Welcome to your new Moodle course!

This Moodle course was created by an automatic script, copying many of the features of your course from WebCT Campus Edition 4.x across to Moodle.

If you're familiar with WebCT you may be a little disoriented, and wondering where to find things. Don't worry - although the overall look of Moodle does seem quite different at first, you'll find that Moodle and WebCT have a lot in common. For example, there are parallels to most of WebCT's "tools" - content modules, quizzes, forums, assignments, files, glossaries, calendars, text blocks, and links, for example.

The entire course is hidden when first created, which means that only you and the site administrators know of its existence. (The "hidden" status is indicated by its name being greyed out in the courses list.) Take a while to get used to the layout, and to make any changes you want to make, but remember to make the course visible when you want to open it up to student access! (In fact, this intro page is "hidden" too, so you can safely leave it in place without your students being able to see it.)

Since a Moodle course looks different to a WebCT course, there are bound to be some changes you'll want to make before making the course "visible". When you go back to the course homepage, click on the "Turn editing on" button (usually at the top right) and you'll be able to move, hide, add or delete items in your course.

Having said that WebCT and Moodle have a lot in common, there are some interesting features which will be new to you.

• Moodle has some features which you won't find in WebCT Campus Edition 4:
  • Peer assessment, in the shape of the "Workshop" activity
  • Wikis, which are a kind of collaboratively-edited website
  • Support for RSS (see this BBC page about RSS if you're new to this particular acroynm!)
  • SCORM support. "SCORM" is an international standard which allows "learning objects", i.e. self-contained units of study, to be moved from one system to another with the minimum of fuss.

There are some features which cannot be copied across, either because they don't exist in Moodle or for technical reasons related to the export/import process:

• Discussion threads/messages are not copied across - only the discussion forums themselves.
• WebCT features which don't exist in Moodle:
  • The "Whiteboard" tool
  • The "Student homepages" tool - although users of the Moodle system do have their own "profile" page.
  • The "CD-ROM" tool

The import process should have created a webpage called "Import log" which lists specific notes about how the process applies to your course. You may wish to read that to check how the import procedure went, and to note any problems or omissions that the system was able to detect automatically.