Preface

This book provides you with everything you need to include pictures, sound, video, animations, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy.

This book was written around the design of an online course called Music for an everyday life using Moodle, where teachers and students will be required to create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. Music was selected as a starting theme because besides being fun and horizontal to all cultures, it's a subject that can easily gather contributions from areas such as Science (for example, Waves and Sound), Geography (with instruments from around the world such as the Ukelele), Languages (music in itself is a language), History (from medieval music to jazz), or even Social Sciences (for example, the law around creative works). It was not made for musicians in particular, and one of its main challenges was to reach different educators from different subjects. Music was the way to get these perspectives working all together.

The tasks presented are easy to do and consume as little time as possible, for teachers and trainers with busy schedules. We will use multi-platform, free software, and Web 2.0 tools to achieve this, and it was kept in mind that using multimedia is not just about improving instructions, but also to improve the ways in which students can construct. So a lot of the examples in the book will be based on activities designed for students in which they will be required to create, discuss and assess each other's multimedia works.