• Before you begin Moodling your course, you should rethink the design of your course activities and exercises – they cannot simply be transferred from paper into an online environment, and may need to be adapted to fit in with the Moodle environment to make them more interactive and engaging. 
  • Be creative – find uses for more interactive and collaborative activities – discussion forums are a powerful tool, and drag-and-drop type activities are more engaging than activities where students are required to simply type words into a box. 
  • Find ways of incorporating multimedia content into your Moodle course in order to better engage your students – use images, audio and video as stimuli. 
  • Clear and concise instructions for students are crucial to the success of your Moodle course. 
  • Ensure you use copyright free images and videos – a Creative Commons search is the best starting point: http://search.creativecommons.org/ 
  • Use compressed and/or optimized files that are suitable for streaming and/or downloading – if files are too big to download or take too long to load when streaming, students will lose interest and click out of the page. 
  • MP3 Files should be sampled at 44.1kHz bit rate with a bit rate of 32 or they may sound like chipmunks! 
  • Don’t use your Moodle course simply as an online repository for your now digital course materials – try to incorporate multimedia, interactive and collaborative tools. 
  • Ask questions and look at other faculties’ Moodle courses – you cannot add or edit anything in these courses but you can look at them for inspiration. 
  • Take the initiative – the internet is full of wonderful ideas and course samples and you don’t need someone to hold your hand while you go out exploring. 
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel – there is a wealth of existing language-learning resources out there. Use them and don’t waste time trying to create such things yourself. Link to them from within your Moodle course. 
  • Do NOT overload or clutter your course home page. The more clutter (e.g. images, videos, RSS feeds, blocks) you have on your course home page, the longer it will take to load. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is a long-standing web design principle and also applies to Moodle course home pages. There is no evidence to suggest that a cluttered home page with lots of bells and whistles benefits students' learning in any way.  
  • Get down and dirty – the best way to learn how to Moodle is to play around with it and experiment. You can always delete what you don’t like. 
  • And finally, if you would like to discuss Moodle or need advice or have any questions at all, please contact the Head Teacher E-Learning on 4997 whose job it is to consult and advise Moodlers at Open High School.