Setting up your Moodle environment

The final element of setting up your working course on Moodle is the course format. Various blocks can be added to the course in order to support and enhance learning and communication among course participants and these can be positioned in a way that makes your course more interactive and perhaps conducive to learning. You can add a calendar, which will tell students about upcoming events such as guest speakers, assignments that are pending, construction demonstrations held at local colleges, or quizzes that have been added. You can also enable a blogging facility so that students can post their own personal reflections on the course for others to read and comment upon their recent work placements. Blogs will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 3. You can add RSS blocks that will pull in information from other websites and keep students up-to-date in developments from companies and government departments. All of these can be arranged in the course format to encourage and stimulate learning and the exchange of information as much as possible. The more interactive these elements, hopefully the more engaged and interactive the students will become.

The previous screenshot shows that this course has a rolling news feed from the BBC technology website and also an add-on block called slideshowgallery, which rotates some of the student's work in a small block. These are only some of the multitude of blocks that can be added to a course, though it is always good not to overdo it. The amount of modules and blocks that can be added to your site is growing daily. Some of these are heavily developed by members of the Moodle core team, while others are personal projects that have been uploaded by users to share. It is best to try these on a test site before placing them on your main site.