How to setup a Virtual Learning Environment for your school at no cost.

Teaching and learning has been changing from traditional class room, face-to face learning environments to blended learning which is a combination of face to face classroom learning environments and interactive and collaborative digital and online media environments, which has been driven by internet –driven technologies such as cell phones, laptops, iPads, tablets and so on. The problem with the educational setting in today’s world is that the digital immigrants (who are people who grew up without technology and adapted them later) are often teaching the digital natives (who are the people who have grown up with technology) according to Marc Prensky. This relationship between the digital natives and digital immigrants causes friction among all participants and now there is a need to bridge the gap with technology. In order to bridge the gap a new assisting technology has been introduced over the years, which is e-Learning environment which helps to supplement the existing learning and teaching environments. Moodle is one of the most popular open source virtual learning environment that enables the design and development of flexible online learning environments  that can be accessed anytime and in anyplace by students.  

Moodle Installation

You can either install your VLE on your local network or over the Internet:

Option A: Local Network

To install moodle on your local network you have three options depending on the OS environment.

Installation of Moodle in a Unix environment

Installation of Moodle in a Windows environment

Installation of Moodle in a Mac OS X environment

I will focus majorly on windows environment since majority of schools run windows machine.

Installation in a Windows Environment

You can either install on IIS (for larger windows installation) or XAMPP (it’s suitable for small number of users)

For your look and feel I will focus on small number of users XAMPP

XAMPP is a free Apache distribution that contains MySQL and PHP, you can download XAMPP at http://download.moodle.org/windows

You can download  MOODLE_32_STABLE or any stable version.

1. Copy the distribution to a directory on your PC and unzip to any directory of your choice.
2. Check to be sure that any software is not using port 80(such as Skype) ,change it to use alternative port.
3.  Double click on start moodle.exe
4. Allow mysqls.exe through your firewall
5. A command line window will appear, which has to stay open ,you can minimize the window, but do not close it.
6. Visit the web browser and enter http://localhost on your address bar
   
7. You will see the installer being launched. All values have already been populated ,all you have to do is to navigate through all the screens until you see setup admin account.
8. Enter the administrator details and select update profile.
   
9. Enter the front page settings for your site.
   
10. Check that no warnings are displayed in the notification area.
11. That’s it!  your moodle should be running now.
    

For larger users installations on windows using IIS on windows server ,contact me lets chat and build it.