E-LEARNING WITH MOODLE CREATING AND TESTING COURCES Under the Supervision of Prof. Dr. Frederik Questier Vrije Universiteit Brussel PROJECT REPORT SUBMITTED TO LIB@WEB 2013 International Training Program UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP Submitted By Vrushali Dandawate Libararian AISSMS College of Engineering India 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT It exports my sincere gratitude to my guide Prof. dr. Frederik Questier Vrije Universiteit Brussel, whose keen interest, encouragement and valuable guidance from time to time helped me to complete this project. He supervised my work with patience and understanding. I am thankful to Prof. dr De Smet Egbert, universiteit Antwerp and course coordinator of Lib@Web International Training Program 2013 for his quick assistance to my queries of the administrative tasks in completing the studies of the Project work. 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE NO. Introduction 4 Moodle A Tool for E-learning Working with moodle creating and testing courses Teacher Interface Moodle Student Interface 6 15 Observation and Conclusions 18 References INTRODUCTION 3 9
Software is programs, procedures, rules and any associated documentation pertaining to the operation of a computer system. Open source software is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user generated content. Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evaluation of source code What is E Learning: - Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become one of the most important factors to the formation of society in the twenty-first century. Their impact is revolutionary. It affects the way of life of people, their work and education. There are two great equalisers in life - the internet and education. By combining the two, e-learning will be the great equaliser in the next century. By eliminating barriers of time, distance, and socio-economic status, individuals can now take charge of their own lifelong learning. Impact of E Learning on Today s Education System:E-learning presents an entirely new learning environment for students, thus requiring a different skill set to be successful (Romiszowski, 2004). Critical thinking, research, and evaluation skills are growing in importance as students have increasing volumes of information from a variety of sources to sort through (New Media Consortium, 2007). Also, particularly in courses that are entirely electronic, students are much more independent than in the traditional setting. This requires that they be highly motivated and committed to learning (Huynh et al., 2003), with less social interaction with peers or an instructor. Students in online courses tend to do as well as those in classrooms, but there is higher incidence of withdrawal or incomplete grades (Zhang, Zhou and Briggs, 2006). Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. Aim and purpose of Study:There are various few E-Learning software packages available in the market and over the network. Some of them are available through Internet free of cost. Therefore researcher thought that there is a 4
need to study the features of Moodle in E-Learning and try to make interactive E learning sessions for end users. Scope of Study:The present study covers moodle elearning softwares available on Internet free of charge. The information about moodle softwares will be collected are from the website. Researcher studied the moodle (version 2.3) in detail. This will help in work and evaluate the moodle software. It is available free of cost on Internet and used by various organizations in world to build their E-Learning System. Thus the scope is Study of moodle software available on Internet and tries to make interactive sessions on LIS in moodle environment Objective of Study:To achieve the aim, the following objectives were set, which will provide the assistance for completing the study, To study moodle To know system requirement for moodle installation To build, manage and organize data with moodle on Library Science topics Methodology of Study:Research is a means to the advancement of knowledge and science but fruitful research study appears to be almost impossible without the proper understanding of research methodology. According to Busha and Harter (4) more efficient and effective approach to expand knowledge, however, is the conduct of special planned and structured investigations a process known as research. Methodology in research is a way to solve some problem to unfold the probable answers, to test a hypothesis. There are many means and methods to solve the problem in research. For this study researcher studied the features of Moodle E learning software package. For this purpose software is installed. Then the researcher will followed the steps in courses and testing then with end users, All these processes will be observed by researcher. MOODLE A TOOL FOR E-LEARNING 5
Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company. What is Moodle :- The focus of the moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use moodle it has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist. Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).many of our users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes. Requirements to Install moodle : Moodle is primarily developed in Linux using Apache, PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB and PHP The basic requirements for Moodle are as follows: Hardware Requirements Disk space: 160MB free (min) plus as much as you need to store your materials. 5GB is probably a realistic minimum. Backups: at least the same again (at a remote location preferably) as above to keep backups of your site 6 Memory: 256MB (min), 1GB or more is strongly recommended.
Software Requirements An operating system, Anything that runs the following software; Linux and Windows are the most common choices (and good support is available). If you have a free choice, Linux is generally regarded to be the optimal platform. Moodle is regularly tested with Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, Windows 7/2012 and Mac OS X. Web server, primarily Apache. Not fully tested (or supported) but should work are IIS, lightttpd, nginx, cherokee, zeus and LiteSpeed. Moodle will refuse to install on any other web server. Your web server needs to be correctly configured to serve PHP files.the version is not critical but try to use the newest web server build available to you. PHP - The minimum version is currently 5.3.3. A number of extensions are required; see the PHP page for full details. Installation will halt at the environment check if any of the required extensions are missing. If available, PHP 5.5 and newer contain OPcache which is recommended (you can ignore the environment check for this if not available). A database. MySQL and PostgreSQL are the primary development database, the most comprehensively tested and have extensive documentation and support. MSSQL is fully supported but documentation and online help are not as comprehensive as MySQL PostgreSQL. Oracle database is not fully supported and is not recommended. o MySQL - minimum version 5.1.33 o MariaDB - minimum version 5.3.5 (drop-in replacement for Oracle's MySQL) o PostgreSQL - minimum version 8.3 o MSSQL - minimum version 9.0 Minimum browser for accessing Moodle: recent Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, Safari 6, recent Google Chrome 11 Moodle Installation package contains everything you need to run Moodle on a windows machine. Moodle has been packaged with Apache, MySQL and PHP. 7
How to use moodle Installation Package: Run 'Start Moodle.exe' to start up the system. Visit http://localhost/ to use your Moodle site! Other people have to access it via http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where number or name of your Windows computer. If you want to shut down the Moodle server, use 'Stop Moodle.exe' xx.xx.xx.xx is the IP Technical Information for starting your moodle installation package 1 Start/Stop Moodle.exe 'Start Moodle.exe' runs the xampp installation script located in server/install/install.php. Then it starts apache and mysql. 'Stop Moodle.exe' stops the apache and mysql processes. 2. XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html) You can use xampp executable files directly if you like. They are located in the "server" directory. 3. Moodle (http://moodle.org/) All moodle files are located in server/moodle/ 4. Performance Settings (http://docs.moodle.org/en/performance) 8
WORKING WITH MOODLE : CREATING AND TESTING COURSES MOODLE TEACHERS INTERFACE When you are working as a administrator or Teacher you are getting all rights to work with moodle environment for that you have to log in as a administrator in moodle and has to select the category you would like the new course to appear in. To get start with moodle teachers has to create courses for his students In the Course categories section chooses the 'Add a new course' button. If you do not see this button this means that you do not have the role as Course Creator. Example No 1- Adding A New Course in Moodle Adding a users to Moodle course:user for particular courses can be added by uploading text document file Users may be uploaded (and optionally enrolled in courses) via text file. The format of the file should be as follows: 9 Each line of the file contains one record
Each record is a series of data separated by commas (or other delimiters) The first record contains a list of fieldnames defining the format of the rest of the file Required fieldnames are username, password, firstname, lastname, email Example No 2- Adding a user file in moodle Example No 3- uploading users to moodle course 10
Assign Teachers role for courses:- By assigning a role to a user in a context, you are granting them the permissions contained in that role, for the current context and all lower contexts. For example, if a user is assigned the role of student in a course, they will also have the role of student for all activities and blocks within the course and if teacher role is assigned to user he can modify and make changes in course Example No 4- Assign role Teacher to moodle course 11
Example 5 Enrolling Users, After making course summary you can enroll users by clicking on enroll button, Example 6 Make a course available to students and enroll them When Moodle courses are created, they are hidden from students. OIT releases courses to students three days prior to the start of classes. If you request a Moodle course after this release date, you will have to release the course yourself. 12
Example 7- How to add Resources to your course : You can add activity to your selected course, There are following various activity are available in moodle like chat, assignments, choice,database,external tools,forums,glossary,lesions,quiz,survey,wiki, by adding such activity you can work on some interactive sessions and take active participation from students Example 8- Adding a various activities to course Chat rooms, Assignments, Quiz s, files 13
Example 9 - How Chat session Work Example 10 - How teachers can assign grade to students, evaluation can be done on their report submissions 14
MOODLE STUDENTS INTERFACE Moodle is easy to use and has a simple and student friendly interface, When students are logged in with their assigned user name and password they can view assign courses for them 15
Students can see upcoming activity of courses what is new material or activity available for them by simply clicking on link. They also can see the summery of the activity in described calendar. Example -1 Reminder for Activities and courses Example -2 List of available courses 16
Example -3 Moodle can also work as notice board for students 17
OBSERVATION AND CONCLUSION Researcher has studied one aspect of moodle software creating and testing courses based on work and study the system The following observation and findings are deduced from researcher, Moodle is simple software, The main reasons for using the system is because it is available at a relatively that its free, it has many different abilities that teachers and administrators can use to teach, and it is - to a certain extent Its easy to learn and implement Additional learning tools, such as forums and quizzes (self tests). 18 The freedom to access course materials at any time and away from campus. Total cost of ownership is reduced Savings can be used for content development Moodle community is an extremely effective resource Customise to fit your needs
There are some disadvantage also might be considered while using moodle e-learning system Lack of easy to obtain support --Forum has a great deal of information but it can be difficult to find More instructor effort required; teaching staff may not be able to cope with new technology Great idea but just too much trouble little or no support Community are there but the teacher with lack of technical knowledge teacher cannot solve problem on his own Moodle is not fully developed to cope with big projects. While it may be useful for colleges or universities of small to medium size, the system might not work efficiently with larger schools or serve as a great way to conduct all classes in a city. Moodle may not be the wisest choice. Along these same lines, the more students that access the platform, the slower the system becomes. This can be troublesome for students when they are trying to take quizzes or tests, or just simply trying to access the course content. The website can also shut down on occasion. SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Since the project span is short it is not possible to study almost all the popular e-learning software s and evaluate them in detail. However the efforts are made to elaborate the moodle software which is very popular in the profession, it is necessary to attain the training to use such kind of user friendly, economical software s available at the initial level, adopt the expertise and then try for the other. In the developing countries these practices are fruitful to initiate the OAI and DLI. These efforts will help in developing the e learning system environment. The OAI concepts are popular in the scientific area, which can be pulled to the social sciences and education system of India for the better communication. 19
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY: Based on the above investigations researcher identified the following topics, which can be further studied. Due to limited span of the study it was not possible for the researcher to cover everything. Comparison study of different E learning software s should be carried out. This comparison may be made on the various aspects such as cost, retrieval capabilities, system requirements, standard followed etc. Study of chamilo e-learning software and its comparative study with moodle can be covered It is necessary to carry out survey of various clearing systems using institute in the Europe or Asia, which are using Moodle Learning Software or any other fruitful efforts made. A study of the commercial e-learning software s can also be covered Problems faced by the organizations can also be studied Lib@web course material can also made available to students through moodle environment And even few distance courses for developing countries students can be made available through moodle References:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning 20
Bourner, T. & Flowers, S. (1997). Teaching and learning methods in higher education: A glimpse of the future. Reflections on Higher Education, 9, 77-102. Olojo Oludare Jethro,Elearning and Its Effect in teaching learning in a global age, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences January 2012, Vol. 2, No. 1 https://moodle.org/ http://www.brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/94013.aspx 21