A Guide for Teachers and Content Creators

This document provides just enough information to get you started using the AlwaysOn Learning web site, powered by Moodle, an open source virtual learning environment. For more complete information, please refer to the teacher documentation for Moodle at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation .

The AlwaysOn Learning virtual learning environment can be accessed at http://moodle.alwayson.edu.au /.

Creating an Account

Before you can make use of AlwaysOn Learning , you need to create an account.

1. Visit http://moodle.alwayson.edu.au/login/ and click the “Create new account” button.

2. Fill in your details, and make a note of your user-name.

3. Check your e-mail for the sign-up message from “AlwaysOn Admin” and follow the confirmation link it contains. You now have a user account for AlwaysOn Learning .

4. If you wish to be able to create your own courses (as opposed to teach courses created by others), please reply to your sign-up message with a request giving your user-name and the person to be contacted for approval (Dr. Margaret Robertson or Dr. Andrew Fluck). You should receive a reply in one to two days confirming your promotion to course creator status.

Creating a Course

1. Make sure you are logged in to AlwaysOn Learning and that you have been promoted to course creator status.

2. Select the “Search courses” link in the “Course categories” box or go directly to http://moodle.alwayson.edu.au/course/ .

3. Select the appropriate category for your new course (at the time of writing, the available categories are: “Miscellaneous”, “Year 6”, “Year 7”, “Year 9”). If you believe that a new category should be added for your course please e-mail a request to admin@alwayson.edu.au .

4. Once in the correct category, click the “Add a new course” button at the bottom of the screen.

5. Each field in the “Edit course settings” form has a small question mark next to it which will display a short help page when clicked. Most of the fields can be left with their default values, but you must provide the following:

1. Full name -- the full name of the course, e.g: “Drugs: Making Decisions”.

2. Short name -- a ‘course code’ used in menu entries, e.g: “SLM201”. This must be unique.

3. Summary -- one or two paragraphs describing the course.

4. Format -- should be changed to “Topic format”.

5. Enrolment key -- the ‘password’ that students must give to be able to enrol in this course. If left blank, anyone will be able to enrol in the course.

6. Click the “Save changes” button and the system will create your course unless there are problems provided.

7. Once your course is created you will be asked to assign teachers to it. You should add at least yourself here:

1. Type the teacher’s name into the text box and click the “Search” button.

2. Find the correct entry and click the “Add teacher” link next to it.

3. When you’ve added teachers to the course, clicking on its short name in the bread-crumbs at the top and bottom of the screen will take you to the main page of your brand new course. All that is left to do now is add some content!

You can change any of these settings later by following the “Settings” link in the “Administration” box on your course’s main page.

Adding Content to a Course

After creating a course, all that is left to do is add your content and get the students learning!

1. Log-in to AlwaysOn Learning .

2. Navigate to the main page of your course using the links in the “Course categories” box.

3. If there is a button labelled “Turn editing on” in the top-right corner of the screen, click it. Your AlwaysOn Learning screen should look something like:
   

4.  

5. Beneath the “Topic outline” heading are a number of boxes, each of which can contain a short description and resources and activities. The first box is for materials which apply to the whole course like unit outlines, calendars, contact details. The system automatically adds a news forum for announcements to this first section. The remaining sections 1, 2, 3, ... represent the topics of your course, each of which should contain the materials and activities for a relatively discrete section of the course.

6. To edit the description of any of the boxes, click on the small icon of a hand holding a pen. It is a good idea to use this space to give a short description and instructions for each topic.

7. Topics can be hidden from students (with the eye icon), highlighted as the current topic (with the light-bulb icon), and moved up or down (with the arrow icons).

8. Resources are static items like images, links, documents, and web pages which the students may refer to, but do not interact with the AlwaysOn Learning system. Activities, on the other hand, allow the students to interact with AlwaysOn Learning to answer questions, interact with each other, build new resources, and more. AlwaysOn Learning supports a variety of resource and activity types, most of which are self explanatory. To add a resource, select the appropriate option from the “Add a resource...” drop-down in the appropriate topic. Likewise, to add an activity, select the appropriate option from the “Add an activity...” drop-down. For more information on the types of resources and activities supported click to question mark icon next to each drop-down.

9. As an example, consider uploading a small web page you have already created along with the images and other materials it requires.

1. Create a folder on your computer containing the web-page and its materials.

2. Create a zip archive of this folder (Both Windows XP and Mac OS X should allow you to do this through a ‘right-click’ menu).

3. In your course, select “Link to a file or web site” from the “Add a resource...” drop-down. Give the new resource a name and summary.

4.   Click on the “Choose or upload a file...” but ton and a new window should pop up displaying the file area for your course. Click the “Upload a file” button, select the zip archive you created in step two, and click “Upload this file”.

5. Our zip archive should now be listed with a number of actions including “Unzip”. Click “Unzip” to unpack the web page and its materials. You should now have a zip archive and a directory. Click on the name of the directory to enter it, then click the “Choose” action beside the web-page.

6. You should now be returned to the “Link to a file of web site” page. Clicking the “Save changes” button will add a link to the web page you just uploaded to our course, and will show us the new web page as it will appear to students.
   

7.  

Using AlwaysOn Learning with Students

To use your new course in the classroom, distribute the AlwaysOn Learning Instructions for Students handout and tell them the name of the course they should enrol in and the enrolment key, if you set one. You can monitor and update the list of enrolled students by following the “Students” link in the “Administration” box.

More Information

For more information, please see the Moodle documentation at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation . If you require additional assistance, or encounter any problems please feel free to contact admin@alwayson.edu.au for assistance, though do be aware that it may take one or two days to receive a reply.