Lauren Shinfield

My Awesome Group’s Top Twenty Tips for Moodle

// April 24th, 2011 // Uncategorized

I was privileged to be part of an awesome group at Moodle Moot UK who came up with the following Twenty Top Tips for getting Moodle started successfully in your institution and also things for maintaining and using Moodle. What a great opportunity to pick the brains of people using Moodle for all different things and from all different levels of use. I particularly like Tip Twenty (which means you have to read all the way to the end to get it!)

1) Acknowledge its limits. Don’t try and put Moodle where it just won’t go.

2) Show people what they can do with it before you show them how to do it.

3) Run some aspect of mandatory training through Moodle.

4) Make your training personalised. Find out what individual users need to enable them to use Moodle and cater your training to that where possible.

5) Acknowledge that Moodle is there to compliment face to face, not replace it. This is particularly important in education but can be said for any institution.

6) Have some ready made resources available which require very little tinkering so that people can start using them straight away.

7) Get the students or users involved in Moodle. Ask them what they want from their VLE. What do they need it to do?

Provide training, templates and a ‘How to use Moodle’ work sheet.

9) Establish a Moodle help desk. Ensure that people know where they can go to drop in for on the spot Moodle help.

10) Bribery and Competition. Get people to be able to see the need instead of telling them they need it. Bring chocolate.

11) Get people to experience being a student. Whether through creating a course that they can do or getting them to trial a course which you have created.

12) Talk to teachers. Ask them what they want to do with their current course, what is not working with that at the moment. Then go away and think about offering a Moodle based solution. We suggest giving them 2 things to try only.

13) Make it look attractive. What ever your budget pay someone to skin it for you if you don’t know how to yourself.

14) Start with the enthusiastic first. Eventually you will make them your Moodle Champions.

15) Make your own training videos so that people can see what it looks like on your Moodle. When it ‘doesn’t look like that’ exactly it can turn people off.

16) Reduce the number of clicks where you can (a technician’s advice).

17) Make a single sign on page.

18) Introduce additional non-teaching use.
a. Putting the student union on Moodle
b. Building information
c. Health care and pastoral care information.
d. Admin information
e. Finance information.

19) Make your Moodle front page the front page of your website.

20) Create a Moodle Angel (this tip really was awesome). Someone anonymous to come in and make things tidier, adds things to your courses, puts analytics on for you and gives you feed back. Imagine getting an email off your Moodle Angel to tell you how many people have logged onto your course and congratulating you on what you’ve done!