Moodle Best Practices : Resources

“Resources” is a generic term encompassing the different forms of content in your course. A resource can be of one of four different types:

1. An uploaded file. This may be an Acrobat document of scanned pages from a book, a MS Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, an MP3 file, or an html file. These are created outside the Moodle system and uploaded into the Files area of your course. The 'resource' is merely a link to this file. [Add a resource : Link to file or web site]

2. Compose text or html. You can compose a text or html page directly within Moodle using the built-in editor. [Add a resource : Compose web page]

3. Link to a web site. This can be your own personal web site at Earlham, a link to a bibliographic resource which requires logging in, or a general URL of a web page. [Add resource : Link to file or web site]

4. Display directory (aka folder). Use this when you want to give students access to a collection of files. You'll need to create a folder in the Files area of you course, upload, move or copy the files into that folder and then link to it from Display directory. Your students will then open this as a folder and be able to download all the files. [Add a resource : Display a directory].

There are different ways of handling html files (web pages) within Moodle and each has its advantages and disadvantages.

There are three crucial components to describing a resource on Moodle:

1. Name: This is displayed in the Outline and what your students click on to read. It should be concise but descriptive; for example, an Acrobat resource of a book chapter (or part thereof) might have the chapter heading as its name.
   
2. Summary: It's crucial to provide adequate detail here for a number of reasons:
   
   1. to model what you expect your students to produce in their own bibliographies
   2. so that you can keep track of exactly what material you have made available

   For pages from a book, I would suggest including the Title, Author & year, chapter number and heading and page numbers. For every file you should indicate what kind it is, eg Adobe Acrobat, MS Word, and give the number of pages and file size. This will enable your students to get a good idea of how long the file should take to open.
   Example:

   Algernon Snibble, 1886, From Mafeking Street to Kipling Road: Reminiscences from the East End
   Introduction: East End communities in the good old days.
   Adobe Acrobat 6 pages, 2.5Mb

   This tells the student that she will need the Acrobat reader on her machine to access this resource and it's only 6 pages so she can probably read it on screen and not bother to print it out.
   
   Web references (URL) should have a link in the summary section to the home page of the originating site and a brief description of what's on the page. Date of page creation can also be useful.

3. Location: If you have asked the secretary to name the file sensibly as above it'll be easy for you to find the correct file in amongst the hundreds of others that you'll end up with.

A resource can displayed in two basic ways:

1. Inside the Moodle window (Same window). Here there is the normal site navigation at the top of the page allowing the student to easily return to the course. Choosing Put resource in a frame to keep site navigation visible anchors the site navigation at the top of the page and scrolling down just moves the content.
   Use this as the normal option.
   
2. Popup window (New window). Here a new window pops up and you can specify the default width and height and other attributes of the window. The disadvantage is that these windows can hang around and get in the way, and popups may also be blocked so that the window does not appear.
   Use this when you want students to read some instructions online and do a task in a different Moodle window.

Note:

Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel files will display within the Internet Explorer browser window rather than running MS Word. This does cause consternation amongst students — a good solution is to convert to Acrobat format (Print to pdf), this also has the advantage of producing a smaller file and the student doesn't need the MS Office suit to read the file.
The Mozilla Firefox browser will start up the requisite Microsoft application however.

When composing sections of the course Outline or an Activity you may want to add a link to a web site. It is possible (and indeed easy) to add a direct link to the page on the web site that you want to reference (highlight some text and click on the Link button). Adding title text to this link allows you to give some extra detail which will appear when the student's mouse hovers over the link and choosing Target _blank will force the page to start in a new window. However, this is not the best practice from a pedagogical standpoint since

The alternative is to create an annotated URL as a resource and link to this instead. This is easily accomplished as follows:

1. Start up a new tab (you'll need Mozilla Firefox or Safari for this), open Moodle and navigate to the course Outline.
2. Add a resource : Link to file or web site in the same week or topic section referenced in your original open tab
3. Assuming that you already have the web site open, copy its address and paste it into the Location field. Selecting New window makes sense in this circumstance because the referenced page will then popup without interfering with the flow of the original text.
4. Briefly describe the contents and purpose of this web page and insert a link to the originating home page of the site.
5. When you Save changes the page will appear — it may popup in a separate window if you enabled New window. Locate the originating window and copy the URL from the address bar — this is your resource URL.
6. Now return to the tab containing the text you wanted to link from, highlight the text string you want to click on, press the Link button and paste in the resource URL address you copied from the other tab. In the Title field you could make the comment that this is a Moodle resource, and then OK.

Although this does seem rather complex and long winded nevertheless the technique has some advantages. It allows you to see all the web URLs you have referred to in the course and the summaries tell you what content is covered by references to web sites. Direct links makes these references de facto invisible. It is pedagogically more satisfying because now the list of resources can form the basis of their exam or quiz revision. In addition, you will be modelling the way that you want your students to refer to web resources in their own work by means of annotated links in a section of references.