Lingkungan Kuliah Berbasis Web:

Pengantar

Muhamad A. Martoprawiro

Penciptaaan web-based learning environment di http://courses.

fmipa.itb.ac.id/ diharapkan memberi sumbangan terhadap
pengembangan kualitas pembelajaran di FMIPA. Peningkatan
kualitas ini dapat berupa peningkatan proses belajar mahasiswa
melalui peningkatan interaksi belajar antar-mahasiswa dan dengan
pengajarnya, peningkatan akses ke sumber belajar (ebook, Internet
resources, dll.), peragaman kegiatan belajar, dll. Peningkatan
kualitas pembelajaran juga bisa berupa terjadinya interaksi saling
mengisi antar satu mata kuliah dengan mata kuliah lainnya,
melalui materi pembelajaran yang bersifat terbuka, di samping
menguatkan keterkaitan antara kuliah prasyarat dan kuliah
lanjutan. Dalam jangka panjang, situs ini dapat menumbuhkan
kompetensi Fakultas MIPA ITB untuk membagi proses
pembelajarannya bagi universitas lain melalui distance-learning atau
online-learning. Distance-learning yang baik hanya dapat muncul jika
sistem tersebut telah secara menahun dan berkelanjutan
dilaksanakan oleh suatu fakultas atau program studi sebelum
ditawarkan bagi universitas lain. Bisa dipertimbangkan pula agar
dalam perjalanannya, bahkan sebelum ditawarkan sebagai suatu
sistem pembelajaran jarak jauh, sistem tsb. dibuat terbuka,
terutama akses terhadap materi pembelajarannya, sehingga dapat
terjadi umpan balik yang menerus dari komunitas ilmiah dan
pendidikan, yang tak terbatas pada lingkungan ITB.
Moodle memiliki beragam fitur yang memungkinkan
terjadinya pengintensifan proses belajar, peragaman (diversifikasi)
kegiatan belajar, peningkatan efisiensi belajar, dll. Fitur yang
tersedia mulai dari yang sederhana seperti forum diskusi kuliah,
tes online, pengumpulan berkas tugas, hingga wiki-based workgroup
writing yang memanfaatkan kemampuan sistem untuk meng-
hasilkan e-book dengan puluhan penulis setara dengan kemampuan
yang diterapkan pada free-encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org.
Fitur terakhir, misalnya, memungkinkan pengembangan kegiatan
penulisan buku atau tulisan lain secara bersama oleh mahasiswa
peserta kuliah. Pengajar setiap saat dapat melihat rangkuman
kegiatan yang dilakukan setiap mahasiswa, dalam berbagai
tampilan.
Pada implementasinya, perlu dibuat sistem yang memung-
kinkan proses pengembangan yang berkelanjutan. Pada sistem ini,
dosen perlu diberi keleluasaan untuk memusatkan perhatiannya

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pada pengembangan materi ajar, interaksi yang konstruktif dengan
mahasiswa, dll., dan tak terlalu dibebani oleh hal-hal yang bersifat
teknis administratif. Dengan demikian diperlukan staf pendukung
yang memusatkan perhatian pada sisi-sisi administratif dan teknis
dari pemeliharaan dan pengembangan sistem (yang selanjutnya
kita sebut “administrator”). Sebagai contoh, setiap awal semester
administrator mempersiapkan berbagai mata kuliah yang
ditawarkan pada semester tsb., beserta nama-nama dosen yang
akan di beri hak untuk mengembangkan online-learning untuk
masing-masing mata kuliah. Tim administrator juga berperan
untuk membantu dosen dan mahasiswa jika mengalami kesulitan
dalam memanfaatkan sistem tersebut.
Sebelum Moodle dipilih, pada tahun 2004 telah dilakukan
tinjauan yang cukup menyeluruh terhadap berbagai open-source
packages untuk membangun kuliah berbasis Internet, antara lain:
ATutor (http://www.atutor.ca), EduPlone (eduplone.net),
CourseWork (http://getcoursework.stanford.edu), di samping
Moodle (http://moodle.org). Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir
hingga saat itu, open-source packages sudah berkembang cukup jauh
sehingga dapat bersaing dengan produk komersial seperti WebCT
atau Blackboard. Saat ini, Moodle yang berupa program "open
source" bisa dikatakan telah setara atau bahkan lebih kuat
dibandingkan dengan program komersial yang disebut.
Selain dapat digunakan sebagai sistem pembelajaran online
secara mandiri (tanpa ketergantungan terlalu banyak pada
perangkat lunak yang lain), dengan Moodle setiap dosen tetap
dapat memanfaatkan kebiasaan yang selama ini dilakukannya
dalam pengembangan materi e-learning. Moodle dapat menjalan-
kan peran mengorganisasi hasil-hasil yang telah dikembangkan
selama ini. Bagi mahasiswa, penggunaan Moodle akan sangat
membantu, karena pendakian “learning curve” pada pembelajaran
online menjadi tak terlalu tajam ketika berpindah dari satu mata
kuliah ke mata kuliah berikutnya.
Halaman-halaman berikut diadaptasi dari Teachers’ Manual
dari Moodle yang bisa dibaca langsung lewat sistem yang di-
bangun di FMIPA (http://courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id), dengan dileng-
kapi catatan-catatan tambahan yang dirasa relevan.

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 “Lingkungan Belajar FMIPA”
Using Moodle
(Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment)

Teacher Manual

These pages is a very quick guide to creating online courses with Moodle
that has been setup at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
ITB as “Lingkungan Belajar FMIPA”. It outlines the main functions that
are available, as well as some of the main decisions you'll need to make. It
is adapted from Moodle Teacher Manual, with additional info specific for
academic staffs at the FMIPA ITB. The online version of this manual
(though not identical with this version) can be accessed at http://courses.
fmipa.itb.ac.id/doc. (Click “Teacher Manual” on the left).
Sections in this document:
1. Getting started
2. Course settings
3. Uploading files
4. Setting up activities
5. Running the course
6. Further information

Getting started
This document assumes your site administrator (admin@courses.
fmipa.itb.ac.id) has set up Moodle and given you new, blank course
to start with. It also assumes you have logged in to your course
using your teacher account.
If you have not logged in, open the Moodle course web site (at
the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences ITB, the address is
http://courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id). Click “login” in the upper right
corner of the screen, type in your username (Nama Pengguna) and
password, and then click “Login”.1 You will see the courses that are
under your responsibility on the lower left of the screen. Click one
of the courses to view/edit the course, or click “logout” (Keluar) on
the upper right corner of the screen after you finish working with
the course web site.

1For the first time login, your password is your email user and your password is the
“consonant” characters of your username. You can change your password later.

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 Here are three general tips that will help you get started.
1. Don't be afraid to experiment:
feel free to poke around and change things. It's hard to break
anything in a Moodle course (“Lingkungan Belajar FMIPA”),
and even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.
2. Notice and use these little icons:
- the edit icon lets you edit whatever it is next to.
- the help icon will provide you with a popup help window
- the open-eye icon will let you hide something from
students
- the closed-eye icon will make a hidden item available
3. Use the navigation bar at the top of each page
this should help remind you where you are and prevent getting
lost. The navigation bar is started to be viewable after you click
one of the courses. Click any phrase in the navigation bar to go
to other parts of the course.

Navigation bar. Click “FMIPA” (in the picture above, it is “BelajarKimia”, as the picture is
from Moodle system at Chemistry ITB) to go to the front page of the “Lingkungan Belajar
FMIPA” with all your courses listed, click “KI1211” to the front page of the current course,
etc.

Course settings
The first thing you should do is look under the "Administration"
(Administrasi) on your course home page and click on "Settings..."
(Pengaturan...). Note that this link, and in fact the whole
Administration section is only available to you (and the site
administrator). Students will not even see these links.
On the Settings page you can change a number of settings
about your course, ranging from its name to what day it starts. I
won't talk here about all these, as they all have a help icon next to
them, which explains them all in detail. However, I will talk about
the most important of these – enrolment password (Sandi
Pendaftaran) and the course format.
You should remember the “enrolment password” (Sandi
Pendaftaran) and give this password to your students, as they have
to fill in this password when they visit your course for the first
time. Of course, you can change this enrolment password through
the Settings page. Specific suggestion for FMIPA ITB lecturers: give
this password to your students at the first week of your course, and
ask the administrator (admin@courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id) to create a
forum called “Diskusi Materi Kuliah”, even if you have not develop

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your course web site. Your students will still be able to use the
forum to discuss the course materials among all participants of
your course. You can also give the password to other people that
you wish to allow them to view your course as guests.
The course format that you choose will decide the basic layout
of your course, like a template. Moodle version 1.5 has many
formats - in future there will probably be many more (please send
ideas to martin@moodle.org or admin@courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id)
Here are some screenshots of three sample courses in each of
three formats (ignore the different colours, which are set for a
whole site by the site administrator):

Weekly format:

In this format, you can put your weekly course activities in boxes
that represent course weeks. The view of this format can be seen in
the previous page, or in a blank course at the Faculty of
Mathematics and Natural Sciences course web site, the view of this
format will be similar to the picture below. It is suggested that at
the top screen (before the first week section), the course-web at the
FMIPA ITB has two general forums: Forum Berita and Diskusi Materi
Kuliah, and one resource: Materi. The second forum is designed to

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be the most usable forum that all students and their lecture discuss
course materials. You can use the forum by clicking the forum icon,
or add more activities to this page by clicking “Turn Editing On”
(Hidupkan Mode Ubah) button at the upper right of the screen (see:
“Setting Up Activities” below).

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Topics format:

Note that the weekly and topics formats are very similar in
structure. The main difference is that each box in the weekly format
covers exactly one week, whereas in the topic format each box can
cover whatever you like. The social format (see next page) doesn't
use much content at all and is based around just one forum - this is
displayed on the main page.

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 Social format:

The weekly format is adequate for most of the courses at the

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences ITB, so that all the
courses have been setup in weekly format. For some courses, e.g.
Seminar or Tugas Akhir, other formats may be more appropriate.
See the help buttons (Bantuan) on the Course Settings page for
more details.

Uploading files
You may have existing content that you want to add to your
course, such as web pages, audio files, video files, word documents,
or flash animations. Any type of file that exists can be uploaded
into your course and stored on the server. While your files are on
the server you can move, rename, edit or delete them.
All of this is achieved through the Files link in your
Administration menu (on the left). The Files section looks like this:

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 or in one course at the Department of Chemistry ITB:

This interface is only available to teachers - it is not accessible

by students. Individual files are made available to students later on
(as "Resources" - see the next section). However, as said before, for
all courses at the FMIPA, we suggest that you create at least one
directory that will be accessible by students, i.e. Materi
subdirectory. In this workshop, it will be shown how to create the
folder and how to setup the condition that any files you put in
Materi subdirectory can be accessed by your students. To upload
files, click “Upload file” button, or click Materi first, then “Upload
file”, if you want your students to be able to see those files.

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 As you can see in the screenshot, files are listed alongside
subdirectories. You can create any number of subdirectories to
organise your files and move your files from one to the other. For
example, in the case of the courses at the suggested FMIPA ITB
course, any files that you upload to root directory can only be
accessed by the teacher, but if you put them in Materi subdirectory,
your students can access.
Uploading files via the web is currently restricted to one file at
a time. If you want to upload a lot of files at once (for example a
whole web site), it can be a lot easier to use a zip program to
compress them into a single file, upload the zip file and then unzip
them again on the server (you will see an "unzip" link next to zip
archives).
To preview any file you have uploaded just click on its name.
Your web browser will take care of either displaying it or
downloading it to your computer.
HTML and text files can be edited in-place online. Other files
will need to be edited on your local computer and uploaded again.
If you upload a file with the same name as an existing file it will
automatically be overwritten.
A final note: if your content resides out on the web then you
don't need to upload the files at all - you can link directly to them
from inside the course (see the Resources module and the next
section).

Setting up activities
Building a course involves adding course activity modules to the
main page in the order that students will be using them. You can
shuffle the order any time you like. One important note: even if you
do not set up any additional activity modules, you and your
students still can use two default modules that are provided to all
Moodle installation (“Berita Terbaru” and “Upcoming Events” on
the right side of the screen). At minimum, your course-web will
become a supporting site to your classroom activities. Sure, the
additional modules, including those that are put in each week, will
make your course web site a “real online course”.
To turn on editing, click "Turn on editing" (Hidupkan Mode
Ubah) under Administration. This toggle switch shows or hides the
extra controls that allow you to manipulate your main course page.
Note in the first screenshot above (of the Weekly format course)
that the editing controls are turned on.
To add a new activity, simply go to the week or topic or
section of the screen where you want to add it, and select the type
of activity from the popup menu. Here is a summary of all the
standard activities in Moodle 1.0:

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Assignment
An assignment is where you set a task with a due date and a
maximum grade. Students will be able to upload one file to satisfy
the requirements. The date they upload their file is recorded.
Afterwards, you will have a single page on which you can view
each file (and how late or early it is), and then record a grade and a
comment. Half an hour after you grade any particular student,
Moodle will automatically email that student a notification.

Choice
A choice activity is very simple - you ask a question and specify a
choice of responses. Students can make their choice, and you have a
report screen where you can see the results. I use it to gather
research consent from my students, but you could use it for quick
polls or class votes.

Forum
This module is by far the most important - it is here that discussion
takes place. When you add a new forum, yu will presented with a
choice of different types - a simple single-topic discussion, a free-
for-all general forum, or a one-discussion-thread-per-user.

Journal
Each journal activity is an entry in the whole course journal. For
each one you can specify an open-ended question that guides what
students write, as well as a window of time in which the journal is
open (weekly course format only). A general rule of thumb is to
create one journal per week. Encourage students to write
reflectively and critically in these journals, as they are only
available to them and you. Afterwards, you will be able to grade
and comment all the entries for that week or topic, and students
will receive an automatic email informing them of your feedback.
Journals are not designed to be continually added to - if you need
to do that then add more journal activities.

Resource
Resources are the content of your course. Each resource can be any
file you have uploaded or can point to using a URL. You can also
maintain simple text-based pages by typing them directly into a
form.

Quiz
This module allows you to design and set quiz tests, consisting of
multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions. These
questions are kept in a categorised database, and can be re-used
within courses and even between courses. Quizzes can allow
multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the

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 teacher can choose whether to give feedback or to show correct
answers. This module includes grading facilities.

Survey
The survey module provides a number of predefined survey
instruments that are useful in evaluating and understanding your
class. Currently they include the COLLES and the ATTLS
instruments. They can be given to students early in the course as a
diagnostic tool and at the end of the course as an evaluation tool (I
use one every week in my courses).
After adding your activities you can move them up and down
in your course layout by clicking on the little arrow icons ( ) next
to each one. You can also delete them using the cross icon , and
re-edit them using the edit icon .

Running the course

There are some big plans to extend this document into a more
comprehensive tutorial. Until then here are a few ideas:
1. Subscribe yourself to all the forums so you keep in touch with
your class activity.
2. Encourage all the students fill out their user profile (including
photos) and read them all - this will help provide some context
to their later writings and help you to respond in ways that are
tailored to their own needs.
3. Keep notes to yourself in the private "Teacher's Forum" (Forum
Pengajar, under Administration). This is especially useful when
team teaching, such as in Kimia Dasar II A or Kalkulus.
4. Use the "Logs" link (Catatan, under Administration) to get
access to complete, raw logs. In there you'll see a link to a
popup window that updates every sixty seconds and shows the
last hour of activity. This is useful to keep open on your
desktop all day so you can feel in touch with what's going on in
the course.
5. Use the "Activity Reports" (next to each name in the list of all
people, or from any user profile page). These provide a great
way to see what any particular person has been up to in the
course.
6. Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later - do it right
away. Not only it is easy to become overwhelmed with the
volume that can be generated, but it's a crucial part of building
and maintaining a community feel in your course.

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Further information
If you have any particular problems with your site, you should
contact your local site administrator
(admin@courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id).
If you have some great ideas for improvements to Moodle, or
even some good stories, come over to moodle.org and join us in the
course called "Using Moodle". We'd love to hear from you, and you
can help Moodle improve.
If you want to contribute to coding new modules, or writing
documentation, or papers, contact me: Martin Dougiamas or
browse the "bug tracker" site for Moodle, at moodle.org/bugs.
Finally, remember to use the help icons - here is an index of all
the help files in Moodle.
Thanks for using Moodle - and good luck with your teaching!
Thanks also for implementing the installed Moodle at
http://courses.fmipa.itb.ac.id for your courses.

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