Building your own Course Management System
Thomas Robb
Kyoto Sangyo University
Draft, 17 Feb. 2004
Many of us have used Yahoo Groups or other free services so that our students can participate in group discussions, or so that we can put material on the web that students can access via the Internet. We tend to collect ‘one-trick’ applications, each for a specific function. Now it is possible to go beyond that to an integrated course management system that will allow us to place all of our online functionality in a single application. By providing a common interface we can make our online material appear to be a coherent whole and simplify the way students access it.
Course Management Systems
Many schools now have their own “course management system” (CMS), sometimes called a “Virtual Learning Environment” (VLE). There are some expensive “high end” products available such as WebCT ( or Blackboard ( Many schools in Japan have opted for creating their own systems which provide discussion boards and a system for students to submit assignments online, but none of these has the functionality and ease of use of a fairly new free system called Moodle which we will turn out attention to below. A CMS is great for independent schools since you can allow prospective students to “look but not touch’. You can grant them access to portions of your site as a “guest” but with limited privileges so that they can see what is available but cannot, for example, post messages or take quizzes.
Record Keeping
Another advantage of placing everything together under a “Course Management System” is that it can allow us to track what materials our students have accessed and to collect scores on any online quizzes, etc. that they have done. Without such a tracking mechanism, we can never really know if students are really using all that material that we spent time putting online. Record keeping also affords the teacher the opportunity to encourage the slow pokes to do their assigned online work.
Moodle
Moodle ( is a free, open-source CMS that is currently undergoing rapid development. It’s the “best of the lot” and thanks to its dynamic user support group and on-going development will probably remain the best for some time to come. In its current stage (v.1.2) it has already become a software product worth reckoning with. Not only does it provide virtually all of the functions of the highend systems, it has numerous virtues that make it idea for our own English courses.
The e-mail and archiving system in Moodle is one of its greatest features. Students post their messages on the Moodle web page, but the messages are sent out to all subscribers as regular e-mail after a teacher-determined delay, of say, 15 or 30 minutes. This gives the writer a chance to review the message and revise it if necessary
All messages appear with a tiny mugshot of the sender, with a smiley face for those who haven’t uploaded a digital version of themselves yet. This small feature goes a long way towards building ‘community’ since it allows students to place a face with a name.
Part of a course at
The search function on each page allows anyone to put in any word or words and extract just those messages containing them. As an instructor, though, you can also get a quick view of all of the messages sent by any one student. One example, courtesy of Don Hinkelmann (Sapporo Gakuin University) is provided above. Don invites you to visit and explore it. Other instructors have also offered their sites for inspection, too. Visit establish a login ID and then go to “Community Forums/Moodle for Language Teaching” and check out the “News forum” at the top of the page.
Other advantages include,
1. It can be installed on virtually any computer – Windows, Macintosh or Linux, as long as you can use it as a ‘server’, connected to the Internet 24/7. It requires less than 25mb for the program itself, although more space will be needed for archived files and messages, but not much for the typical class usage.
2. It can be downloaded from the Internet and be up and working in less than an hour.
3. Moodle.org has a very active user group that offers free support, plus a large searchable archive of past postings so when you do have a problem, you can usually find the solution in a matter of minutes. There is even a special “Moodle for Language Teaching” forum there moderated by Don Hinkelman (Sapporo Gakuin University).
4. The interface can be switched to any of 30 languages and dialects, simply by selecting the desired language at login time from a pulldown menu.
5. It has a robust logging function that allows you to see how many people have accessed a specific course, a function within a course, or even a record of an individual’s accesses.
6. You can create quizzes including multiple-choice, true-false, matching within Moodle or even use Hot Potatoes quizzes and take advantage of Moodle’s ability to track them. Furthermore, for quizzes created in Moodle or imported into it, there is a fairly complete statistics report that provides an item analysis of your test items.
7. Adding new material, moving old material around or deleting unwanted resources is straightforward.
Some Technical Details
Moodle runs using a scripting program called PHP and the answers are normally stored in a database system called “mySQL”. Both of these are also free, as is the software for running a web server (Apache) on either Windows or Unix.. See for a great package that installs all of these on windows at one time. (Be sure to download the English version; French is the default!)
For the faint of heart
If you don’t like to mess with technical details yourself, you can still use Moodle via any of these alternatives,
1) If your school has a web server, convince them to install it. It can even be set up to tap into your school’s e-mail password authentication system so that students don’t need yet another account and password to access your course materials.
2) Ask Moodle.com to set it up on your machine for you. They’ll login in to your server and do a straightforward set-up for just $100
3) Use Moodle.com’s hosting service which charges $100 per month or $1000 per year. (In yen that’s pretty cheap, particularly if the school or a number of teachers share it.
4) Use someone else’s server. A number of Moodle users in Japan are happy to share their servers although free hosting with a non-professional could run the risk of down time or loss of data. I’m willing to host up to 5 people, first come, first served.
The PaCALL/interact top page, typical of Moodle course, standard layout
A new organization for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) practitioners.
Pacific CALL, has recently unfurled its wings and taken off with chapters in all major Asian countries. The association will host an annual conference somewhere in the Asia/Pacific area, publish a journal, but most significantly, provide an interactive forum (thanks to Moodle) for teachers to discuss their problems and aspirations. There are forums for various practical aspects of CALL implementation, as well as for the discussion of CALL theory, and a place for conference and job-related announcements. Use of the discussion area is free, but you need to set up a user ID first, following the instructions on the PaCALL/interact login page. Check it out today!
The Student List Project reborn
Some readers might have already participated in the SL Lists (Student Discussion List Project) whereby students exchange e-mails on various topics of common interest. These e-mail discussion lists were originally set up in 1995 by Lloyd Holliday (La Trobe U., Melbourne), Mark Warschauer (then Charles University, Prague) and the author (Kyoto). Now, a new, more functional edition of the SL-Lists has been created on the web:
The site contains discussion areas on a number of common topics: current events, music, movies, culture & society, sports, English, Business English and general "chat". There is also an area for students of secondary age.
The site provides an excellent way for your students to get meaningful writing as well as reading practice. What your students post forms a permanent record, which you and your students can access at any time for further discussion, evaluation, focus on specific errors or communication techniques, etc.
In order to maintain a sheltered environment, native speakers are not permitted to join except with special permission. ESL/EFL students may join under the sponsorship of their teacher, or as individual students, upon application to . Participating instructors and individual students are supplied with an "enrollment code" which permits registration and establishment of their user ID.
To check out the lists, go to and either obtain an ID or log in as a guest. The ‘enrollment key’ for the Teachers’ Forum is, as of this writing, set to ‘jointeacher.’ Contact if this doesn’t work. There is full information about the lists and how to go about using them with your classes, plus the enrollment keys for the student areas inside the Teachers’ Forum.