Moodle Learning Management System Presentation

For those of you who attended our presentation on open source software in libraries at the Alabama Library Association Convention, thanks for coming out to hear us!

During Tamara's portion of the presentation, she discussed Moodle ( a free course creation website) and talked about how she used Moodle to create a series of interactive courses for library staff:

In Fall 2009, the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library Social Network Challenge was created as a way to introduce library staff to various Web 2.0 websites as well as other online resources held by our library which they may not have used before. The HMCPL Social Network Challenge was based on Learning 2.0, a program that was originally developed and launched for the staff at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in Charlotte, North Carolina during August 2006.

Moodle or Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment is a free learning management system for producing Internet-based course websites. The main power of this activity-based model comes in combining activities into sequences and groups, which can help guide participants through learning paths. Thus, each activity can build on the outcomes of the previous ones. There are a number of other tools that make it easier to build communities of learners, including blogs, messaging and participant lists as well useful tools for grading, creating reports and integrating with other systems.

Moodle also has a thriving online community at Moodle.org where Moodle users can ask questions, post to forums, download documents or Moodle Themes, read the latest Moodle news and get Moodle support.

Three resources that helped me out tremendously while setting up the HMCPL Social Network Challenge were Moodle Course Conversion by Ian Wild, Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development by William H. Rice IV (the fourth) & the online book Using Moodle-Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster.