Moodle is the Learning Management System used by Clackamas to deliver online courses. This system creates a standardized platform for students, while allowing flexibility and freedom for course development by instructors. Moodle is a modular platform, meaning you can pick and choose the elements you want to add to your course. These elements are the building blocks for your course.
Some of these building blocks are called Resources. These include web links, text documents, images, video and audio files. Other building blocks are called Activities. These allow an instructor to determine the methods of communication, feedback and testing that will be used in a course. Some examples are quizzes, assignments, forums, and dynamic calendars.
Moodle provides a number of ways for instructors to organize these building blocks for best use by their students. For example, content for a course can be organized by Topic, or content can be set up in a Weekly structure. An instructor also has great freedom to develop their own system of evaluation for Quizzes and Assignments. Scores are centrally collected in a Gradebook for easy management. This allows students to check on their progress in a course at any time.
To begin, instructors are given a staging area (sandbox) where they can build their course. Courses can be safely set up in the staging area where they will not be publicly viewable. Material from an existing course can be imported into your staging area for you to build your course. Once a course has been constructed, it can be moved to the provisioned course page where students will have access to it.