Book Module

I've not blogged for a while because the development side of my Moodle has slowed down and I've been working on putting courses up.

BUT!  I stumbled across something completely by accident that it well suited to my needs.  That thing is the Book Module.

The Book Module works as a kind of alternative to Lessons, allowing you to put together a series of pages into a "book" which can then be exported or printed by the learner.  The navigation is simpler, there are forward and back arrows on the top right and bottom right and a Table of Contents block appears where the navigation block would normally be (top left for my site).

The Book Module in action

 The simplified navigation and boxed off content area are what appeals to me about using the book module.  The border can be altered through the CSS.  I would like to be able to theme each book so I could have different colour borders but I haven't really looked at that yet.

There is still no smooth way to go from the end of a book to a quiz and then onto a new book (I've just used links within the last page of the book and in the quiz feedback.) but there wasn't in lessons either.  You can't use the question pages in a book the way you could in a lesson but I didn't like those anyway.

There is capacity to embed a quiz or a Hot Pot quiz within a book using an iFrame but I have yet to get that working smoothly so I'll do a post about that later.

Another pretty big drawback of the Book module is the completion options.  You can only have a book marked complete upon being viewed.  So if a student looks at the first page the book is marked as complete and anything relying on that book being complete becomes available.  However, because of the simplified navigation it is not immediately obvious to the casual user that the next step is now open. 

Another thing, if a user gets half way through a book and leaves the page, their progress is not remembered, meaning next time they come back they have to start the book again.  I've been keeping the section of my courses short anyway (about five or six pages per book with a quiz in between) so it's not too bad for me but more complex courses might have to stick to the lesson module.

The Book Module is installed the same way as other contrib modules.  Download the correct file for you build of Moodle from here.  Unzip that file and upload it to the mod folder of your Moodle.  When you login as an admin to Moodle you'll have the notification page come up, just click continue at the bottom and then you'll be able to choose Book from the resources drop down in any course.