Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Use Moodle to manage and organize your administrative duties; monitor attendance records, manage student enrolment, record exam results, and much more

Overview

• Transform your Moodle site into a system that will allow you to manage information such as monitoring attendance records, managing the number of students enrolled for a particular course, and inter-department communication
• Create courses for all subjects in no time with the Bulk Course Creation tool
• Create accounts for hundreds of users swiftly and enroll them in courses at the same time using a CSV file.
• Part of Packt's Beginner's Guide series: Readers are walked through each task as they read through the book with the end result being a sample CIMS Moodle site

In Detail

Moodle is the most widely used Learning Management System in the world. Moodle is primarily used as an online learning course platform and few people know how to use it in any other way. However, Moodle can also be used as a management system. By adapting Moodle to become a curriculum and information management system, you can keep your administrative tasks in the same place as your lesson plans by managing student attendance records, recording grades, sharing reports between departments, and much more

Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System will show you how you can use Moodle to set up an environment that enables you to disseminate information about your educational program, provides a forum for communication amongst all those involved in your institution, and even allows you to control your course registration and enrollment. This book is written on version 1.9 and also includes examples applicable to version 2.0.

This book will show you how to create courses and organize them into categories. You will learn to assign teachers to each course, which will greatly help you to manage timetables and student enrolment, which can otherwise be a very frustrating and time consuming task. You will learn how to display the different aspects of your Curriculum and Information Management System to make it easily accessible and navigable for staff and students alike, ensuring that everyone knows what they are doing and where they are meant to be

A practical step-by-step guide to expand the functionality of your Moodle learning management system

What you will learn from this book

• Create hundreds of courses in Moodle via the Bulk Course Creation tool with ease
• Add multiple web pages to your Moodle site that can all be accessed by anyone visiting the front page of your site
• Use Moodle to keep attendance records for your institution
• Ideas about how Moodle can be used as a grade submission tool
• Deliver program-wide assessment tests using the Moodle Quiz module
• Create different roles, with specifically defined access capabilities, in your Moodle site for educational administrators
• Install and use several advanced plugins that allow you to access student related information and data that is stored in the Moodle database
• Different ways of using your Moodle database as a Student Information System
• Expedite the communication and information flow within your institution using Moodle modules
• Manage the course registration and enrollment for your institution using contributed Moodle enrollment plugins

Jason Hollowell

Jason is an English language teacher and educational program administrator. As a university student, Jason studied Political Science with the intention of proceeding to law school and becoming a lawyer. When he studied abroad in Japan, prior to his senior year in university, that plan changed and he returned from his study abroad to complete his university degree and then promptly headed back to Japan to learn more about its fascinating language and culture, never to consider law again. It was the beginning of a series of rewarding experiences that include working as a technical translator and interpreter for both Mitsubishi and Toyota Motors, earning a Masters Degree in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawaii, working for the University of Hawaii and then for Nihon University in Japan where he is now employed as a Associate Professor of English and the Director of the English Language Program. He has been involved in online education programs through the development of a Sloan Foundation funded English writing program and, since 2004, has been an avid user of Moodle. Jason subscribes to the constructivist principles upon which Moodle was founded and has developed a working knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Linux, and Apache through many hours of experimentation and countless visits to online forums, especially those hosted on the Moodle.org website.

Jason Hollowell

Jason is an English language teacher and educational program administrator. As a university student, Jason studied Political Science with the intention of proceeding to law school and becoming a lawyer. When he studied abroad in Japan, prior to his senior year in university, that plan changed and he returned from his study abroad to complete his university degree and then promptly headed back to Japan to learn more about its fascinating language and culture, never to consider law again. It was the beginning of a series of rewarding experiences that include working as a technical translator and interpreter for both Mitsubishi and Toyota Motors, earning a Masters Degree in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawaii, working for the University of Hawaii and then for Nihon University in Japan where he is now employed as a Associate Professor of English and the Director of the English Language Program. He has been involved in online education programs through the development of a Sloan Foundation funded English writing program and, since 2004, has been an avid user of Moodle. Jason subscribes to the constructivist principles upon which Moodle was founded and has developed a working knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Linux, and Apache through many hours of experimentation and countless visits to online forums, especially those hosted on the Moodle.org website.