Moodle Support Resources
The following are recommended web resources for CSULA faculty piloting Moodle. Please note that most of the tutorials and information refer to Moodle 1.9 and earlier; as of March 2011, Moodle 2.x is the current version and the one faculty will be piloting for the spring 2011 term.
Moodle Learning Community Course and Workshops
For more information, please send an email to: ahamane2@exchange.calstatela.edu
Moodle 2.0 Videos
Here is a series of more than 15 Moodle 2.0 videos.
CSULA Moodle Pilot Resources
In a good example of cross-campus collaboration in these tight budgetary times, not only is CSU Fullerton hosting our Moodle pilot, but we've arranged to have the folks in their Titan Tech Training team develop training materials for CSULA faculty, including:
- PDF: A 26-page guide, "Getting Started with Moodle"
- YouTube: "Getting Started: A Brief Overview of Moodle 2.0" (37 mins)
- YouTube: "What's New in Moodle 2.0" (12 mins)
Lynda.com Training Modules for CSU Faculty and Students
The CSU Chancellor's Office has licensed lynda.com's Moodle training for faculty and students. These training videos are available to the campuses at no cost.
NOTE: Students can only access the Lynda.com training modules from campus computers, but faculty and staff can watch them off-campus using VPN. For more information regarding the use of VPN, please visit here.
If you have trouble accessing the modules, please email webservices@calstate.edu.
Presentations from M00DLE MOOT US - WEST COAST 2011
- Making Your Moodle Course Student Friendly
- Streamlining Accessibility in a Moodle Course
- Real Moodle Classroom: Students Submitting Electronic Homework and Taking Tests Online
Resources at Moodle.org
- Teacher documentation
- Video tutorials (of varying quality).
QuickGuides for Faculty & Students
Initially developed out of SFSU, QuickGuides is a searchable knowledge base of step-by-step tutorials for the California State University system. Users can browse a general set of QuickGuides, and some campuses have customized tutorials for their users.
Book: Using Moodle
Using Moodle - Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster is published by O'Reilly as part of the Community Press series. The first edition of the book, released in July 2005, is based on Moodle version 1.4 but still may prove useful.
The second edition, available from Amazon.com, was released in November 2007, and has been updated to cover all the features in Moodle 1.8, such as the new roles and permissions system, blogs, messaging and the database module.
University of Minnesota Moodle User Guides
Organized by topic, this page links to many help pages. Very helpful, but please note many features are limited specifically to UM's installation of Moodle.
@One Faculty Training Course
The @One consortium offers a full Moodle training course for faculty at a very low cost. "In this course you'll learn how to enter a Moodle course shell and organize and present content—including graphics—all without needing to know HTML! You'll discover handy tools for site, course, and student management functions, as well as tools for creating quizzes, assignments with due dates, grades, and interactive forums. You'll not only finish the course with a working knowledge of Moodle, you'll also walk away with the foundation for your own online course." Contact http://www.onefortraining.org/ for course scheduling information.
Other Resources
ePortfolios: An ePortfolio is a separate system that interfaces with a learning management system. In June 2010 we presented this overview of Moodle and ePortfolios (PDF).
UCLA: This UCLA report details their roadmap toward Moodle 2.0x and has good information about Moodle and ePortfolios (PDF).
CLAMP: A consortium of liberal arts colleges currently using Moodle 1.9x have reviewed a possible transition to Moodle 2.0x in this report (PDF).
Respondus: Two new resources were announced in November, 2009 for the recently released Moodle integrations for Respondus 4.0 and Respondus LockDown Browser. Short demonstration movies are available by clicking the links below:
- Publishing to a Moodle course
- Introduction to Respondus LockDown Browser within Moodle courses
- View a list of Respondus demonstration movies.
Insights into Moodle Administration
It is often challenging to convey to people the complexities of supporting a system as large and sophisticated as Moodle. The following examples are presented to illustrate the kind of work necessary to run Moodle, and we hope they will help people who don't actually do this kind of work appreciate the challenges support staff face.
- Insights into how complicated running Moodle is can be seen by watching this Moodle Administration Overview webinar. This webinar, offered by the CSU Moodle Common Interest Group, illustrates the experience and resources needed to run Moodle for a university. The speakers describe the back-end technical resources needed to run Moodle on their campuses; most of the support listed below is not the kind of pedagogical faculty support we provide in eLPS:
- SLO - Support Structure (pilot)
- 2 PT GUI Admin (Instructional Designers)
- 2 PT Server Admin (servers/vm)
- 1 PT MySQL
- CSU San Marcos
- 4 Instructional Developers/trainers (Share GUI) - each specialized on certain areas
- 1 PT MySQL DBA
- 1 PT Server Admin
- 1 PT Technical developer
- 1 PT PHP technical backend
- San Francisco State
- 3 backend Server Administrators (Apache, MySQL, PHP, virtual machines, file system)
- 2 FT Moodle developers
- 1 FT support person
- SLO - Support Structure (pilot)
- "Moodle Auto-Linking Feature" (PDF) is an essay written some years back explaining how much human time, effort, and expertise was needed to resolve a seemingly trivial issue.
- Moodle performance testing: 1.9 vs. 2.0 compares the newest version of the system to the previous version in terms of server load.
- Mark Dreschler's series "Moodle 2.0 Files – an Inconvenient Truth" explores the new file system in Moodle 2.0x. His blog is a very good source of Moodle information.
Moodle at Other Universities
eLPS has gathered notes and reports about the LMS selection and implementation processes at other universities.
In summer 2010 we polled the CSU Moodle campuses, asking how many front-line people campuses have to support Moodle. (Note: This is limited to supporting Moodle and does not include other tasks that eLPS currently handles, such as managing a drop-in faculty lab, providing training, etc.). Here is what campuses reported:
- SFSU: 1 FT Moodle support, 4-5 students, + floating support, + 1 programmer. (Separately, 1.25 people support ePortfolios.)
- CSU Humboldt: 1 FT Moodle support, + 3-4 students + 1 programmer
- Sonoma SU: 1 FT Moodle support, 1 half-time Moodle (the other half supports Blackboard); 1 FT tech staff; 2 Library support staff (approx. 1 half-time) to help faculty one-on-one. Even this, "is not enough." Additionally, the Faculty Development Coordinator is conducting the Moodle pilot.
- CSU Northridge: 3 FT staff, 3 students, + slices of IT support (for user passwords, etc.)
- UCLA also uses Moodle. Here is a list of the UCLA support for Moodle, branded the "Common Collaboration and Learning Environment." In addition to 5 full-time staff, 20 departments contribute local support for their students and faculty.

