A simple guide to building MOOC-like online Moodle course

1. Building an Online
Moodle course
Dr. Ahmad Mikati
Arab Open University
Lebanon
June, 2017

2. Overview
• Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online course intended to reach
an unlimited number of participants with an open access via the web.
• In addition to customary course materials such as readings, video recorded
lectures, and problem sets, many online courses provide interactive user
forums to support community collaborations and engagements among
students, professors, and other facilitators.
• MOOC is a recent development in distance education, which fosters open,
participatory, distributed, and lifelong-networked learning.

3. MOOC Design Patterns
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A Moodle course page is mainly divided into categories of sections:
1. A General section, which could be considered as week 0.
In this section, the student can find the needed information about the course: aims,
structure, content, and learning outcomes. In addition, the student will find the latest
announcements along with the important dates of the assignments and exams.
2. Weeks sections, where the material will reside.
In each weekly section, the student will find the material of the week: text, images,
video, and any additional activities such as Discussion forums or quizzes. In addition,
the learning outcomes should be included for each week.
In the next two slides, we will show you a typical design of each section.

4. MOOC Design Patterns- week 0
• Course Title;
• Welcome
• Short video to introduce the course
• Welcomenote to the course
• Course team with hyperlinks to profile page of every one
• Brief statement of the course aims
• Brief statement of course content
• Course learning outcomes
• Why the course topics can benefit you
• Typical real-world problem scenario
• Course structure and content
• Diagram summarizing the contents foreach week
• Preparation for this course
• Educational prerequisites
• Study advice:
• Guideline – how to best use this course and the platform;
• Structure – of the course,number of weeks, name of chapters, assignments,deadlines;
• Announcements– any important information the student needs to know about the course.
4

5. MOOC Design Patterns-weekly section
• Weekly information
• Week number and title
• Learning outcomes of the week
• Topics/learning objects
• Title of the topic
• Text of the topic
• Graphics of the topic
• Videos of the topics (if available)
• Discussion on forum related to the topic
• Activities related to the topic
• Quiz with formative feedback
• Simulations
• Summary of the week:
• Briefing about the topics of this week and introducing the topics of the next week
• Summary video (optional)
• Summary text
5

6. MOOC Design Patterns-weekly section
One of the possible options to implement most of the weekly components is the “lesson” activity .
The tutor can add the lesson activity in each week, and this lesson comprises several pages (each
section of the material needs a page), in addition to the quizzes, videos, quizzes, tests, and other
stuff. This is depicted in the below exhibits.
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The pages of the
lesson

7. Building a Lesson
in a Moodle course

8. Planning your lesson- Overview
• A lesson in Moodle comprises several pages which may have content
to be read or questions to be answered.
• The content and questions can be prepared beforehand by the tutor.
• The tutor decides the sequence in which these pages appear.
• However, the tutor needs to have a clear clue beforehand of what
he/she wants to do with this lesson. Will the lesson be a graded or an
ungraded one? Will the students be granted multiple attempts to
answer the questions or revisit the subsections, or is it just a once-
only opening?
• A very useful approach is to note down on paper the direction they
want their lesson pages to go in, rather than having to recall and
envisage the flow in their head.

9. Planning your lesson- Formation
• The first step the tutor needs, after preparing the content, is to add the
lesson (activity) and set it up.
• In the next two slides, you can find the depiction of what the setup page of
the lesson looks like
1. Click Add activity
2. Choose lesson

10. Planning your lesson- Formation
The title of a lesson
appears to the student at
the top of the page.
Time settings
The tutor is able to control
the retakes, display of
scores,etc..

11. Planning your lesson- Formation
The settings could be as shown here
The file that contains the content (for reference)

12. Content page
• This is a page where a tutor can provide information to move the lesson forward but without
requiring the student to answer specific questions.
• The student sees the page's title, some information and then one or more buttons at the
bottom to select.
• When the student clicks on a button, they go to the next page but their choice is not scored.
buttons
Title of the lesson
Title of the page

13. Adding content to your lesson
After setting up your lesson, you can click on the name of the lesson on the
page, and you will be taken to the screen in the screenshot below.
- Choose the content page.
Choose content page

14. Adding content to your lesson
After choosing the content page, a new page will appear as in the below figure:

15. Adding content to your lesson
The tutor will also see the page title
in the collapsed edit mode when
they are working on the Lesson,
and they will also be able to choose
the title (and hence this page) from
the drop down "jump" lists.
Choose the next
page to jump to
Then, you start filling the fields of the content page.
Material of
this page

16. Adding content to your lesson
The link to the next jump.
The below figure shows the preview of the content page after adding the material and filling the fields.

17. Adding content to your lesson
The Actions icons allow you to move (if you have
more than one), edit, preview or delete yourpages.
The drop down menu allows you to create another page of your choice

18. Adding questions to your lesson
In that page, you can choose the type of the question as well. The below figure shows
that an MCQ type has been selected.
From the drop down menu, you can choose to add a question.
After choosing to add a question, you will be directed to a question page.

19. Adding questions to your lesson
The format of question pages is similar to content pages.
A typical question page could include:
Title: the name the student sees at the top of the questionpage.
Page contents: the actual question
Type your
question here

20. Adding questions to your lesson
A typical question page could also include:
Answer: The field where you can type one of the choices
Response: The field where you can type a feedback
Format: Keep it as is (Moodle auto-format)
Jump: The place where you can redirect the student ( to continue or to revisit the material)
Score: You can decide there the weight of the score.
The screenshots below depict the fields
Correct answer
Wrong answer

21. Lesson- Final view
The below figure shows how the lesson will look like. Notice how you can offer the
students different choices to jump to a certain page.

22. Ending your lesson
• To bring the lesson to a close, select the "End of Lesson" option from
the Jump menu on any relevant pages.
• The student will then see a generic message as in the next
screenshot, with a direction back to the main course page or to view
their grades:

23. The course as seen by the student

24. The course as seen by the student

25. Saving your lessons as .mbz file
• After finishing all lessons and distributing them properly over the weeks, the tutor needs to
create a backup of this course in order to be reused later or in other Moodle pages.
• To archive course Resources,Activities, and course settings for safekeeping, it is highly
recommended that tutors backup (.mbz) their course periodically; if something happens to
the original, they can easily restore it to the most recent backup.
• The .mbz can be used to restore the course on the local LMS or the central LMS.
Note: The tutor should know that .mbz files cannot be used outside of Moodle.

26. Steps to backup a Moodle course
Step 1: first, you go to the Moodle course that you want to backup and click
Backup in the Settings block (Backup is found under the title: Course
administration).

27. Steps to backup a Moodle course
• Step 2: Here, you set the initial settings. Checks are already found by
default. However, you can manage your own settings. When you are done,
click next.

28. Steps to backup a Moodle course
• Step 3: In the Schema settings, you can select some or all weeks,
depending on the items you want to backup. When you are done, click
next.

29. Steps to backup a Moodle course
• Step 4: In the Confirmation and Review, double check the list of included
things, and then click Perform Backup.
Here, youcan rename
your .mbz file

30. Steps to backup a Moodle course
• Step 5: The Backup is now ready. After clicking continue, you will be
directed to the page where you can manage your backup files ( download
or restore). Click download and choose the place you want to save your file
in. You just finished saving the backup copy of your Moodle course page!

31. Credit
• https://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Building_Lesson