only start one new topic or conversation within the
forum.
● Q and A forum - allows an instructor to pose a question to
students. Students must post their response or answer
before they can view other students’ responses.

20. Discussion Forums
● Forums for Student Interaction and
Collaboration
● Standard forum for general use - allows for the
“standard” usage of a discussion forum with multiple
topics arranged in a threaded conversation. Students
may start new topics in this format.
● Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format -
allows for the “standard” usage of a discussion forum
with multiple topics arranged in a “blog' style format
with the first post prominent and comments behind a
link. Students may start new topics in this format.

21. 5. Tracking progress of students
● The progress of students through out the course can
be tracked using these 3 settings:
● Course completion
● Activity completion
● Course reports
● Course completion shows the progress a student is
making towards finishing the course according to
specific criteria like meeting a grade level or a manual
checking "complete" by either the student and/or
teacher.
● Course completion can be used to check if a student
has completed the recommended prerequisite
courses.

22. 5. Tracking progress of students
● Activity completion Report is a helpful way for students
to be able to track their progress in a course. The
student has an easy to see checklist of what they have
done so far.
● It can also be linked to Course completion in order to
allow both students and teachers to watch progress
through a course. As each activity is checked off as
"complete", the student moves further towards final
completion of the course.
● It can also be linked to Conditional activities in order to
allow the teacher to set criteria upon which a student
is allowed to progress through a course and access
materials.

23. Course reports
● Moodle allows instructors to request reports
telling which course material have been
accessed, when, and by whom.
● Moodle produces 4 kinds of reports :-
● Logs show student activity in a specific period of time.
● Activity Reports show number of views for each
lesson/course material
● Participation reports show general participation in the
course by whole class or individual student.
● Statistics show how many hits there have been on
various parts of your site during various time frames.

24. 6. Giving Assignments
● To evaluate student understanding of the
material, instructor can give an assignment
– to type shorter or longer responses directly online
– to submit files at different times for a project
– to write a response to a video/sound file/image
– to answer a series of questions on a video/sound
file/image
– to keep an ongoing journal or do an iterative
assignment
– Offline assignment or 'Real world assignment'

25. 7. Assignment submission
● Students can submit an assignment in 2
different ways :-
– File submission → allows students to submit/upload
file(s) to be assessed. It collates students' work into
one space.
– Online text submission → allows students to type or
copy-paste text into a window in Moodle for
instructor review and assessment.
● Students can also post comments on their
submission and receive reply from teachers.

26. 8. Conducting exams
● Along with assignments, an instructor can also
conduct exams using the 'Quiz' module in
Moodle.
● Quiz module allows the teacher to design and
build quizzes consisting of a large variety of
Question types.
● The standard question types available in
Moodle are Calculated, Description, Essay,
Matching, Multiple choice, Short Answer,
True/False, Numerical, Embedded Answers.

27. 8. Conducting exams
● Quiz module can be used to create quizzes :
● as unit or course exams
● as mini-tests for reading assignments or at the end of a
topic
● As practice exam using questions from previous years'
exams
● to provide feedback about performance
● for self assessment
● (with the use of the Quiz creator role) to allow students to
generate their own quiz questions for a practice question
bank.

28. Some nice features of Moodle Quiz
● Quizzes can be configured to allow multiple attempts.
Each attempt at a question is automatically marked,
and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback
and/or show the correct answers.
● Teacher can set time limit to an exam.
● The order of questions in the quiz can be randomly
shuffled each time a student starts a new attempt at
the quiz.
● A single quiz can automatically select random and/or
specific questions from different
categories of questions from question bank.
● Questions can be imported and exported.

29. 9. Grading students work
● All the grades for each student in a course can be
found in the gradebook, or 'Grader report'.
● When an activity in a course is assigned a grade, it
is automatically added to the 'gradebook'.
● Scores will be automatically populated for graded
activities into the Grade book.
● The Grade book can aggregate a final score for the
class and convert it to a letter grade.
● Students can view their grades in individualized
reports that protect their privacy. You control what
grades are visible and when.

30. 10. Request feedback for the course
● Course evaluations at the end of the course,
help determine the effectiveness of the various
components of the course and address areas
that may need revision. They also communicate
to students that their input is valuable.
● In Moodle, Feedback and Survey modules
allow instructors to create and conduct surveys
to collect feedback.
● Survey module has a pre-defined set of
questions while Feedback module allows to
write your own questions.