The lesson module in Moodle provides a way for a teacher to share content in an interactive way through the use pages that provide text and questions at the discretion of the teacher.

This post will provide basic information on how to setup and deliver content through a lesson.

Planning a Lesson

Lessons take a lot of planning. You have to determine what you want you students to do while also deciding how they will navigate through the lesson. This is not easy. For our example, we are going to have a brief lesson on two theories in education (perennialism and essentialism. Below is an outline of the structure of the lesson.

1. Greeting page
2. Perennialism
3. Essentialism
4. Question

Types of Pages in a Lesson

There are several types of pages you can use in a lesson there are explained as the following.

• Content pages-These pages contain content or the learning material
• Question page-These are for assessing learning
• Cluster/end of cluster-This page is use to randomize several question pages
• Branch/end of branch-Use to provide a different order in which content pages appear

In our sample lesson, we have the following types of pages

1. Greeting page (Content)
2. Perennialism (Content)
3. Essentialism (Content)
4. Question (Question)

Below are the steps for setting up a lesson

1. Select the “lesson” option in the “activity and resources” menu
2. Give the lesson a name. There are a lot of other options available that are mostly self-explanatory. For now, we will just give the lesson a name and click “save and display”
   
3. On the next page, we want to add our first content page by clicking “add content page”. After you click you will see the following
   
4. On the content page we need to add some information. The name of the page is “understanding theories of education. This goes in the “page title”. In the “page contents” we put the following
   

   Welcome to the lesson on Theories in Education. Click on the button perennialism to learn about this theory.

5. You need to scroll down and find the “content 1” box. In the “description” type “perennialism and set the jump to the next page as shown in the picture below. Then click save page

When you click “save page” you should see the web page below

Under the heading actions select “add content page”. In the new page call it “perennialism”. You can give a brief definition of  perennialism. In addition, you can add a video on perennialism as my example did. Under “content 1” type “essentialism” and have this page jump to the next page. Below is what the page should look like.

We now repeat this process for the “essentialism page” The only difference is that for “content 1” we will have this page jump to a page called “summary questions”. Below is a visual of this step

The final page we need to create is a question page. This allows us to assess student understanding of the lesson. On the home page for the lesson under “action” after the “essentialism” page select “question. This is shown in the picture below.

On the next page select “Essay” as shown below

You can now give the page a name and ask whatever question you want. Make sure you set the jump to “end of lesson” and you can also determine how many points the question is worth. Below is my example.

You can see how your lesson looks using the “preview” tab. After your students have completed the lesson you can click on the grade essays tab to mark the essays. Below is an example.

The reports tab give you the results for all students.

Conclusion

The lesson module is a great feature in Moodle. It is important to keep lessons short, focused and lively in order to keep student motivated. The only limit to a lesson is your own imagination and the ability to plan systematically.  As progress in elearning continues lessons may be replaced in the near future with the development of authoring tools and other forms of interactive content.