Moodle | ICOS

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.

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:

Moodle 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 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.

The Front page

The Front page of a Moodle site – the page you reach from your browser – usually includes information about the establishment itself and can be highly customised. (Note that it is also possible to lock the front page down so that all a user sees when they click on the Moodle URL is a log in screen.)
How users join a Moodle site depends on the establishment: they might be given logins; they might be allowed to make accounts themselves, or they might be signed in automatically from another system.

Inside Moodle

Moodle’s basic structure is organised around courses. These are basically pages or areas within Moodle where teachers can present their learning resources and activities to students. They can have different layouts but they usually include a number of central sections where materials are displayed and side blocks offering extra features or information.
Courses can contain content for a year’s studies, a single session or any other variants depending on the teacher or establishment. They can be used by one teacher or shared by a group of teachers.
How students enrol on courses depends on the establishment; for example they can self -enrol, be enrolled manually by their teacher or automatically by the admin.
Courses are organised into categories. Physics, Chemistry and Biology courses might come under the Science category for instance.

Teachers, students and other Moodle users

You don’t enter Moodle with the “teacher” or “student” role.
Everyone who logs into Moodle has no special privileges until they are allocated roles by the administrator according to their needs in individual courses or contexts.

Finding your way around

A logged in user can access areas of Moodle such as their courses or profile from the Navigation block and Settings block. What a user sees in these blocks depends on their role and any privileges granted them by the administrator.
Each user has their own customisable page, accessed from the Myhome link.

Moodle is being used by educational institutions all over the world. There are 65837 currently active sites from 216 countries that have been registered at moodle.org/sites.

Some examples are: