Moodle, as a Web-based learning management system/virtual learning environment, is prepared for a range of multimedia elements (not for creation, but for integration). We can easily add images, videos, and sound files. And if everything works out as expected, we will just need to make a link to the multimedia file, and Moodle will do the rest to embed a player and show it.
However, there are some Moodle settings that we should be aware of that make this use of multimedia easier. We should ask our Moodle administrator to do the following:
- Enable the multimedia plugins: In the Site administration block, go to Plugins | Filters | Manage filters and on the dropdown of the Active? column for Multimedia plugins, change it to On and only apply it to Content).
- Allow the EMBED and OBJECT tags: In the Site administration block, go to Security | Site policies and select the checkbox for Allow EMBED and OBJECT tags field, and save the changes.
- Enable trusted content: In the Site administration block, go to Users | Permissions | Define roles, and for the Student role, select the checkbox Allow for the option Trust submitted content.
- Use the TinyMCE HTML editor: In the Site administration block, go to Plugins | Text editors | Manage editors and enable it. This option is usually enabled by default.
- Enable RSS feeds: In the Site administration block, go to Advanced features and select the Enable RSS fields checkbox. After this, you will need to enable RSS feeds in each module that generates them: Database, Forum, and Glossary. In the Site administration block, go to Plugins | Activity modules and select the option Yes for Enable RSS feeds, after clicking on the name of each of these modules.
- Increase the maximum upload file size: Multimedia files can be sometimes larger than common document files, so having a good upload size limit will be helpful. A maximum upload size of 16 MB will be enough for common uses. If our Moodle installation has less than that, we could ask our administrator to increase it. In the
php.inifile (or in the.htaccessfile), change the following values:post_max_size = 16777216andupload_max_filesize = 16777216. In Apache'shttp.conforphp.conffile, change the value ofLimitRequestBodyto16777216. Then, in the Site administration block, go to Security | Site policies and in the drop-down box for the Maximum uploaded file size field, select Server limit.
Note that Moodle administrators can refuse to change some of these settings as they can overload the server, so we may need to ask them to upload larger files for us. Multimedia files, especially videos, can be very large files, so we should have some preoccupation with the size of the files we upload. An alternative that we will explore in this book is to host our files on online services and then link or embed (a concept we will see in a moment) these in Moodle. This will save server space for our school or institution, but can raise other questions such as blocked websites, bandwidth, or e-safety that we will see in this book. Another alternative is to use file formats that have good size/quality ratios, and we will learn how to select and use such file formats later on.