Analysis - continued ......

The desire for a Virtual Learning Environment at LPS School

Staff at LPS School are constantly looking for ways to engage their students and to promote learning outside of the classroom. Prior to the schools inclusion in this project, the head of ICT begin to look into the possibility of making coursework resources available via the existing school website. This however was deemed too difficult to maintain and structure. It is felt that a Virtual Learning Environment may provide a means of structuring resources and would also provide necessary tools to allow communication to continue outside of the classroom environment.

The Virtual Learning Environment - Moodle

Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It's an ongoing development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software. Basically this means Moodle is copyrighted, but that you have additional freedoms. You are allowed to copy, use and modify Moodle provided that you agree to: provide the source to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work.

Moodle is basically a Virtual Learning Environment developed to facilitate web-based distributed learning. What sets Moodle apart from other VLE systems is its grounding in social constructivism, its flexible ability to embrace the educators pedagogy (Moodle doesn’t force the use of social constructivism) and the fact that it was created and continues to be developed by teachers for teachers.

Functionality

Moodle is designed in a modular fashion around the idea of Blocks and Modules. Moodle provides a core level of functionality that can be added to via the use of these Blocks and Modules to suit individual course needs. Core functionality provided by the Moodle environment includes:

• The ability to assign users into distinct categories each with differing privileges and levels of access to the system.
• The ability to structure courses. Several course formats are available such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focussed social format.
• Each course has its own homepage which can be used to display any changes to the course since the last login and news relating specifically to that course, thus helping to give a sense of community.
• An embedded WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is provided to allow editing and creation of resources, forum postings, journal entries etc.
• Activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed "story" of each students involvement including postings, journal entries etc on one page.
• Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be emailed in HTML or plain text whenever required.
• Courses can be backed up into a zip file that can be restored on another Moodle server.