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Reconsidering the Moodle Book resource

As a Moodle “teacher” developer, I recently had one of those “aha” moments. While working on a series of help pages that became unruly, I decided to condense the Pages into a Moodle Book. I have been avoiding the Moodle Book resource for years as I thought of it as more as a resource and not and activity. Once I started migrating the pages into the Book format, my apprehension lessened. I inserted interactive Web2.0, H5P and Hot Potatoes learning objects. They worked well on the pages of the book. For our purposes these activities were used for concept introductions and self-checks. There was no linking to the Gradebook.

The Book resource in Moodle is a series of connected Moodle Pages. It is suitable for replicating a text book or a manual. In addition to text, video, audio, images; web sites, interactive activities and links can be included on Book pages. Possibly, some of us discount the Book module as a place for incorporating interactivity as it is listed in the Moodle Resources section of the Add an activity or resource chooser.

As far as the Moodle Book module being yet another feature to learn, this should not be a concern for teacher developers. This tool is very similar to the Moodle Page resource.

Here are a few results/ideas that I have learned by using the Moodle Book resource.

1: Return to existing courses and reconsider which clusters of content can be condensed into a single book. This will make the course homepage menu more tenable.

2: Embed interactive files such as H5P, Hot Potatoes and Quizlet into Books as self-checks with Iframe tags or embed tags.

3: Insert or embed media (images, audio, video) into Books to enhance engagement.

4: Insert a website into a Book with an Iframe tag to include a complete resource or set of activities on a topic.

5: Export the Book as a PDF for use offline and/or printed for a more traditional experience.

I hope that this experience may have you reconsider using the Moodle Book resource. To be honest, I have not figured out how to link an activity embedded in the Moodle Book resource to the course grade book. If you have a solution, it would be great if you considered sharing it with the community.

John Allan
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John Allan

John is a Canadian who writes about learning object development and online facilitation from a teacher's perspective.

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