How to Use Moodle™ to Create Awesome Online Courses

Creating custom training courses has never been easier. With eLearning growing at unprecedented rates, many organizations and businesses are looking to harness its power to build or bolster their online training programs and courses. But where do you start?

If you’re creating your own eLearning content, you’ll need a reliable business-focused LMS, as well as a content authoring tool. There are many authoring tools available in the market, making it difficult at times to choose the best platform for your exact needs.

Moodle™ is a powerful learning management system you can use to develop and publish online courses. Plus, it’s open-source and highly secure. The exact steps to creating a new course in Moodle™ are well-documented. In this article, we’ll first look at how to set up your new course and then we’ll look at how to make your course awesome.

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How to Create Your Own Course In Moodle™

Here are a few quick steps you can follow to create a course in Moodle™:

1. Ensure that you are a Course Creator within Moodle™. Without these privileges, you may not have sufficient access to create courses.
2. Navigate to the category you would like your course to appear in, and click on the “Add a new course” button.
3. Name your course and give it a short name as well.
4. Set the start date and the period during which students can enrol in the course.
5. There are other settings you can alter at this stage, including whether to hide specific sections from students, whether grades should be visible or hidden, and so on.
6. By default, courses are created with four empty blocks: Latest News, Upcoming Events, Recent Activity, and Course administration.
7. Ensure that you are in “edit mode” when developing your course.

This is, of course, a basic overview of how to get started. Creating a new course is the easy part. The hard part is developing a course that’s useful to your learners and covers your learning objectives.

3 Steps to Developing Awesome Online Courses

The specifics of developing an awesome online course can only be addressed on a case-by-case basis. This is because it depends on the nature of your organization as well as the people you’re looking to serve with your training initiatives.

But here are a few helpful tips to get you moving in the right direction.

1) Keep Your Target Audience In Mind

Your target audience is the most important factor to consider in creating any training program. You need to consider what they know, what they don’t know, what they need to know, and so on. You also need to think about what context or understanding they already have on the subject, and if none, provide that context.

2) Keep It Simple

Don’t get too complicated. Avoid walls of text. Break things up with headers, graphics and images, audio, videos, and other multimedia formats that enhance the learning experience. Don’t give your students more information than they need. Don’t try to do more than you are capable of as a course author. Courses should be self-contained, but also connect with other courses you’ve developed or will be developing, if applicable.

3) Make It Engaging

Again, make generous use of multimedia and gamification elements to keep your students interested in the subject matter. In general, eLearning can enhance instructor-led classroom sessions, helping students learn at their own pace, and giving them an opportunity to choose their own learning path. Help your students have fun while they are learning, and they’ll be motivated to keep learning!

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Content Creation: In-House or Outsourced?

Moodle™ is an excellent tool for creating your own online courses—which is why it forms the backbone of our own corporate LMS, Open LMS WORK. It’s intuitive to use and highly customizable. Again, the steps to creating your first course are not complicated. What may challenge you is the process of developing a course that holds the attention of your students or employees. Use the tips defined above to create a learning experience that resonates with your learners and the exact needs they have. And remember, it’s up to you whether you create your content yourself or find an expert to help you.

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the eCreators blog and has been updated to reflect those changes since eCreators became a part of Open LMS.