As I observed in my last post Moodle 2 is substantially different from its predecessors and now more suitable for use as a social networking tool. In this post I want to go through some of the technical aspects of making a Moodle more social. Some of these relate specifically to Moodle 2 while others are generally applicable to all Moodle installations. I should state at the outset that I am not a professional administrator and don’t know anything about server settings, back-ups or MYSQL databases. However I have often used Moodle as an administrator to build courses up from scratch.
So what follows is my observations on some of the technical niceties needed to make Moodle more of a social space; a space where people are motivated to upload photos and have discussions about aspects of their college life such as field trips and conversations with their non-Danish speaking partners in exchange projects.
Before I start I should probably mention that a lot of what follows has to do with forums because I believe that forums are the heart of what Moodle is about. And in a Moodle built as a social networking site I believe that the forums are even more important.
Cron job: I’m a bit hazy as to what this means but I do know that if the cron job is not set up properly then your forum posts don’t get sent out to course participants’ email and what follows is a loud silence as nothing happens because nobody knows you’ve started. So Google cron job and send the link to your IT administrator so that your forum posts go out at timed intervals to your participants.
Language settings: Make sure that if you are expecting an international audience that you allow users to choose which language they see the Moodle in. I once accidentally changed the interface to Hebrew and in the end could only get back to an interface I could understand by clicking on something which, I guessed by its relative position, would get me back to something I understood.
Front page: In my experience Moodle front pages have been very dull which is why I talked about design in my first post. Administrators can also decided what people see on the front page before and after they have logged in. In a social Moodle I would advise that guests should be able to see as much as possible on the front page in order to entice them to participate by logging in.
Design templates: Much more interesting themes are now possible with Moodle 2 which also seems to include static pages in addition to the normal course pages.
Make Moodle pages look more like ordinary web pages: It has always been possible to achieve a great deal by using the source view rather than the WYSIWYG editor when setting up a webpage within a course but it is possible to achieve even more, even with the older Moodle versions, by playing with the visibility of blocks as shown in the video below.
Resource & activity menus: In Moodle 2 these have been renamed and simplified so teachers may take awhile to get used to the new names.
Files: In 1.XX Moodle each course had its own collection of files. This meant that if you had a common document across all courses, such as assessment guidelines for example, this would need to be duplicated as many times as there were courses. It makes sense to avoid this duplication but this means that file storage now looks different and needs to be re-learned by teachers.
Roles: It has been possible for a while now to allocate roles on a local basis. This means that you can for example designate a student as a teacher in a specific forum while still retaining the student role in the rest of the course. If we want to use Moodle as a more social tool then this is potentially a very powerful feature which could support my suggestion for rotating class ambassadors as made in my previous post.
Embed: It has been possible for a long time to add any missing functionality through the use of embed code. The most common use of this is to embed video in a forum or in a task page and is done by using the source editor instead of the WYSIWYG editor. But this needs to be enabled by the tech administrator who may be reluctant to allow code embedding because what this does is it allows you to put any code into the Moodle which may of course be malicious. One especially useful feature is the html block which you can add to any side menu in Moodle. I have used this to add all manner of widgets for example from Google Gadgets to add a GMT clock, live audio chat, visitor counter or a game and so on and so on. In Moodle 2 the support for embedding YouTube videos is much smoother but it has to be actively enabled. Another nice touch is to present any mp3 file as a player instead of generating a clunky pop-up which then opens a media player from your computer. But again this has to be actively enabled.
This means that in Moodle there has always been a choice about which features to add. Moodle comes with standard modules such as its wiki. There is also a collection of additional optional Moodle modules such as the Lightbox Gallery mentioned in the previous post. And if all else fails it is often possible to embed what Moodle does not include.
RSS: To make Moodle activity more social it is possible when setting up a forum to enable RSS (though again RSS functionality also has to be enabled at administrator level before it can be enabled at course level). You could then add the RSS feed from a course or class space to the front page so that other courses or classes could get a taste of what was happening in the other groups.
Again I recommend Moodle 2.0 First Look by Mary Cooch for exact details of how to change settings and so on in Moodle 2.0.
The main message here is that Moodle can probably do much more than you think but that a great many of these functionalities have to be enabled first at administrator level before they can be enabled at course level.