How to start work with Moodle

This is a tutorial which is a primitive as can be. It prides itself not on what it coves but on what it omits. Not on its depth, but on its superficiality. It is trying to reduce the agony that many teachers suffer when they first are confronted with an empty Moodle shell.

We want to get as quickly as possible from an empty Moodle installation, with a bewildering array of options to just one practical application that can be used in practice.

Most Moodle installations at present are used by Secondary Schools, Colleges and Universities. When writing these instructions, I had a small Primary School in mind.

What follows is far from perfect. But it leads, I hope, without too many by-ways to one practical application, the forum. Once a teacher has that up and running, she can easily create more Forums, and she will have a better feel for the workings of Moodle to learn about different Moodle techniques.

If God give me time, I may produce similar tutorials each similarly focussed on just one Moodle technique.

Contents

What is Moodle? 2
Getting started with Moodle 2
Moodle is like unto a new car 2
Moodle is like unto an unfurnished flat 3
What you will learn in this tutorial 3
How to go to Moodle front page 4
How to log in 4
How to change administrator's username and password 5
Roles and permissions 5
Dummy users and passwords: General principles 6
The user list 6
Username, password and e-mail conventions 7
How to create many user accounts 7
Text for profile 8
How to assign roles (permissions) to users 9
Course organisation 11
How to Create a Course Category 11
Create course descriptions 12
&&& insert text here (must be done in html) 13
The Tudors: short course "summary" (Course settings) 13
The Tudors: extended blurb 13
The Tudors: Forum introduction 14
Landscapes in Art: short "Course summary" (Course settings) 16
Landscapes in Art: extended blurb 16
Landscapes in Art: Forum introduction 18
&&&end of html file 18
How to create courses 18
How to create a resource within a course 19
How to link the blurb to the course summary 20
How to find the course "settings" 21
Do the same for topic "Landscapes in Art" 21
The course "Landscapes in Art" is now set up. 21
How to create a standard forum 21


What is Moodle?

Moodle is a piece of software (a program), like Microsoft Word.

MS Word enables people to type letters and documents. Moodle helps teachers to teach, and students to learn.

MS Word is a program which resides on your hard drive (your computer). Moodle is a program which resides on a server.

A server is a computer which many people can access from their computers at the same time. The public computers holding information on the Internet are servers.

Since Moodle sits on a server, you do not have to download it to your computer. You have to be connected to the Internet when you use Moodle.

Everything you do is stored on the server. Your students can access it, all at the same time, from the school computers, from their computers at home, or from anywhere in the world.

Getting started with Moodle

Moodle comes as an empty shell. To get something out of it, you have to put something into it. To do that, you have to learn how to use it.

Moodle is like unto a new car

Getting a Moodle installation is like getting a new car. The car can take you absolutely anywhere in the world. It can drive forward, backward, left and right. (It can even drive you potty.) But first you have to learn to drive it. That can be difficult and frustrating at the beginning.

It is easier learning to drive a tram. All you have to do is how to start it and how to stop it. But it is not as flexible as a car.

The effort you have to make learning to understand and to use Moodle is the price you have to pay for having a teaching tool which is so incredibly versatile and which in future can be made to do almost anything *** you *** want.

With Moodle you can create many different activities, for example: a forum, a chat room, quizzes and tests, multiple choice questions, assignments, lecture notes, etc and endlessly etc.

In this tutorial we have only one simple objective, how to create a forum. As a starting activity in Moodle the forum has the following advantages:

· You have to provide comparatively little information. (Complete lecture notes are more difficult to prepare than the starting text for forum.)
· Your students do most of the work
· You encourage them in argument and independent learning

Once you have the forum up and running you can consider what other activities you may wish to set up to help in the teaching of the same topic.

Once you have one topic up and running, with various activities, you can try another topic with similar activities.

It will get easier and easier as you go along.

Moodle is like unto an unfurnished flat

A fresh Moodle installation is also like unto an unfurnished flat when you go to inspect it on a grey winter's day: cold, characterless, uninviting, uncomfortable, smelly, damp. Once you have redecorated it, brought in your own furniture and smells, you will feel safe and at home in it.

What you will learn in this tutorial

Given an empty installation of Moodle:

  1. Go into Moodle as an administrator
  2. Change your username and password
  3. Set up a dummy accounts for a variety of users
  4. Assign roles to users
  5. Create a course category
  6. Create a course
  7. Create a brief course description
  8. Create a standard forum
  9. Enrol students in that forum
  10. Start them arguing and argue with them

I am now going to do this for a dummy school called Holland Moodle.

How to go to Moodle front page

Start your browser (Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey, Internet Explorer etc)

  • Enter the address of your Moodle installation, e.g.
    http://moodle.amsterdam.lancs.sch.uk/
  • Hit Enter
  • Front page appears (Screen 01)
  • Top right: Log in using username and password as supplied by hosting company
  • Example:
    username: adrian
    password: xxxx

Probably you will want to change these later. If so, write down new username and password before making the change and keep them in a place where you can find them again.

How to log in

How to change
administrator's username and password

  1. Top left: Site Administration
  2. Click Users | Accounts | Browse list of users
  3. List of users appears (screen 04)
  4. Only one user is listed so far, you, the administrator.
  5. Click on name of administrator.
  6. Your profile comes up (screen 05)
  7. Click "Change password".
  8. "Change password" screen comes up (screen 06)
  9. Type new password, repeat new password, click "Save changes"

    Note: If you want to change your username, set up a new account with your new username and password. *** Then *** delete your old account. See below how all this is done.
  10. The "Password has been changed" screen comes up. (Screen 07)
  11. On top of the screen you see the 'breadcrumb trail' which shows you (like Hansel and Gretel) which pages you have visited.
  12. Click on the first breadcrumb (lift-most), the name of the school, in our case 'Holland Moodle'.
  13. That is (more or less) the front page. (screen 08)

Roles and permissions

Moodle users have different "roles". Depending on their roles they have different powers (permissions) to do things in Moodle.

The standard roles, starting with the most powerful, are as follows:

  1. Administrator: can do anything she likes
  2. Course Creator: can create courses and teach in them
  3. Teacher: can do anything inside her course, e.g. make changes and teach
  4. Non-editing teacher: can teach and grade students inside her course but can not make changes
  5. Student: can learn inside a course and participate in activities
  6. Guest: can look and read but not type anything

Dummy users and passwords:
General principles

I have a typed list of users from the school. For each user I have written down the role of that user.

In addition I create one dummy user for each role so that I can enter Moodle under these names to test what happens, what such a user would see and what such a user would be permitted to do.

I use a dead easy method of password creation, to make sure that I can easily remember them and enter in the name of these users while we are still testing the installation.

Once the system is running in earnest, I give myself an extremely difficult password (to protect the installation from damage), and I tell the other users to change their passwords as they see fit.

The user list

This is my user list for Holland Moodle:

Teacher: Mrs Nicola Grand (Class 4G)
Pupils: Tom Rankin, Lian Cahill, Lauren Wright.

Course: "Class 4G"

Miss Carrie Phillips (Class 5P)
Pupils: Belinda Armstrong, Tom Anderson, Ellen Smith.
Course: "Class 5P"

Mrs Kim MacDonald (Class 5/6M)
Pupils: Alison Johnson, Matthew Robinson, Daniel Cahill.
Course: "Class 5/6M"

Miss Rebecca Monaghan (Class 6M)
Pupils: Jessica Tynan, Liam Holden, Matthew Feeney.
Course: "Class 6M"

 

Username, password and e-mail conventions

Username: n.grand (initial dot surname; lowercase only)

Password = surname

email: silly@silly123.co.uk
(The digits have to be changed each time, since Moodle wants every user to have a different email address.)

These are the conventions I follow when setting up accounts so that I do not have to agonise over particulars These users can then change their details as they see fit.

How to create many user accounts

  1. You are on the "Site Administration" front page (screen 08)
  2. Top left block: "Site administration"
  3. Click 'Users' | Accounts | Add a new user |
  4. The "Add a New User" form (user profile form) appears. (screen 09)
  5. I enter a username and password for first user (following the conventions given above); then first name and surname.
  6. Then comes the field demanding an e-mail address. Moodle insists on that.

    In the sample school most of the users do not have e-mail. I therefore give a non-existent e-mail address, e.g. silly148@silly.co.uk

    Moodle does not accept the same e-mail address for more than one user. I therefore vary the digits after "silly" by picking random numbers off my digital clock.
  7. E-mail display: I hide the e-mail address from everyone. The user concerned can change this later if she wishes.
  8. E-mail activated: I disable it.
  9. I enter city and country as required.
  10. Text for profile

    As I scroll down this page, the HTML editor comes up. (Screen 10).
  11. I can type some text into this window which will later appear in the user's profile.

    I have two dummy texts, always the same for girls, always the same for boys. For teachers I simply write: "I am a teacher...". Every user is thus encouraged to get rid of the dummy profile and enter a more appropriate one.

    The dummy profile for girls is:
    "I am Mary Muddle. I am eight years old. I am in Class 4. I have two younger brothers, and they are a handful. I live in Liverpool. My best friend is Betany Bigmouth. My hobbies are stamp collecting and driving my mother up the wall. I love science classes at school. When I am big I will be an engineer or an airline pilot, or a pop star. Or perhaps I'll become Pope or Prime Minister."

    The dummy profile for boys is:
    "I am Terry the Terrible. I am eight years old. I am in Class 4. I have two younger brothers, and they are a handful. I live in Liverpool. My best friend is Mike Mastermind. My hobbies are music and driving my mother up the wall. I love maths classes at school. When I am big I will be an engineer or an airline pilot, or a pop star. Or perhaps I'll become Pope or Prime Minister. My little brother wants to become God. But I don't think he'll make it - not quite."

    I copy and paste this into the profile for every student, to give them an example and an incentive to replace this text by something that is true of them.

    or teachers I put the following text into the dummy profile:
    I am a teacher, etc etc.
  12. I ignore the remaining fields and buttons and scroll to the bottom of the page. (Screen 11)
  13. Click "Update profile"
  14. The list of all users comes up, and I can see that the most recently added user is there. (screen 12)
  15. Click "Add a new user"
  16. The "add new user profile" form (screen 09) comes up, as before. I now create one account after another, until my typed list is finished.

User names for dummy users

Here are the 'usernames' of the dummy users, which must not be forgotten. The password for all dummies is 'dummy'. I did NOT create a dummy administrator (with an easy password), for security reasons. The administrator must always have a password which is extremely difficult to crack, because too much damage can be done by any intruder having administrator powers.

  • dummy.coursecreator
  • dummy.noneditingteacher
  • dummy.teacher
  • dummy.student
  • dummy.guest

How to assign roles (permissions) to users

Warning: This is how I did it first time round, but presumably in future I will assign roles only after courses etc have been created, so that I can limit permisssions to these courses and contexts.

  1. Go to the top of your current page, which is probably the page entitled "Browse list of users", with a prominent link entitled "Add a new user".
  2. Look at the breadcrumb trail.
  3. Click at the first of the breadcrumbs, the root of the trail, which is probably the name of your school. This should take you to the "Administration Front Page". (screen 03)
  4. Click Users | Permissions | Assign system roles |
  5. The "Assign Roles" page comes up.

Warning: I have chosen this route in order to keep things simple at this stage. However, we are giving some users more powers than they should have in the long run. Any permissions we assign to them now will enable them to do *** anywhere on the site *** whatever they are entitled to do. Students, for example, will be able to wander into *** any *** course on the site, not only into the courses intended for them. Similarly a teacher will be able to make changes in a course created by another teacher and not only in her own courses.

Therefore, once courses have been set up and your Moodle installation has become richer and more functional, you will have to cancel all these permissions and create new permissions which are valid only in carefully considered areas of the site.

We will now go through the roles on this page one by one and assign to each user the role appropriate for her.

  1. Click on Administrator.
  2. Another Assign Roles page appears. (Screen 14) This is where the mappings carried out.
  3. There is a two-column table. Above the table, you can see the name of the role to be assigned to one or several of the users listed in column 2.
  4. Column 1 lists the users who at present have that role. One person already has that role. We want to make D.Highton administrator as well.
  5. Select D.Highton in column 2.
  6. Click on the arrow pointing left. This will shift her name from column 2 in two column 1.
  7. If you want to take away a role from a person, i.e. shift that person's name from column 1 back to column 2, select the name of that person, and then click the arrow pointing from column 1 to column 2.
  8. Now we want to assign the role of Course Creator.
  9. In the drop-down menu above the table (at present showing "Administrator"), select "Course Creator".
  10. Column 1 is now empty and therefore only a few millimetres wide. (Screen 15)
  11. We have two users who will be course creators. Select both names (ctrl-click), click on top arrow, and their names will move from column 2 into column 1.
  12. Similarly assign the role of Teacher (= editing teacher). To start with give this role only to one teacher, and give all other teachers the less powerful role of non-editing teacher, until you have a better feel for how many powers each teacher needs and merits. It is easy enough to upgrade powers at a later date, but it can be very difficult and embarrassing to remove them.
  13. Therefore, in our example, we give Teacher powers only to one real teacher and to one dummy teacher.
  14. We now assign the role of "Teacher" (= Non-Editing Teacher) to all the remaining teachers and one dummy teacher.
  15. Similarly we assign the role of Student to all real students, including one dummy student.

Course organisation

When there are many students, teachers and courses in an organisation, it can be useful to bundle them together in some hierarchy, similar to drives, folders and subfolders on a computer, or Dewey's decimal classification system, etc.

Moodle provides for the following hierarchy of teaching materials:

  • Course Category
  • Course
  • Topic
  • Activities and resources
  • and presumably more.

Course categories may, but need not, be based on the subject matter, as in the ancient universities which had four course categories (faculties): Theology, Law, Medicine, Arts.

In our sample school (a primary school) I thought the simplest approach would be to have one course category per year:

  • Year 1
  • Year 2
  • Year 3
  • Year 4
  • Year 5
  • Year 6

In each year there would be several courses, named after topics, such as "The Tudors", "Landscapes in Art", "A Village in Uganda", etc.

How to Create a Course Category

  1. Go to the top of the current page, look at the breadcrumbs, go to the root (Administration Front Page). (Screen 03)
  2. Click Courses | Add/edit courses
  3. The "Course Categories" page comes up. (Screen 16)
  4. To simplify things, I will create only one category, Class 4G.
  5. Type "Class 4G" into the field on the left of the "Add new category" button.
  6. Click "Add new category".
  7. After a few seconds the newly created category shows in the list of existing categories. (Screen 17)

Create course descriptions

Two descriptions are needed,

  • a brief one which the student sees at first glance (to tell him approximately what the course is about
  • and a longer one (blurb) designed to whet his appetite.

Even though the primary school teacher has a captive audience (compulsory education), it is better for all concerned if she behaved as if she were in charge of a theatre, which has to make money, and where her job is to get "bums on seats".

She may not have the inclination, imagination and energy to do this each time she stands in front of the class. However, when preparing texts for Moodle, she has time to think up ideas, test them, run them past colleagues, improve them, etc. Once they have been written down and incorporated into Moodle they can work their magic on all students, even if the teacher is tired. They can be used again in subsequent years. The effort is not wasted. This is one of the advantages of having Moodle as part of the teacher's armoury.

The teacher can type these texts directly into Moodle when prompted to do so.

However, I would not recommend this. Things go wrong when least expected, the teacher loses her page without knowing why, the administrator accidentally deletes some valuable text, etc.

I would draft and develop all these texts in a word processor with which I am familiar, save them in a location I trust and where I can easily find them again in future years, and take all the usual precautions against bugs, viruses and crashes.

Here is an example of the course descriptions (short and long) I have created for the topic: "The Tudors". If you don't like it, write a better one. This is just an example knocked together in a hurry.

The Tudors: short "Course Summary" (in Course settings)

The Tudors

Do you want to learn about a King who had six wives, and about a Queen who did not have even a single husband (poor sod!), and about the most famous English writer who ever lived, and in whose plays 132 and a half people were killed and 356 litres of blood were shed? Then this course is a must for you. Read more about it by clicking in the Topic Outline "The Tudors".

The Tudors: extended blurb

The Tudors - blurb

In this course you will learn about the Tudors, a royal family that ruled England several hundred years ago.

The most famous Tudor King was Henry VIII (Henry the Eighth), or was he? Why did he write his name "Henry VIII" and not "Henry 8" as any sensible person would do? Didn't he have maths lessons when he went to school in Skelmersdale, or Ormskirk?

He had six wives. Why didn't he have eight wives? Couldn't he afford that many? Or were they too much trouble and strife?

If Henry the Eighth had six wives, how many wives had Henry the Fourth? If you don't know, ask your Maths teacher. She ought to know.

Who was the most famous English poet and playwright - ever ever ever? He lived in Tudor times? His name was William S___________ . Can you guess?

Have you ever read any of his stories? Check in the library if there are any Hamlet comics.

How many people got killed in his plays - altogether?

Were his villains worse than those dodgy characters in Eastenders? Read and find out.

What was it like to be locked up in the dungeons of the Tower of London?

Have you ever heard Tudor music? Even Henry VIII composed a piece or two. And it wasn't as bad for your eardrums as some dance music of today can be. Henry VIII had too much sense for that.

If you want to find out, join Miss Grand's course, the best in Skelmersdale.

And if you work terribly hard and get good grades, you won't even have to pay. Lucky you!

But if you are a lazy lay-about or cause trouble, you will be locked up in the Tower of London, where it is damp, your only food (if any) will be water and dry bread, and the rats will keep you company during the night, and no electric light and no television and and no computer games and no nothing. It's worse than hell. So are you going to be good - with a nice teacher like that?!

(Written by Miss N Grand's public relations agent. She ain't responsible for any of this nonsense. Or could it be true?)

The Tudors: Forum introduction

The Tudors - Forum Introduction

There is a lot of information about the Tudors on the Internet. Now here is your challenge. Show your teachers what you can do without them.


Links

Here are some links:

http://www.brims.co.uk/tudors/
a site for children with a quiz

http://tudors.crispen.org/

http://tudorhistory.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_dynasty

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/


Explore these links on your own. Take some notes on anything that catches your fancy. Try to understand. Try to remember as much as you can.


Books

Get some books on the Tudors from the library, read them, and take notes.

Then return to this Forum and answer as many questions as you can.


Discussion, mates' mistakes, opinions

If you spot a mistake by one of your class mates, post a reply and put him / her right. If you are wrong, others will put you right. If you can't agree, look for the answers on the internet. Then return to your Forum.

If your mates express an opinion and you do not agree, say so. Let them argue back. Give your reasons. Let them give their reasons. Discussing things is a good way to learn and to remember. The more you discuss, the more you learn, and the better you get at arguing


Return to Internet and books

Continue doing this (studying on the internet, then arguing on the Forum) until you know your Tudor History inside out.


Find discrepancies on the Internet

If you want to be really smart, try to find mistakes (or discrepancies) on the Internet. Look what each of the sites says about some aspect of the Tudors.

For example (but I am making this one up, just to show you):

- One site says: Henry VIII has six wives.
- The other site says: Henry VIII five wives.

or

- One site says: Henry's favourite food was fish and chips.
- Another site says: Henry's favourite food was Yorkshire Pudding.

If two sites say something different about the same thing, that is called 'a discrepancy'.

So try to find discrepancies. If you find a discrepancy, tell your mates and your teacher by posting it on the Forum.


Quote your sources

Always quote exactly (copy and paste) what you have found and then give the source, namely the address of the site where you found it, so that everyone else can go there and look and see whether what you have said is true.

Your teacher will show you how to copy and paste a quote and an URL (the site address).

Have fun!

Your Forum Teacher, Miss N Grand

 

Landscapes in Art: short "Course Summary"
(in Course settings)

Landscapes in Art

In this course you can look at, and dream about, beautiful landscapes from England and all over the world. It could make you really happy. You'd better enrol for this course, or you'll miss something very nice. Read more about it in the full blurb.

Landscapes in Art: extended blurb

Landscapes in Art

What is the furthest you have ever travelled? Have you ever been on the continent? In Spain? In France?

Have you ever been in London?

Most of you will have been in Liverpool.

Some of you come from foreign countries.

One way to see different landscapes without having to spend money on travel is the television. Sometimes you see beautiful landscapes in car advertisements. But they come and go so quickly that you never have a chance to imagine what it would be like to live there.

Imagining that can feel very strange and be a lot of fun.

Looking at landscapes painted by famous painters is one way to experience landscapes at leisure, see as many of them as you want, and look at them, dream in them, as long as you want.

In this course, I will show you how to do that.

Look at the following website:

Museum Network UK

Which of these paintings would you like to talk about in class. Tell us in the Forum and say Why.

We will have a forum in which you can say what you see in each picture and what you think about it. You can ask questions and discuss them with your class mates.

As the course progresses I will put links to more large pictures on the Forum.

Names of many landscape painters

Camille Pissarro (French painter)

Brueghel, winter landscape

Albrecht Dürer: Fisherman's House

Dinosaur landscape

Alpine landscape

Edward Theodore Compton (1849-1921)

American desert landscape

Japanese: Fuji Yama

Landscapes in Art: Forum introduction

??? Yet to be written.

How to create courses

  1. Go to the "Site Administration Front Page".
  2. Click Courses | Add/edit courses
  3. You want to add courses to category "Class 4G". Therefore click on "Class 4G".
  4. A page with the prominent line "No courses in this category" comes up. (Screen 18)
  5. Click on the button "Add a new course".
  6. The "Edit Course Settings" page comes up. (Screen 19)

    Into the fields provided type:
  7. Full name: The Tudors
  8. Short name: Tudors
  9. Delete the instruction in the text editor ("Write a concise and interesting paragraph here that explains what this course is about").
  10. Copy and paste the short course "Summary" from your word processor into the text editor.

Do you want to learn about a King who had six wives, and about a Queen who did not have even a single husband (poor sod!), and about the most famous English writer who ever lived, and in whose plays 132 and a half people were killed and 356 litres of blood were shed? Then this course is a must for you. Read more about it by clicking in the Topic Outline "The Tudors".

Leave all the other settings in this form unchanged.

Note: If you want to change this text at a later time, you can get at it by clicking on "Settings" on the course administration page. (This instruction must be spelt out in more detail at the end of this tutorial.)

Go to bottom of this page. Click "Save changes".

The "Assign Roles" page comes up. (Screen 20)

On this page you can assign roles which are limited to the context of this course (as opposed to the "system roles" you have assigned above).

We now assign several teachers, including a dummy teacher, and all students to this course.

We start by clicking on the role of "Course Creator".

The "Assign Roles" (mappings) page comes up. (Screen 15)

For this course (The Tudors) we now have a short Course Summary, but we still need a blurb (longer) to pull the students in. We deposit the text for the blurb in a "Resource".

How to create a resource within a course

Go to top of page, look at breadcrumbs, click on "Tudors", ie go back to "Main page"(root) of this course. (Screen 21)

Note that you are inside the Tudors course, and therefore the resources you add, or whatever else you do, will be within the confines of that course.

Top right: Click on "Turn editing on"

Several "Add a resource" boxes appear. (Screen 22)

Go to the first of these, click on "Add a resource". In the drop-down menu click on "Compose a webpage". (Screen 23)

The HTML editor appears. (Screen 24)

Type into the "Name" field: The Tudors - blurb

On this page, there are *** two *** copies of the HTML editor. The first one is for a summary of the blurb. Since we already have a summary of the course, we leave this copy of the HTML editor empty.

We scroll down to the second copy of the HTML editor, which is headed "Full text".

Copy and paste the blurb text into that HTML editor.

Click on "Display".

The blurb text appears covering the whole screen.

Go to breadcrumbs trail, and click on first breadcrumb, which takes you back to the front page.

How to link the blurb to the course summary

Note: There may be a simpler way but the following is the only one I have been able to find so far. The method is as follows, in general terms. First we have to find and copy the link location of the blurb (the HTML resource). Then we have to find the "course summary" on the "Course Settings" page. Then we have to create the link.

The procedure, starting at the site administration main page, is as follows:

  1. Click on "Available Courses": The Tudors
  2. The Tudors "Weekly outline" page appears. (screen 25)
  3. In column 2, top box, is the link to "The Tudors - blurb"
  4. Right-click on that link.
  5. Left-click on "Copy link location".
    (You now have that link in the buffer.)
  6. Left column, bottom: Administration block: click Settings.
  7. The "Edit Course Settings" page appears. It includes the html editor containing the Course Outline of The Tudors.
  8. Expand the html editor by clicking on the "Expand editor" icon on its very right.
  9. Select the bit of text to which you want to link the blurb.
  10. Click on the chain-link icon of the editor (it is on the right of the anchor, and almost underneath the B=bold).
  11. A small window opens.
  12. Clear the field called URL.
  13. Copy the link into that field.
  14. Click OK.
  15. Minimise the html editor by clicking on the minimise item on its very right.

How to find the course "settings"

Go to "Add a new course"
Click through to weekly outline,
then in left block: "Settings", then "Course Settings" page appears.

Do the same for topic "Landscapes in Art"
Start again with the section called "How to create courses"

The course "Landscapes in Art" is now set up.

How to create a standard forum

A forum is one of the many activities which can take place inside a course. Therefore, before creating the forum, we enter the course.

First we create a forum for The Tudors course.

  1. Start in the Site Administration Main Page.
  2. In column 2, Available Courses, click on "Landscapes in Art".
  3. The Topic Outline page comes up.
  4. Top left, Activities: Click on "Forums". (This is in Moodle book, p 70 ff.)
  • Top right button: Turn editing on.
  • Click on "Landscapes in Art", i.e. the title of the course to which you want to add a Forum.
  • A page entitled: " Landscapes in Art: Topic Outline" opens. (screen 000???)

In the central column, top field click on: "Add an activity"

Select Forum

The "Add a New Forum" page appears.

Enter Forum name: The "Landscapes in Art" Forum

Forum type: select "Standard Forum for General Use"

Enter the Forum introduction into the HTML editor.

Click "Save and return to course".

How a teacher can delete
inappropriate msgs in a Forum

Re: Technicalities of managing a Forum by Mike Churchward - Monday, 21 April 2008, 08:34 PM
Generally speaking, Moodle forums are setup by default to not require (or allow, for that matter), and kind of moderation. There have been long, philosophical discussion on that topic.

But, if you are using Moodle 1.8 or higher, you can grant the ability to delete and edit existing posts to whatever 'role' of user you wish. You do this by editing the forum settings in question. On this screen, there will be an "Override Permissions" tab. Using this tab, you can grant and deny capabilities specific to forums to specific roles.

The ones you want to look for are " Delete any posts (anytime) ", and " Edit any post".

mike

 

 

More information

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Forums

 

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