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Robin Fred
The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning

The stars are aligning for the rapid expansion of online learning.  Colleges and continuing education systems have been on the bandwagon for years, and they’re accelerating online courses as student needs change, gas prices rise, and technology improves.  Now many high school teachers are taking a greater interest.

Moodle is an open source course management system that makes it possible for teachers to implement their courses online.  You can manage assignments and assessments, and augment the process with chats, forums, wikis, custom web pages, even games.

QTL’s Moodle system is helping teachers in our Computer Engineering and Networking I programs plan lessons, manage their classrooms, differentiate instruction, and ‘go paperless.’ Since setting up our Moodle server a couple of years ago, we’ve occasionally heard from teachers who loved the system so much  they wanted to put their other courses into Moodle.

That’s becoming easier and easier to do, as Charles Thorne of Williamston High School is showing dozens of teachers at sessions at NCDPI’s Career & Technical Education Summer Conference. Today Charles is demonstrating how teachers can set up their own SME Servers to host their own Moodle system.  The process can be a little daunting technically, but is becoming simpler (watch the tutorial videos Charles put together - links at the end of this blog post).

Charles used QTL’s Moodle system for Computer Engineering classes and loved that.  But he wanted more control and wanted to be able to administer other classes. So he decided to set up his own Moodle system. He could have used one of the pre-configured Moodle ‘partner sites’ that Geof Duncan blogged about a couple of weeks ago, but he wanted his own system, and found a relatively easy way to set it up.  For these sessions, he’s showing teachers how to set up their own system, and he’s walking us through the process.

To make this work, you would need to have a server that students would be able to access. If you have a server in your classroom, but it’s behind a firewall or turned off at night or not accessible over the network, that’ll be of little use.

Once you have your server and way students will be able to access it, Charles recommends a free server setup called SME Server.  Basically SME Server is a LAMP setup, which is basically a standard web server setup that includes Linux for the OS, Apache for the web server, MySQL for the database, and PhP to connect the database with the interface.  SME Server has all of those elements in one package, and makes it easy to download and install Moodle and set up your Moodle database so you can get rolling with setting up your online classroom.

Charles is demonstrating this installation in VMWare, virtualization software that lets him do all of this on his Windows laptop for purposes of showing us what it will look like when we set it up ourselves.  Of course, we would do this on our own servers that are going to be always on, always available to students via classroom network or Internet connection.

Charles is a die-hard Windows guy, and when he first started this process he tried hosting it on Windows machines. That sort of worked, but was buggy. So he looked for alternatives. He tried Linux distributions that included the four components of a LAMP setup.  Ubuntu worked, but SME Server was easier.  That’s partly because SME Server has a built-in function where you can just enter a single line of code at the end of the SME Server installation process, and have the Moodle installation process pretty much automated.   It creates the Moodle database that will manage your students’ assignments and tests and grades for you.

Here’s the process, in simplest terms:

1. Download an ISO of the SME Server CD and use that to install the program on your Internet-connected server.  Most of the choices you have to make are just accepting the recommended settings.  You’ll need to name your server.  Your administrator user name will be ‘root’ and you’ll choose a password.
2. Halfway through the system will reboot, and when it returns you’ll have to sort through some options like whether to let the computer act as a server (yes) and whether to let it provide DHCP to the network (probably not).
3. When you finish the SME install and reboot again, you should get a line of code like this: [root@c3po ~]#   (in that example, c3po is what Charles named his server… you’ll see YOUR server name there).
4. Add a single space after that # sign, then the following line of code (from SME Server’s wiki):
   yum -- enablerepo=smecontribs install moodle smeserver-moodle
5. This should prompt the system to go out and download Moodle and then install it.

Near the end of installation you’ll be asked to agree to the user agreement or Moodle, and then you’ll get screens that prompt you to configure your Moodle system.  You’ll first set up the administrator account (remember, this will be a different administrator account from your ‘root’ account on the server).  Then configure the front page - give it a name, short name, description, and decide which elements users will see there.  Set the basic settings the way you want them (lots of help is available at the moodle.org site if you need it), and you’re off to the races.

Students should then be able to access the server by putting its IP address or the hostname you gave it during installation (different from the server name!) in a web browser. You should also be able to log in and manage the server from your own laptop or computer using administrator credentials.  You can add resources and assignments, add test items and lots of other options.

If you are a QTL Computer Engineering or Networking I teacher, you can export Geof Duncan’s base courses from our Moodle system and use them on yours.  However, we do NOT recommend this and cannot provide support for it!

IT teachers, setting up a Moodle server might make a great project for students.  Have your star students do it as a high-level project. Make them research it, do it, make it work, document it. All of this helps create a classroom environment where students are responsible for their own learning.

“We need to stop teaching so much and start facilitating,” Charles says.  “Our students need to learn to find the answers themselves.”

Watch Charles’ tutorial videos on this process:

1. Preparing for the Install
2. Installing SME Server
3. Installing Moodle

Note: The universal or Windows-compatible version of LAMP is called XAMPP.  For Macs, there is MAMP.