Analysis - continued ......

Moodle Blocks are functional areas that can be placed along the left and right borders of the initial site page and individual course home pages. These Blocks include:

• Activities – A Block used to provide links to activities within course.
• People – A Block used to provide access to course members details.
• Calendar – A Block that acts as a calendar, providing the facility to view course events, site events, group events and personal events.
• Administration – A Block that provides administration functionality such as the ability to modify course settings.
• Recent Activity – A Block that displays changes to the course or site since you last logged in.
• Online Users – A Block that provides information about users that have used the environment within the past 5 minutes.

Moodle Modules are actual areas of functionality that can be instanciated to create activities within the Moodle site and individual courses. For example, the Forum Module provides the functionality to create and maintain forums while a teacher forum is an activity that uses the functionality provided by the Forum Module. The current stable version of Moodle is provided with the following Modules as standard;

• Assignment – Provides functionality for setting online assignments such as time stamping submissions against a specified deadline, student submissions tracking and uploading, return of grades.
• Chat – Provides basic chatroom functionality for online discussions.
• Choice – Provides functionality for carrying out simple multiple choice polls and surveys.
• Forum – Provides typical forum functionality, as well as the ability to rate forum posts and control who can post to specific forums.
• Glossary – Allows a glossary of terms to be maintained and automatic linking of terms to glossary entries.
• Journal – Provides the facility for a user to maintain an online journal which can only be viewed by themselves and the course teachers.
• Lesson – The Lesson Module provides the ability to create a collection of pages that guide the user through a particular topic. Each page terminates in a series of questions which must be answered. Based on the answers provided by the user, they can be directed to further reading on the subject (if incorrect) or on to the next subject (if correct).
• Quiz – Provides the ability to maintain a structured repository of questions (multiple choice, short answer, numerical answer or term insertion) from which online quizzes can be generated, as well as providing grading, question randomisation and answer randomisation facilities.

Other Blocks and Modules exist and are available via the Moodle website, they are however either deemed unnecessary for general use or simply not stable enough for inclusion in the standard distribution, these include an Appointments Module, an Attendance Module and a module designed to allow integration of quizzes created by the popular Hot Potatoes software into Moodle.