9 Tutorials for watching

8 Site for Storytell-ing

7 mobile Moodl-ing

6 Course-for-matting

5 a course about Jiiing

4 pretty themes

3 [awesome] plugins

2 Cheery images

and A freebie Christmas themed Glossary!

If it’s one thing Moodle has done well is creating a community driven repository of courses that you can easily download and put to use on your own site.  There are 1000s of courses across the web from various sources (and more spring up every day).  While they are not necessarily all centrally located the MOOCH has set a nice foundation for the slow accumulation and centralization of shared resources and courses.  As more users switch to 2.x more and more courses will surely be published.  If you’re looking for free courses to checkout/download/adapt, you might find something worthwhile in the links below.

1. 1000+ courses on various site collected by Moodlenews
2. OpenLearn http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
3. MOOCH http://hub.moodle.org/
4. Moodleshare http://courses.moodleshare.com/
5. Open High School http://ocw.openhighschool.org/
6. Open of Course http://www.open-of-course.org/courses/
7. and many more.  Just check out our tags for “Free courses” and “OER“

And stay-tuned for two more days of #Moodlemas.

Get it in just a few easy steps,

1. Visit Moodle.org
2. Login
3. Visit hub.Moodle.org
4. click the RSS button on the lower right.
5. Subscribe with your favorite RSS reader et voila!

What you’ll get is a list like you see below!

The other is hosted at Moodle.org in the course exchange (both provide the same basic functions): http://goo.gl/WiBZg (3rd from the top)

If you’re a Moodle trainer and want to provide a quick shortcut for teachers to see how their materials might fit into a Moodle course, these might be a great place to start.

UPDATE: there’s also a Moodle 2.0 course template/demo which highlights each of the Moodle standard modules and some of the basics of course design and organization.  Less a course template than a simple idea generator, this course is available as a download at http://demo.moodle.net/course/view.php?id=5 for Moodle 2.0 users.

Gotta Course Template to share?  leave it in the comments:

Getting started with a course foundation is a great way to get a jump start on delivering content in Moodle (just check out all the sites with backup courses available).

Great news if you’re a 9th grade teacher, the Open High School of Utah just opened their 9th grade curriculum to the public as Open Course Ware.  And it’s all Moodle based.  That’s right, the entire 9th grade year, available to use on your Moodle with your students.  Content areas include,

• English/Language Arts
• Math
• Social Studies
• Tech
• Science

Kudos to OHS of Utah for providing this resource, a tremendous step in the right direction for providing a base-level of content to high school teachers around the country,

Unique to OHSU is our commitment to share the curriculum we have developed as an open educational resource. All of these elements combined make the Open High School of Utah the future of education; we are the face of innovation.

No login or registration required to download the courses: http://ocw.openhighschool.org/

(via David Wiley via Open Source News)

One anonymous commenter asks and important question though:

where are the GOOD open courses?

If I’ve learned anything about Moodle, it’s that course quality is in the eye of the beholder.  Or rather to put it more accurately: quality learning outcomes are in the hands of the teacher.

I’m a firm believer that the availability of open course ware, already contextualized in Moodle will be a boon for the LMS.  A collection of open content, like a public library, becomes a destination for browsing, learning, and informal learning for teachers and students.  Except that the content can be revised, remixed and mashed up to create new learning objects.  Identifying these courses, regardless of quality, is the first important step in creating the easiest entry point for teachers on the fence about using Moodle.

Certainly the quality of all courses is not based solely on the quality of the content (as made available through a Moodle backup file).  Good courses are the aggregate of student experience, learning outcomes, facilitation, support, etc.

That being said, if the first step is identifying open courses, the second step will be to index and rate them in terms of quality.  What exists now is more of a rummage sale of open course ware.  What we need is a well organized library.

Add your own to the list by clicking here.

There are courses in multiple languages as well:

PBS TeacherLine deploys open source course management system for its online professional development courses to provide more flexibility to schools licensing content [http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/blog/tag/open-education-resources/]

Big news in the world of online professional development for teachers.  PBS’s TeacherLine, a provider of technical and subject-focused PD for teachers across the country has taken a big step to streamline it’s content licensing by adopting Moodle as it’s LMS.  This will enable Moodle-using schools nationwide to quickly receive and deploy online learning modules and content to teachers locally.

It’s over 130 courses are now available to remix and re-deploy (albeit with costs in tow) in a push to ease local cost of course development,

PBS TeacherLine’s course licensing program enables schools, districts and education service agencies to expand their staff professional development programs cost-effectively. Now provided on the Moodle course management system, PBS TeacherLine’s licensed courses offer administrators more control over the course design, schedule, workloads, assignments, and facilitation. School leaders can modify the course content based on educators’ preferences, learning styles and needs to create customized professional development opportunities for their staff.

For more information

• http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/blog/tag/open-education-resources/
• http://www.pbs.org/teacherline

http://moodle-rsc.ukc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=76&username=guest

Use that link to access the course, see what it’s about, help it improve and even download it for you own Moodle.  It covers the nuts and bolts of the most important Twitter activities, including the ever-important #tag.  That’s how we stay up to date on everything #moodle!

Thanks to Twitter for this link, specifically @haylau via @adamrsc via @JISC_RSC_SE and #moodle.

We’re located a few more sites that host open Moodle courses available for download, Helen Foster graciously tagged two for us, OpenLearn @ the Open University in the UK (which houses a mind boggling number of courses and materials for download; I’m still counting them up) and a great wealth of information (as always) at Moodle.org in this forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=7304.

From a quick tally it appears as if we’ve located over 800 courses!  WOW.

SUBMIT your own shared Moodle courses by URL using this quick form: http://bit.ly/bcpPGI

REVIEW all the sites that have been submitted by visiting the published Google Doc: http://bit.ly/moodleshare

• MoodleCommons http://moodlecommons.org/
• MoodleShare http://courses.moodleshare.com/
• Moodle http://moodle.org/mod/glossary/view.php?id=918
• Demo Moodle http://demo.moodle.net/

Between them there are over 100 courses available to download and restore to your Moodle site (sweet).

That being said; there are only 100 Moodle courses out of over 3 MILLION (not a very good ratio; http://moodle.org/stats/).

We must be missing some, if you know of a site where even just one course is available for teachers to browse and possibly download let us know using the form below. You’ll be able to see the results once you share you link.  When all is said and done we’ll share the results of the survey in a few weeks and hopefully we’ll be able to point to a good many additional courses available.

http://goo.gl/YOP8