To our students and faculty,

Welcome to Moodle 1.7! You’ll notice a few changes, a new theme, and you’ve located the guides we’ve placed here to ease your Moodle path. (We do like to use the term moodle every so often in a humorous way.) “The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity.” http://docs.moodle.org/en/About_Moodle

Beginner is the guide to lead you, a first-time Moodler, through becoming a proficient student or instructor using Moodle as a tool. The second purpose is a reference. It may be that you don’t see or use a particular function or resource in Moodle for awhile; using the guides as a reference can refresh your memory and aid you in using the function to the fullest. Once you've mastered Beginner, move on to Student or Instructor, as your Moodle role dictates.

• To use Moodle effectively, you'll need to be able to download files, pop-up windows should be enabled, and cookies for the site need to be allowed. To learn more about making these changes, use your Web browser's help or these directions: Browser Instructions.
• Beginner help - everyone starts here
• Student help - use this one after Beginner
• Instructor help - use this one after Beginner

The guides primarily come from a university in Finland – the Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences. Their eLearning Centre posts articles and manuals in the hope that they are a help to others. In our case, they were a tremendous boost in better documenting Moodle for you. We thank them very much for sharing their insights as well as the pages themselves. Various pages were added or deleted, altered, or otherwise edited to better suit the way Moodle is set up and used at Wittenberg.

Should you have any questions, run into a problem, or if you’d like to discuss Moodle for any other reason, please contact the Solution Center at any time. Feedback about this courseware package is both welcome and encouraged!

Solution Center, Wittenberg Computing

This document last reviewed September 4, 2007.