What to do after Moodle installation?
Previously, in our part one of the LMS series, we have explained how to choose just right LMS for you and recommended our favorite.
In this part two of our series on LMS (Learning Management Systems) we will cover initial setup and examples of customization after installation of our recommendation in part one text – Moodle LMS. Also, we will demonstrate the importance of thinking in advance and planning prior to system setup.
We will present everything trough examples of medical education portals we have made and customized for specific additional functionality.
Setting up your categories
You know what you are building so at the beginning think about categories of your future courses.
If you are expecting a lot of courses it is important to separate them into logically made, easy for users to understand and navigate, categories. Try to keep them to one level only without additional subcategories.
Here we come to the first customization we made on portals we made. In Moodle a course can not belong to more than one category. In our example, courses can be for medical doctors and doctors of dentistry but Moodle will allow assignment to one category only. If you assign it to medical doctors, users searching through doctor of dentistry category will not see it. We had to make our own extension allowing courses to be assigned to multiple categories.
User’s data collection
Collect data you must have and will need for separating users into groups of different interests. Make a list of all personal and other data you will need from your users. Don’t forget about potential to use it for marketing.
When you did that, go to site administration and add additional custom fields in user’s profiles. This is core function in Moodle so it is easy to add those. The trick is in using it.
Custom reporting
All the reports of the Moodle are predefined and there are a lot of them. The great thing is that you can and are allowed to change them. Just customize existing report which has most data you need or create your own report.
Also, Moodle reports on user activity are located on every single course. In other words, you have to enter every single course and generate a report for it. That is fine when you have up to 10 courses but it is becoming a problem fast with growing number of courses.
We needed complex and informational reports to be generated for expected 50 to 150 courses on demand. So, we have created custom report plugin which creates multitab Excel file for all the course for desired time period. Our custom reports are presenting absolute, relative values and presenting it in graphs for easy reading.
Additional value of just the right user data
If you have planed in advance, you will be able to separate users in different groups based on the collected data in user’s profiles.
All hail marketing!
We all want to have loyal, regularly returning users but we have to be proactive to keep them once they have register.
Moodle will allow you to send messages to all the users enrolled to one course or to all of the users registered on your system. But, that is far from perfect. There are some newsletter plugins you can try but those haven’t worked for us. That is why we made custom newsletter extension allowing you to send messages via email to groups by custom fields you have added to user’s profile. You can send a single message with attachment or make more of them and schedule send dates for your own campaign.
Frontend
Choose a nice template. Don’t hesitate to buy one that fits you the best. You will need scrolling banner to promote your top news and content. Just like the WordPress, Moodle has a lot off free themes that will work but are not eye catching but there are a lot of affordable premium themes to choose from.
Transitioning to production
After setting your Moodle LMS up, you are ready to create your first courses. In the next part of our series we will present to you the exact course layout that worked for years now for us. We will list all of the plugins we used to resolve some needs we had.
Author
Dr Nikola Ilic - MD and Biomedical informatics PhD