This blog page will discuss issues in distance education and offer insights into instructional design and educational technology. One focus will be on the exploration of best practices for Moodle use in courses that are fully online as well as traditional courses that have an online component.
I put together a comprehensive guide for teachers that includes information about features of Moodle 2 that were not found in Moodle 1. I have sent it to the professors at BBC&S, but I thought I'd share it with the population at large. Enjoy!
As you know, a rubric is a grading standard established for
a given assignment. The rubric consists of various criteria. For
each criterion, several descriptive levels are provided. Have you ever
wished that you could have a rubric right inside Moodle and use it to grade
assignments that are submitted through the system? Well, now you can!
Imagine this:
A student submits an assignment via Moodle.
You open the assignment and use a rubric inside of Moodle to award appropriate
points for each criterion on the rubric.
Moodle gives a grade based on the points that you select for
each item/criterion.
The grade automatically transfers into the grade book!
Why would one do this?
It assures that the assignment objectives are
tied to particular assessments.
A rubric only needs to be created ONE time and
it can be shared across assignments!
It will allow for consistency across
courses. For example, the same rubric that is used to assess a forum
discussion in one course can be used in another course as well.
It’s easier! You don’t have to get out
your syllabus and look at your rubrics and switch from looking down at your
paper to up at the screen! You can do it all electronically!
Moodle does the math for you!
Watch this video to learn how to set up rubrics in your Moodle course:
Moodle 2 allows you to restrict the availability of
activities until certain conditions are met. These are called conditional
activities. For example, you may restrict all of the content and
activities in a particular module until a certain grade is earned on the quiz
in a previous module.
Conditional activities are a way for you to force your
students to work through things in a particular order. It is certainly
good course design to make it clear to your students what they are expected to
do next, but do you need to force? Malcolm Knowles and his principles of
andragogy would tell us that adult learners like to be in control of their own
learning. So, should you use labels and layout, rather than locks and
keys, to suggest the best learning path? Something to think about,
eh? Here are some suggestions for when the use of conditional activities
might be appropriate:
-The idea of restricting access to something
until another task has been completed happens to nicely mirror the level
structure present in many games. You could venture into games-based
learning. Just a thought for those who are creative in that way…
- Conditional activities are good to use when one
week/module builds on the next. If you need to lead the horse to water AND
make him/her drink, a conditional activity might be just what you are looking
for. Suppose you need the students to choose a group for an activity.
You can create a “Choice” activity and then make access to that week’s graded
discussion forum dependent upon the completion of the “Choice” activity.
-If you want to be sure that students have read
content before posting in the discussion forums or before taking a quiz, you
can set up the forums or the quiz so that the PDFs/URLs (i.e. electronic
reading material) must be opened before the activities become available.
This way, the students can’t discuss material that they have never even opened!
-Facilitating self-directed learning is perhaps
where conditional activities are the most powerful. They allow you to
automate several paths through content. Conditional activities make it
simple to offer both extension and remedial activities to students simultaneously.
For instance, you might have a practice quiz set up so that students who
achieve above a certain score are directed to further exploration activities
whereas those who achieve below a certain score are given access to some help
resources.
Watch this video to learn how to set up conditional activities in your Moodle course:
Sliderocket is a great presentation software program. The "lite" version is free. Although it has some limitations compared to the $24.00/month "pro" version, it does enough to allow you to create something pretty cool. It looks clean and crisp. Check it out for use in your classes or, if you are a Moodle trainer, consider using it as a presentation tool when training faculty.
I would like to introduce a new format for your eLearn courses. Up until this point, we have used a weekly format and a topics format. We now have an additional option called “collapsed topics” that will help to organize your courses and decrease the cognitive load for your learners. We all know that eLearn can be “clunky” and disorderly. This new feature has the potential to improve the look and navigation of your course! Here is an example of how it looks:
The new format does not affect your course materials whatsoever and can be changed back to the weekly format or topics format at any time if you find that it is not your preference. To check it out:
1) Enter your course on eLearn.
2) Click “Settings” in the administration block.
3) Click on the “Format” dropdown menu.
4) Choose “Collapsed Topics.”
5) Click on “Save Changes.”
