Book: Using Moodle (Cole & Foster 2e 2008)

Using Moodle: [teaching with the popular open source course management system](2e)(2008).
Cole, J. R., & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle: [teaching with the popular open source course management system](Second edition). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Community Press.
ISBN 9780596518516 059651851X 9780596554989 0596554982

In late August 2011 I had a meeting with two academic gentlemen who would go on to offer me an unusual, yet fulfilling job. I was to act as an assistant project manager for the UNSW School of Business at ADFA to transfer their 23 postgraduate courses from a legacy Learning Management System (LMS) to an innovative, new, open source Content Management System (CMS). The old LMS was called Olive; the new CMS is called Moodle.
The UNSW is the University of New South Wales and ADFA is the elite Australian Armed Forces Training College: the Australian Defence Force Academy. I was there for nearly six months and it was an extraordinary experience. There was such a sense of respect and camaraderie from the defence forces staff and defence forces students that I have never experienced in any other work environment. Centrally placed in all this was a university where workplace politics was being played out amongst the academics, administration, and support staff; much like government bureaucracies I've worked in. Then there was also the mix of cultures from the mainly overseas students who were higher academic candidates, such as the brilliant Egyptian PhD candidate who was given a part-time role to assist me with content creation and the mundane task of transferring content files from the old system to the new one (...but hey, he was young and he needed the money!).
At the conclusion of the job interview I was handed a downloaded and printed PDF file of Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.). I was given a week to learn it as the project manager was almost ready to travel down from Sydney to Canberra to begin the five month change program: moving the 23 courses that made up the Master of Business program from the old system and training the 29 academic staff how to use Moodle as technical staff would no longer be in control of content, as they were with the old Olive LMS. Except for a change of circumstances: at my next meeting with the UNSW staff members who would go on to become good friends and mentors, I was informed that the project manager had fallen off a ladder while gardening and broken her leg so badly that she would not return to work for at least six months: could I take over and deliver the change management project?
Moodle is not hard to get your head around if you have been using personal computers for as long as I have: at that stage I had more than 25 years' experience with PCs and trying to fix broken software and bad programming. If you can use content management systems like Wordpress or Blogger, or if you use MS Office software and have now transferred most of your files to Onedrive or back your files up to Dropbox, then using Moodle is not that difficult.
Although Moodle is based around four software components working together, known as LAMP for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, you can download a working copy for Windows or Mac environments and try it out there. I have recently downloaded and set up a copy of one of the latest stable versions of Moodle to run on a Windows 10 laptop (though my attempts to set it up on a Windows 7 laptop have not worked, even though I had a copy running in 2011 on a Windows 7 lite Netbook) just to remind me what Moodle does. And although the copy of Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.) is over 10 years old, it is still relevant enough to assist with setting up the software, then adding courses, before having to turn to online sources for help.
Other reading of related texts
Reference List / In-Text Citation Styles in APA 6th
Please Note: I do not strictly follow APA style in these citations as I would like various technology and media to be able to access these pages.

Download: Cole, J. R., & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Community Press.


20190510
Using Moodle (Cole & Foster 2e 2008)


Unless otherwise noted all books listed were in my personal library at the time of the first blog posting about the book. Some titles were borrowed from RMIT University libraries during the period 2006-2016, or from Hobsons Bay City Council library.

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