Course Guide

1. How to approach this course?

The Moodle Course for Meteorology Trainers is designed primarily to be self-directed, which means that learners can access it at any time and follow it in order they wish. The Moodle Course has a modular structure.

Moodle can be used for different purposes by individuals with different roles.The first edition of the Moodle Course addresses primarily teachers. However editions for other roles, like technical support, administrative and managerial staff are foreseen in near future.

The edition of the course foreseen for teachers is divided in five Units. Each of the Units explores different training areas, like for example practice, assessment, evaluation.The Units will be released at different times, thus not all of them are available yet. The sequence of the Units reflects the course design and delivery process to some extend. For this reason it may be advantageous to follow the sequence starting from Unit 1 and finishing with Unit 5. However because the course is self-directed the choice relies on the participant. Each Unit is composed with Sections that address a specific skill in a certain training area. 

Example ways to approach this course:

• Browse a Unit and find a section most relevant to your current work. For example, you are preparing a course in Moodle for the first time and you would like to make the course interface friendly and easy to read for the users. Go to Unit 1 and browse the section about "Design a clear course structure". If you decide to take a Quiz related to that section, you will complete one item required for a Unit 1 badge. 
• Improve your skills in certain Moodle area. For example, you would like your courses to get more practical but you need a hint where to start. Take the entire Unit 4 to get more complete overview on ways to implement practice in Moodle. After completing all Quizzes in Unit 4, you will receive a badge for it.
• Improve your skills in various Moodle areas. Take the whole course with the pace and sequence most suitable for you. If you take all the Quizzes in all Units, you will receive all six badges and consequently a course certificate.

2. Where to practice?

Your own Moodle website

The best place for practice is your own installation of Moodle. Ask your Moodle administrator to create a practice environment. You will need teacher rights to be able to practice. In case your organization does not have Moodle available yet, you may use other solutions like setting up account with MoodleCloud, installing Local Moodle on your own computer or using the Moodle demo server.

MoodleCloud:

In five steps you can create your own Moodle site for free https://moodlecloud.com/en/signup

•     50 users maximum.
•     200Mb disk space
•     Core themes and plugins only
•     One site per phone number

Note that there are some limitations and ads for this free service but it is a great option for practicing.You can find more information at https://moodle.com/cloud/

Local Moodle

3. Communication guidance

The self-directed edition of the course is meant for individual study. Furthermore, as the course is offered all year long there is no one cohort you will be taking course with. Moodle is a very popular tool world-wide. There are many online communities you can access that discuss Moodle related topics. 

The Moodle community is large and active. If you browse their forums, you are likely to find an answer for your question. If not, the members should reply rather promptly. As you become a part of it, you may also enjoy supporting others. Problem solving is a challenging way to learn. 

https://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5

CALMet Commons is a community focused on training of meteorology, hydrology and related sciences. Moodle is one of the tools commonly used by the members. Browse articles related to Moodle, or ask questions through the Forum/Q&A and connect to professionals that use Moodle with similar purpose. 

http://www.calmet.org/

For technical questions, use the Forum in the Start page. 

Lastly, the communication from you we are looking forward to is the course evaluation. Fill in the Evaluation form and help us to improve this course.

4. Assessment guidance

Self-assessment

In the self-directed edition of this course, you are asked to self-assess the results of your practical exercises. You can compare your results with the instructions and with the examples. 

Quizzes for each Section

Each Section in a Unit is concluded with a Quiz. The Quiz addresses only the skills practiced in that particular Section and the content is covered in one of the Lessons. The Quiz can be taken multiple times. In case you do not succeed first time, feel free to go back to Lessons of that Section. The Quiz is considered successfully completed with 80% score. Quiz questions are in different formats, multiple-choice or multiple-response, true/false and matching. Depending on the question, there might be one or more correct answers. This is indicated in the text of the question.

Integration of your skills

A recommended way of assessing your skills is to practice integrating them in the real project. Are you working on preparing a Moodle course at the moment? Try to apply what you learned in this current project. 

Community of practice

In case self-assessment is not satisfactory for you, you may always ask your peers in one of the communities to review your work. The community members can also suggest alternative approaches.

Moodle community: https://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5
CALMet Commons: http://www.calmet.org/

Badges

You can obtain a badge for each Unit after successfully completed all the Quizzes and seeing all the Lessons. Your progress towards the badge is indicated in the Course completion block. Read more about badges.

Certificate

A course certificate of attendance is granted after having completed all the Units in the teacher path. In practice this means that after collecting all five badges you will be eligible to receive a certificate of attendance. 

5. Technical guidance

Browsing online

You will need an Internet connection to access the course website. The course will work on PC, Mac or mobile devices. You do not need a specific browser. You should be able to use any of the most common browsers like Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari. For details about supported browsers, please check: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.8_release_notes#Browser_support

Offline

Remember that all the Lessons can be printed out or saved as a PDF for offline viewing.

1. First open the Lesson you would like to save or print out.
2. Then go to the Settings block and
   • Click the Print book link to print the entire lesson
   • Click the Print this chapter to print the current page only.

Video and audio

The introduction to the Unit includes audio files in MP3 format. They will play directly in the Moodle page. The videos are linked from external YouTube pages. Check the YouTube help files in case you have problem to view the videos: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/175292?hl=en

6. Copyrights and reuse

The CALMet Moodle Course for Trainers and Educators in Earth sciences is a shared effort of different organizations (EUMETSAT, WMO, EUMeTrain, EUMETCAL, VLab, IMGW-PIB & MeteoFrance). You are free to reuse and remix the material for educational purposes under the Creative Commons license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.