Moodles

[Nobody Soup]

right, I do some teaching stuff and I was thinking that I would put all my material up onto the web so the students I teach could access it, various information and work sheets and the like. so, I've seen these moodle things which universities and schools seem to use for the same purpose so I think setting up one of those is what I'm expected to do right?

the only thing is, when I looked at a "how to set up a moodle" it was all this stuff about running linux servers and creating a php database. I'm alright with computers and could probably muddle through but the purpose of having all my stuff online was so it was all mobile and setting up a server seems to imply I would need some permanently hooked up computer running this thing which would be useless.

So my question is, what the hell is moodle? why is it better than just making a web page or wiki? because all the ones I've seen don't look like anything more impressive than a bunch of links to downloadable documents anyway. and if it is better is there a way to set one up that isn't impossible.

[Zetetic]

It probably isn't better than a wiki for you; particularly as there some like DokuWiki that are an utter doss to setup if you have any kind experience with web servers.

Moodle has stuff like tests, achievement tracking and automatic course progression (i.e. you have to pass this to read that) for students. It's a relative pain to get running as you say, and compared to, say DokuWiki again, is relatively resource-intensive.

[Nobody Soup]

aaah, the resource tracking thing makes a lot of sense, I never knew it could do that. I do know when I've used them before (in work or when studying) it's all been in conjunction with a database of learners and things.

ok, that's perfect, I can live without that stuff, I suppose it might have been nice to be able to set things up so that I wouldn't confuse students by letting them access everything at once but I can get round that and it's certainly not worth it for the effort.

thanks

[Zetetic]

I do know when I've used them before (in work or when studying) it's all been in conjunction with a database of learners and things.

Yeah, precisely. I've only had experience with moodle helping my father set up (against my counsel) some e-learning thing.

ok, that's perfect, I can live without that stuff, I suppose it might have been nice to be able to set things up so that I wouldn't confuse students by letting them access everything at once but I can get round that and it's certainly not worth it for the effort.

I suppose if you do get a wiki going, you can presumably give different classes different jumping off pages or something.

[Wayman C. McCreery]

I administrate a Moodle site at work. It's the most frustrating, unintuitive and complicated piece of software I've ever used. Keep away from it.

That said, I've not come across a better dedicated e-learning alternative. But it's so bad that I'd recommend just setting up a blog (try WordPress) and linking to resources from that. At least any basic skills you learn from doing that are transferable - Moodle works like nothing else does, and so if you ditch it and try something else you'll have wasted your time. Starting with a blog and moving up will give you a base to learn from.

[Nobody Soup]

yeah, I think I am going to try something like that. I've thought about using blogs, mostly because I think tumblrs are just the best looking sites on the web, but I'm not sure if I want to be bothered uploading all the stuff every time I do it.

I think I'm going to open some passworded wiki and put it all up there, or just knock together some bog standard webpage. I've decided having different access isn't that important, also I am not just being a totally alturistic good two shoes, I want to use this is to accompany my CV because to be quite frank, the work sheets and stuff I make are bloody good.

this has definitely convinced me not to use moodle though. It sounds a bit of a 'mare. funnily though wayman, using the moodle did also go along with the CV, transferable skills. I can set up webpages and the like but I missed out on a job a while back because I'd never used it (we use our own VLE in my work) but I guess I'll just live without it, it's only come up once.

the work I do and the webpage for the classes aren't related in case none of this is making sense. my work is tutoring IT and this is for my ESOL stuff.