Most of your teachers are using Moodle to be in contact with you. This is the university policy and there are many reasons why this kind of software can be very useful in higher education. One of them is that you do not need much knowledge of IT and internet stuff (i.e. html language) to use and maintain in good conditions. However, there are other ways and I think you may learn something if I try a different approach.
Computer Labs: Online Resources (go to the page)
I want you to navigate on the internet and download files from the main source of data world wide: internet. Everyone is using it and most probably you will be better off if you start now. That is why you will find the material you need for your computer labs in this website.
Blog: Online Discussions (go to the page)
Also, I will use a blog (what is a blog?) to post questions. In my experience, you will not use Moodle to post questions to the whole class but address me directly or send me a personal email. I want to avoid this so we can share the information with other students. You may still contact me directly by email for personal reasons but I will ask you to post any question about econometrics on the blog. An additional advantage is that it is easy to follow up any question using the comment option in any entry.
This is the first time I run this module and I have noticed some of you are shy. This is not necessarily a bad thing and I respect everyone's personality. However, you would be surprised how much you can learn from some of your class mates. The few times some of you actually have made question, they were interesting in contend and relevant to the lecture. That is why I will motivate you to share your questions in the blog and make good use of our time in class.