The first attempt to use MOODLE at the MIE, and probably in Mauritius, was made in year 2000 with students of B.Ed for a course on Research Methodology delivered by the Education Studies Department under the supervision of Om Varma, Head of Education Studies Department. Ever since, this course has been available online for all subsequent cohorts of B.Ed students. Support was also offered to other academics at the MIE to use the platform. The Home Economics Department used the platform for courses in Food and Nutrition for B.Ed students. The same facility is offered today to students of Teacher's Diploma Primary following mixed mode courses with the MIE and the Indira Gandhi National Open University and a number of Science Support programmes offered by the MIE.
Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.
The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler.
The Moodle platform offers opportunity for receiving all teaching and learning materials online, students can engage in forum discussions, send mail and chat with each other, submit assignments, receive feedback from tutors, obtain their grades.
Facilities include adding resources, composing texts, web page, website, directory or label as well as adding assignment, forum, chat, glossary, journal, lesson, quiz, survey, wiki and workshop. Online evaluation of the courses is also possible for quality assurance purposes.
To get support for using MOODLE click on Free Support