Using the Moodle Book Module to Create and Deliver an Interactive Online Biblical Hebrew Course and Textbook

Moodle is a powerful learning management tool made more powerful because it is built to manage courses and track student progress, and yet is not subject to licensing fees. Such is not the case with institutionally licensed learning management systems such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn. This means that course enrollments are not limited to your institution’s registered students and you can conceivably create and manage global courses. This presentation will demonstrate an existing Moodle Biblical Hebrew course that is built around the Moodle Book, Lesson, and Glossary activities. The Moodle Book activity contains a structured Biblical Hebrew lexico-grammar based on a systemic functional framework. It is linked to Moodle Lessons which implement this approach and apply it to biblical texts. The grammar is also organized around and richly linked to grammatical tables and paradigms for reference using the Moodle Glossary activity. This enables students to go directly to relevant grammar for reference and to examples when they are working through the grammatical exercises. These function together as a system because Moodle has an effective filter system that automatically creates links among these resources, so the links do not have to be hand-coded. The textbook-course also contains a lexicon based on the ETCBC SHEBANQ database. In addition to instructors being able to track the progress of their students, students very much appreciate having all their learning material available in one hyperlinked environment. Lastly, because the course is built in Moodle, the base course with textbook can be imported into an existing instance of Moodle, if your institution runs Moodle. Or you can run the course from an already created Moodle container such as bitnami.com's Moodle, or from a server’s cpanel instance of Moodle, such as is available, for example, at bluehost.com.