She asked:
“My name is Emma, and I’m writing in regards to your site. I’m currently working with Accreditedonlinecolleges.com, and we recently published an article entitled “10 Latest E-Learning Trends in K-12 Education”.

“If you find this resource would be of interest to your audience, please feel free to share it with them at your discretion.

“Either way, I’m glad to have come across your blog. If there’s anything else on our site that interests you, please feel free to let me know. Thanks again for the great content!

“Sincerely,

“Emma Taylor”

Here’s the link:  http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/10-latest-e-learning-trends-in-k-12-education/

Here’s a window onto the page. Let us know what you think:

claude

Caveat: Anything I say about pricing and numbers of seats is subject to change by manufacturers without notice.

First off, there are quite a few good web conferencing platforms out their with free trials, free versions, or are actually open source.

You can read one of the many top 10 lists about them here:

http://tomuse.com/top-10-free-web-conference-services/

My personal experience, having tried a lot of these is that for most active learning or teaming uses of an LMS/web conferencing combination, you’ll end up paying something for the number of seats you need in the web conferencing tool.

That’s because the biggest constraint on numbers of seats for the freebies (not counting the fact that the free trials expire) is that they don’t give you a lot of seats for free.

But there are some pretty reasonably priced, quality solutions.

Elluminate

If money is no object, my all time favorite by features and reliability is Elluminate. By design it can handle a lot of legacy systems and give even dial-up users a pretty good experience.

Anybody can get a free 3-person Elluminate room (called a vRoom) by joining Elluminate’s sponsored community of practice Learn Central. I have one and use it all the time. The only feature disabled is the ability to record your sessions for later playback. But if you have a utility like Camtasia, you can do that anyway. Usually, however, most people who want web conferencing for doing online learning need more than three seats.

At that same website, you can upgrade to a single moderator/50 seat room for about $1000 a year and you can get a 100 seat room with unlimited moderators for about $4-5000 per year.

Vyew

As a second choice and also a very good value, I generally fall back on Vyew.

Vyew is offering a new wrinkle to the web conferencing genre: “always on.” It offers most of the features of any web conferencing platform, plus “persistence” which makes it possible to go full circle, returning to asynchronous collaboration on the content of recorded meetings that have already taken place. This means that you can have a window open on your computer that you just leave open, kind of like you would with an instant messenger. Not only can you more easily call and hold a meeting, but you have instant access to recorded versions of all the meetings you’ve already held. In addition to the free consumer version, they also offer an “enterprise appliance” which is a box you can buy and clip to your own server rack that already has the software installed.

The hosted free version of Vyew allows 10 people per meeting up to 20 total people. So you could have 2 simultaneous meetings of 10 each, or 4 of 5 each and so forth.

For $10 a month or $72 a year, you can expand the total to 50 with a limit of 10 per meeting. But, you can purchase increments of seats up to 80 concurrent users.

Yugma

Finally, I also like Yugma. The main reason I use Yugma, when I do, is that it has a “Yugma for Skype” version that integrates with Skype so that you can have a free VoIP teleconference as your audio while sharing your desktop, slides, etc. in the Yugma window.

Yugma’s pricing is in increments of 2 seats, 20, 50, 100, or 500 for $24.50/year, $99.50, $349.50, $799.50 or $1599.50, respectively. You can pay by the month, but the annual pricing is like getting 12 months for the price of 10.

In doing my research for a client, I use Elluminate as my bench mark. It’s my experience that it is the best web conferencing tool out there and has more of the features one needs for education and training than any other. But sometimes you don’t need all those features, so comparing other candidates to Elluminate helps you answer the question of whether they can do what YOU need.

If anybody is interested in what the features are that you generally actually use in web conferencing I’ve created a spreadsheet for my clients that lists most of them and you can simply fill the columns with what you find out from your own research. Drop me an email at claude[at]futureu[dot]com if you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet.

Got more questions? Post them here or send me an email. I’d be happy to try to answer them. Also you may want to check out these pages on my website for more about the services I offer in this arena.

Strategy and Planning
Virtual Events (Meetings, Webinars, Online Courses and Conferences)

claude

Sally Cider who got me started thinking about this runs her own training company and she wants to add e-learning to the mix. She innocently asked her own IT guy about using Moodle but quickly ran into resistance. There could be several reasons for this.

First, there is nothing wrong with Moodle. But there could be some technical issues her IT guy is aware of that need to be addressed.

Infrastructure

For example, it is possible that her company doesn’t have enough hardware infrastructure to handle the usage load she is proposing. The IT guy may know this and also he may know that there is no money in the budget for upgrades right now.

So, Sally, I recommend finding someone to translate so you can get to the bottom of this and eliminate any kind of tech issue like this. I’d be happy to join you in a 3-way call if it would help.

Workload

In addition, he may not want the project right now. Most IT departments are over committed and commonly resistant to taking on more. After all, they already have full time jobs. Right?

So to solve either of those problems, you may have to find an internal sponsor at a high level of influence and arrange to promise the IT guy more hardware/software money and additional staff. Then he might suddenly become your best fan.

It sounds like that high-level decision maker may be you, so that will make the job a bit easier.

Outsourcing

On the other hand, if there is a single technically astute person who could work part time on this project, there are a number of highly reliable Moodle partners who can provide all the hardware, software, and tech support you need on a reasonably priced outsourcing basis.

This solution is the one I recommend most strongly as you get everything you need at a cost lower than your own IT people can do it. Unless they are already Moodle experts, they will have a learning curve that you will have to pay for.

It’s difficult to bring Moodle in house for a price cheaper than you would pay to a Moodle partner.

Check out the Moodle Partners Page for the one nearest you and start a conversation with them to get actual numbers for your project.

Alternatives to Moodle

Finally, while Moodle is great, a powerful tool with lots of flexibility, easy to learn, easy to use, it is not the only high quality open source lms out there. Visit this blog to read one person’s opinions about 10 alternatives to Moodle.

If you start looking at alternatives just keep a few points in mind:

1. Do they have a community of supporters as large and as active as Moodle does?
2. Do they have commercial partners who will offer cost-effective installation, support, and training?
3. And probably most important, do they offer all the functionality you need?

Use Moodle as your benchmark and create a comparison grid on price and each of the features important to you.

4. As an aferthought, also find out which, if any, web conferencing platforms will work with each option (if web conferencing is important to you).

Next up, web conferencing as an adjunct and extension of your LMS.

Recently group member asked a very interesting question of the group in a quest for solving the always challenging issue of how to add e-learning to an existing training or educational program.

For reasons completely unfathomable to me, I have a lot to say on this subject. (Maybe its because this is how I’ve been making my living for the last 20 years.) Ha, ha!!!

But seriously, my company FutureU was launched back in 1998 specifically to answer this question and we’ve been at it ever sense with clients ranging from the American Hospital Association to the NASA Astrobiology Institute, from Pacific Bell to Fujitsu America, from Dominican University of California to Missouri State University, from Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico to King Abdul-aziz University in Saudi Arabia, to name a few.

So I decided to post my suggestions to my “Build Your Course Online” blog then share a link to it with the group. That gives me double the traction for half the work (I know it may be seen by some as cheating, but I don’t have a marketing staff, so I must get as much function as I can out of everything I do, to keep up with the demands of maintaining a social media presence).

I’m not the only one with some good ideas about this though, so if you have a LinkedIn account, jump on over to the e-learning 2.0 group to see what other people have to say.

My first caution is to take an organized approach. Use a simplified design cycle model to start with. I prefer the simple 4D’s model I developed for working with my own clients:

1. Discovery (learn everything you can about the initiative your planning; what’s gone on before; what are the features you think you’ll need; and so forth.)
2. Design (run some pilot testing of “bench models” you design that you think will meet your needs. For LMSs that could include actual pilot courses within the software. Many vendors will support this.).
3. Development (with everthing you learned up to this point, prepare for roll out. get the hardware and software into place or finalize the arrangements with the hosting partner. have some volunteers do real work in the environment to make sure evrything seems to be working)
3. Delivery (hold a launch event for the benefit of both your people and your customers, keep track of any problems that arise, collect feed back on how things are going on a regular basis, after a sufficient time period, conduct an evaluation and identify what needs to be dropped, changed or added).

Next post: Let’s talk a bit about IT resistence.

Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment by Jason Myrick. PackT, 2010.

[Visit PackT to learn more about this book or purchase from Amazon by clicking on the image at the right.]

The author of this book, Jason Myrick, is another expert level user of Moodle. He calls what he’s done here a "book that contain[s] the basics." But he is far too modest. Beyond being a manual on how to use the assessment features of Moodle 1.9, it is also a basic introduction to testing and assessment.

The old fashioned seat-of-the pants way of creating, administering, grading, and recording the grades from educational assessments feels to most teachers like something everyone is born knowing.

But, needless to say, that’s not the case. Understanding when to use the various assessment alternatives we have to choose from isn’t difficult, but it IS complex.

What You Will Learn

A careful study of this book will help you learn to:

• Create a Moodle quiz intended to help instructors to efficiently develop and offer computer-based tests to their students inside their Moodle course
• Create multiple-choice tests that are a big part of small-scale and standardized tests
• Build a complete test by setting the various options such as Timing, Display, and others
• Set up an adaptive and interactive Lesson to make students learn and understand
• Test your students’ listening and comprehension skills for details using audio, video, and forums
• Evaluate reading skills using Moodle modules such as Timed reading quizzes and Hot Potatoes
• Assess your students’ speaking ability by recording multiple audio files and tracking their comments by using NanoGong and Voiceboard
• Scrutinize your students’ writing skills by using forums, portfolios, and pre-writing assignments available in Moodle
• Track the progress of the tests to monitor students improvement by setting up Moodle Gradebook

Not only does Myrick go into some detail about how all the assessment features in Moodle work, but he also gives a pretty good lesson in quiz question types and when to choose which.

He includes these five common types:

• Multiple choice
• Matching
• Sort Answer
• Essay
• True/False

But he also spends time on these less well known types:

• Calculated
• Description
• Embedded Answers (Cloze)
• Numerical

Beyond some very deep instruction in question types, he also covers assembling them into a Moodle Quiz, including how to import questions from other sources and how to export them for backup.

He spends more than 150 of the 392 pages on quizzes and questions, but he also gives guidance in using the Moodle Lesson and Moodle Workshop modules as a planned part of your overall assessment strategy.

Then he embarks on another set of instructions about how to use Moodle to do specific kinds of assessment beyond quzzes, including:

Listening Test

Myricks chapter on listening tests is a great introduction to the basics of using udio players within Moodle. At the very least, try to master the Moodle MP3 Player as the best place to start.

• Using Discussion forums and audio and video files
• To listen for sounds
• To listen for vocabulary
• To listen for gist, main idea, and comprehension

Using audio recordings takes up a lot of space, compared to the usual text-based pages we build within Moodle. Be sure to check with your Moodle admin folks to let them know what you have in mind so they can make sure there will be enough space for you.

A forum in the Moodle Language Teaching area focuses on using listening. It’s not a hotbed of activity, but a lot of people are members, so you are likely to find plenty of help with issues you come across.

Testing Reading

Online courses are essentially a reading and writing medium. There is a ton of different choices for testing reading skill and comprehension online. Myrick limits himself to covering just three of them in detail. But these happen to be three very easy to use options. They include:

• Using quizzes
• Using flash cards
• Using Hot Potato and QuizPort tools, including how to install them. (Hot Potatoes is no longer supported by Half-Baked Software, but it looks like an integration module for QuizPort is likely to takeover the important role HotPot used to play as a third-party quiz tool).

The Flash Cards offer a good way of helping students review and gives you a way to track their progress. QuizPort offers a lot of possibilities for reading and other tests, since it is really limited only by the way you design the activities inside it. Timed readings, vocabulary testing, and reading comprehension are just a few activities that can be done in Moodle. For additional activities related to reading, you might want to check out Moodle’s site and look into the Teaching Strategies and Moodle for Language Teaching – Reading forums.

Testing Speaking

Testing speaking online has continued to be a challenging form of assessment. Myrick makes a significant contribution to overcoming this challenge and gives several options to chose from, some that are very recently released and a couple that have been pretty well tested, including Skype. His chapter on Testing Speaking provides a basic overview of several usefual opeitons that help teachers understand how to test speaking in general and how to do it with Moodle, specfically. Among the options he covers are:

• Using Nanogong, Voiceboard, and Voice Shadow
  • Standalone
  • In forums
• Using Skype
• Using COVELL (Cohort-Oriented Virtual Campus for Effective Language Learning)

If you want to interact with some people regarding speaking activities and methods, visit Moodle.Org and start searching for what you want to know; chances are someone else will have already asked and answered it.

Testing Writing

Using Moodle can help make the assessment of writing easier, by offering several tools that will lighten your load.

This has traditionally been one of the most challenging areas of assessment that teachers face. Beyond the unpleasantness of reading a lot of bad writing, the methods of assessment themselves are not very precise. Writing assessment has usually been quite subjective and profoundly limited by the time it takes.

You have to:

• Define the type of writing you want from the students
• Outline the specific parameters of the assignments
• Define how the grading will be done
• Allow the necessary time for writing, editing and rewriting

Moodle can help with some of this, but you will still need to do most of it manually. Myrick covers what can be automated well, including:

• Setting up a Forum as a writing portfolio
• Pre-writing assignments
• Writing assignments
• Finding plagiarism

Myrick closes Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment with a chapter on using the Gradebook module, including:

• Grade categories
• Grade items
• Setting up a complete gradebook.

The Gradebook is a powerful tool and something that, when used properly, will help you and your students track progress and identify who’s falling behind or under participating in their groups.

The reporting features available in Gradebook, from grading simple assignments and forums to quizzes and tests, allow you to see the whole grade picture for each student in the class, in groups or as a whole in a complete, simple, or custom view.

This is an invaluable tool in helping you see possible issues in instruction, materials, or any other issue that may have affected the students’ work on the activity in question.

Categories and subcategories can help keep you organized, can help the students see where every assignment will impact their grades, and allow for instant feedback and/or changes, should they become necessary.

Finally, this book has a detailed table of contents and pretty good index, so you should be able to use it as a solid reference book for looking up answers to assessment issues in Moodle on the fly.

This is a thorough and valuable book that is easy to read and use as a hands-on guide in your own Moodle course space. You may run in to some confusion about which level of permission is needed for a few of the features discussed, but it should be obvious when you encounter a task that you can’t do because you only have teaching access, not administrator access.

Whither Moodle 2.0

With this book as with any of the other Moodle books I’ve reviewed the question arises, "Given that we now have version 2.0 of Moodle, how useful are books on version 1.9?"

A large part of this book relates to the Quiz module, and while it is true the Quiz has been prettied up a lot in Moodle 2.0, its question types and their use remain pretty much the same. If you read this book and become proficient with the 1.9 Quiz, it will stand you in good stead for the 2.0 version.

Furthermore, at the moment, there are a lot of 1.9 courses out there and it will undoubtedly take at least two or three years before we can all migrate to Moodle 2.0. So think of the books I’m reviewing as your basic "Teacher’s Bookshelf" for Moodle that you’ll want to start using now. Don’t worry too much about Moodle 2.0 until at least these two criteria have been met:

1) New books covering Moodle 2.0 are available, and
2) A majority of courses have migrated to Moodle 2.0

Next time: One more Moodle book. This one about top Moodle extensions.

Each of the books we’ve reviewed so far include expert tips about using the tools within Moodle from people who have advanced knowledge about Moodle. Here is another.

Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative ways to use Moodle for constructing online learning solutions by William Rice, Pack-T, 2007.

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques: Creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses by William Rice and Susan Smith Nash, Pack-T, 2010.

In the previous posting, we reviewed two editions of William Rice’s books on using Moodle, written primarily for beginners to Moodle and/or beginners to teaching online. As with those two books, these two are essentially the same book. Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques is also somewhat reorganized and reconceived. In the 2007 Moodle Teaching Techniques, Rice organized the contents based on the basic teaching tools available within Moodle, including:

• Forums
• Chats
• Quizzes
• Lessons
• Wikis
• Glossaries
• Choice Tool
• Topic 0

The Choice Tool is a multifunction polling tool and Topic 0 is the nickname for the built in opening topic space that can be used to show students how the course is organized and what learning activities may be involved; sort of a syllabus on steroids.

In the later, 2010 Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques, with the help of Susan Smith Nash, Rice expands on theses concepts, adds additional explanatory information and creates even more tips about ways to use each tool.

In addition, the 2010 book contains a new chapter covering the portfolio and the gallery tools.

If you run across a used copy of the 2007 book, it is definitely worth picking up for a few bucks. But if you are going to pay retail, even the discounted retail offered by online book sellers like Amazon, be sure to get the 2010 book. It is significantly better.

Either book is really "the missing manual" for the basic tools listed above and the obvious next step to take in your own self-education, once you’ve mastered the content from one of the books for beginners I’ve reviewed earlier (Using Moodle by Jason Cole and Moodle 1.9 by Rice.

claude

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development – A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle by William Rice, PackT, 2006.

Moodle 1.9: E-Learning Course Development – A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle 1.9 by William Rice, PackT, 2008.

These are almost the same book. Rice wrote the first one a year after Cole’s Using Moodle, reviewed in the previous posting.

For the purposes of this review, I will focus mainly on the 2008 edition that isupdated and expanded over the 2006 edition and focuses on Moodle version 1.9.

There are many Moodle version 1.8 sites out there and version 2.0 has just been released. However, as of 2011, the version of Moodle you are most likely to be using is 1.9. So far, nobody has published a book on 2.0. For this reason and because of the high probability that you will be using 1.9, Rice’s 2008 book Moodle 1.9 is the one you will benefit the most from for the next year or two.

Rice’s Moodle 1.9 goes beyond Cole’s Using Moodle by including a chapter on installation and configuration of your Moodle site. My personal experience with Moodle has given me the impression that Moodle is user friendly and easy to install and configure. Generally this is true, but by monitoring several community discussions at Moodle.Org I’ve discovered that many issues can arise. If you, yourself, are not a "techie," my recommendation is to partner with someone who knows PHP and MySQL; preferrably someone who is also familiar with Moodle. To keep costs down, look for a volunteer, intern or student willing to do independent study. But the easiest, most reliable course to follow is to go ahead and spend the $1,000 to $8,000 a year it costs to purchase your hosted Moodle site from one of the Moodle Partners (http://moodle.com/partners/).

In addition to the chapter on installation and configuration, Rice includes all the same content that can be found in Cole’s Using Moodle, but Rice organizes it as the steps in a project. I found this quite helpful, when it came to preparing a Moodle course for teaching faculty at a university in Saudia Arabia.

Here’s an outline of the content to give you an idea of this approach:

• Creating Categories and Courses
•   Using Course Categories and the User Experience
•   Creating Courses
•   Adding Teachers and Students
•   Blocks
• Adding Static  Course Material
•   What Kinds of Static Course Material May be Added?
•   Files
•   Text Pages
•   Window Settings
•   Web Page
•   Link
•   Directory
•   Label
• Adding Interactive Course Material
•   Assignments
•   Choices
•   Journal
•   Lesson
•   Quizzes
•   SCORM
•   Survey
• Adding Social Cousre Material
•   Chat
•   Forum
•   Glossary
•   Wiki
•   Workshop
• Welcoming Your Students
•   First Impression: Login Page, Front Page, or Your Page?
•   Customizing the Login Page
•   Customizing the Front Page
•   Combining Anonymous, Guest, and Registered Access
•   Look and Feel
• Features for Teachers
•   Logs: Where Are They Stored?
•   Using Scales for Feedback, Rating, and Grading
•   Grades
•   The Teacher Forum

Rice also includes a closing chapter on extending and administering Moodle that acts as a mini-manual on administrative capabilities, such as integrating add-on modules or backup and restore.

Finally, in an Appendix, he provides a project checklist to help you through the creation and management of your own Moodle course.

I can’t say Rice’s content is better than Cole’s, but it is organized differently. Rice has the added advantage of being current with the look and feel of Moodle 1.9. Check out the tables of contents for each book on Amazon.Com if you’re trying to choose between them. Personally, I have both and find that they each have something to offer.

claude

Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole. O’Reilly, 2005.

Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster. O’Reilly, 2007.

As far as I know, Jason Cole’s 2005 edition of Using Moodle, was the very first book about Moodle. My comments here are based on the latest release of that original book, circa 2007.

Jason is a long-time member of the Moodle community and he seems to have done a great job of gathering the early folk wisdom of community members into a well organized, unofficial Moodle manual. In this second edition he is assisted by Helen Foster in updating everything. Overall, it’s the same great book as the original.

Using Moodle assumes you are a teacher and that someone else will provide you with the technicalsupport necessary for installation and maintenance of the software itself.

So this book is a great introduction to teaching with Moodle  for newbie instructors. It covers all the basics, including:

• Interface layout and use
• Account editing
• Course formats (by topic or by week)
• Editing versus non-editing mode
• Creating content
• Managing content
• Using forums, chats, and dialogues
• Quizzes
• Workshops
• Assignments and exercises
• Journals
• Glossaries
• Lessons
• Wikis
• Grades and scales
• Class management (enrollment, adding other teachers, removing users, groups, backup and recovery)
• Surveys and choices
• Creating the best learning environment
• Administering a Moodle installation

Since this book was published several other books covering Moodle basics have been published, but if this is the only one you can find, don’t hesitate to start here. We’ll review a several other books on Moodle in future postings. So subscribe or check back soon.

claude

While doing his graduate studies, his school installed WebCT, one of the early LMS platforms. Dougiamas was frustrated that the software’s intellectual property restrictions prevented him from enhancing the system. This is one of the major drawbacks to all commercial LMS systems. You are at the mercy of the company’s own development schedule and team and while you can make feature requests, you can only hope that your’s will be the chosen few implemented in the near future.

Because of this drawback, Martin began developing his own online learning and teaching tools and even before he
finished his advanced degree work, Moodle was born.

He chose to make Moodle “open source” so that anyone who adopted it would not have to suffer from the issue of intellectual property issues.

Like several successful open source platforms before Moodle, Dougiamas invited Moodle users to join in an online community to share in the process of identifying bugs to fix and features to add. He also founded a for-profit company to lead the development of major releases of Moodle and to provide quality control. Finally, he created a partnership certification process so that other commercial companies could become official purveyors of Moodle and its modules.

This combination of factors is undoubtedly why Moodle has been so successful. Because of the existence of a robust open source community and the availability of commercial support companies, Moodle is able to easily compete with any commercial LMS without the problem of intellectual property issues.

Dougiamas’ PhD thesis is entitled “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”.[http://dougiamas.com/thesis/] From the beginning he built constructivist learning principles into the design of Moodle itself.

While many of today’s leading commercial LMS platforms were also developed by educators, most have focused on creating tools that would easily convert existing learning materials into formats that were accessible on the Web. In other words, their primary goal was to help teachers and trainers avoid having to learn HTML, CSS or any other kind of programming language.

Moodle on the other hand, arguably places more emphasis on including a viable learning model in course construction by building it into the tools. You don’t even have to know much about constructivist learning theory to build a pedagogically sound course because Moodle makes that a part of the process. This is another key factor that differentiates Moodle from the rest of the crowd.

To aid in content creation and conversion, you can use tools like Softchalk’s Lesson Builder or the open source authoring tools eXe), both of which are SCORM compliant. Since Moodle too is SCORM compliant, you can easily import anything you create in Lesson Builder or eXe.

BTW, Dougiamas serves on the board of eXe, International. So you might guess that it works particularly well with Moodle.

Claude

NEXT TIME: Finally, a book review.

Looking Back

In previous postings, I’ve argued that you don’t need an LMS but that if you’d like to use one, there are several to choose from that don’t cost an arm and a leg. I mentioned Moodle in that list and because it is the world’s most
popular LMS, I’ve decided to do a branch posting on books about Moodle that can help you make the most of that software.

Free Moodle Course Space

Since my post on cheap LMS’s I’ve discovered a couple of sources of free Moodle classroom space:

WebTeacherTools.Com

This is a simple Moodle hosting site provided by Internet Design & Publishing Inc. a commercial web design and web hosting company. They seem to make an effort to keep the code updated to the latest version of Moodle and at the time of this writing, they are using version 1.9.7.

You first set up an account on the site, then email asking for a course space. They have a set group of categories for courses and will place your course under one of the existing categories and give you “teacher” access privileges.

Tuition Class by Tuition Ware

This site doesn’t admit to using Moodle, but it appears to have created it’s own private-label distribution of an older version of the Moodle code. They offer just a classroom space but without admin rights. So you can build a course, but you can’t modify the code or install additional modules.

Signup is easy and once you are enrolled you are given enough access permission ot create your own Moodle classroom.

According to the site: “Teachers can use this website and easily create an online course or publish course material on the internet. Students will then enroll the course (using enrollment key) to gain access to the On-Line classroom.

Claude

NEXT TIME: The Founder of Moodle