NMT Moodle 1.9 Instructor's Guide

The purpose of a courseware system is to help instructors teach courses by providing a flexible, easy-to-use Web site for course-related materials and communication.

Martin Dougiamas, an educator in Perth, Australia, invented Moodle because he was frustrated by the inflexibility of the WebCT courseware system. Moodle is now an open-source project, heavily used by educators at every level all over the world.

Whether you use Moodle at all, and what parts of it you use, are entirely up to you. Moodle has a modular structure so you can choose only the parts that fit your teaching style. In this document we describe only the most commonly used features, but you will find plentiful online documentation for all of Moodle's features.

We have found that the gradebook and assignment tools, in particular, are features likely to save you and your students time and pain. The gradebook, in particular, has these virtues:

Because it is vital to make it easy for students to track their own progress, as soon as you or a grader posts a grade, the student can see it without any more work on your part. The student can always see their overall course average and the individual grades that are used to compute it.
Brian Borchers of the Math Department and Elaine DeBrine Howell of the Advising Resource Center have been using Moodle to track early progress in critical freshman courses such as Math 103 and 104. Feeling that if problems are evident by midterm, that is too late, they now track whether students are taking quizzes and submitting assignments in the early weeks, to intervene early with students who never get a proper start on their college career.

Abundant online documentation, and lively support resources, are available at the Moodle community site. In particular, see the Moodle 1.9 documentation page.