Introdcution to teaching online course using Moodle
Download as ODP, PDF5 likes4,164 views
This document outlines the general procedure for teaching an online course through Moodle. It discusses creating and organizing the course, posting the syllabus and schedule, student enrollment, communication methods, tracking student progress, assigning and grading work, and requesting feedback. Key aspects include using different content formats, conditional activities, forums, chats, and quizzes to engage students and the gradebook to track performance.
Introdcution to teaching online course using Moodle
- 1. Teaching an Online Course through Moodle
- 2. General procedure for Online Teaching 1. Create and organize an online course 2. Post course syllabus & schedule, and send out communication 3. Students enroll into the course 4. Communication between Student – Instructor 5. Tracking the progress of students 6. Giving Assignments 7. Assignment submission by students 8. Conducting Exams 9. Grading student's work 10.Receiving feedback about the course
- 3. 1. Creating an online course ● An instructor usually considers these factors while building a course online – What course material is needed – In how many different ways we can present our course material – How the course can be organized ● Because all students have different learning styles and respond differently to various learning activities, it is important to offer them instructional materials in a variety of formats.
- 4. Course material ● Moodle supports a range of formats of content which teachers can add to their courses :- ● Book - Multi-page resources with a book-like format ● File - A picture, a pdf document, a spreadsheet, a sound file, a video file, a powerpoint presentation ● Folder - For helping organize files and one folder may contain other folders ● Label - Can be a few displayed words or an image used to separate resources and activities in a topic section, or can be a lengthy description or instructions ● Page - The student sees a single, scrollable screen that a teacher creates with the robust HTML editor ● URL - You can send the student to any place they can reach on their web browser, for example Wikipedia
- 5. Course material ● Many websites provide materials and interactive learning exercises different from and complementary to Moodle's own resources and activities. ● The External tool module offers a way for teachers to link to these activities from within their Moodle course page and where available to have grades sent back into Moodle. ● Students only need to log in to Moodle; they do not have to log in a second time to the connecting site. ● Sites which allow connection to Moodle in this way are known as LTI compliant and are called Tool providers. ● Here is a list of LTI certified tools
- 6. Course presentation ● The two layouts which are used more frequently in Moodle to divide the course syllabus are Topics format and Weekly format. ● The Topics format takes the center section of your course and breaks it down as a series of topics that you will be covering, or units that you are going to be covering, throughout your course. ● Weekly format breaks down the course and distributes the topics equally across the time period set for the course.
- 7. Course presentation ● Two settings in Moodle allow instructor to confine the presentation of some course material – Conditional activities enable teachers to restrict the availability of any activity or even a course section (in Moodle 2.3 onwards) according to certain conditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activity completion. – Hidden sections option allows you to hide some sections of the course from students.
- 8. Course presentation ● The content can be delivered in a flexible and interactive way using the 'Lesson' module. ● The lesson module presents a series of HTML pages to the student who is usually asked to make some sort of choice underneath the content area. The choice will send them to a specific page in the Lesson. ● 'Lesson' module can be used eg: to introduce a new topic, interactive fiction, decision-making exercises .etc.
- 9. Organization of the course ● Moodle allows the courses to be grouped into 'Categories' ● By organizing the courses into 'Categories', moodle makes the courses to be sequenced and structured in a manner that enables learners to achieve the stated goals.
- 10. 2. Post course syllabus and schedule ● Post the course syllabus and course schedule along with course description as announcement in the news forum. ● Once posted in news forum, an email is automatically sent to the registered users. ● Or we can manually send notification to all registered users using People block.
- 11. 3. Enrollment into a course ● Upon receiving news about the course, students go and take a look at the course description and enroll into the course or request for enrollment. ● Once a student enrolls, he becomes a true participant of the course where he can access all the contents of the course. ● There are various ways an enrollment into a course can happen.
- 12. Enrollment methods ● Manual Enrollment ● Self Enrollment → allows users to enroll themselves into a course, either directly or via an enrollment key. ● The enrollment key is supplied once payment is made through phone or email. ● Guest access
- 13. Enrollment methods ● Cohort Sync → A cohort is a set of users which has been added either to the site as a whole or to a particular category and then made available to a course. ● Course metalink → This allows users who are in another course to be automatically enrolled into your course as well. ● Paypal → This allows users to pay for a course.
- 14. 4. Student-Instructor Communication ● Once enrolled, students should be able to communicate with the instructor so they can receive prompt assistance when they encounter problems or have questions. ● Moodle has many ways of keeping the communication alive between students and instructor and among students in the course :- ● News forum ● Email ● Discussion Forums ● Real-time chat
- 15. Email communication ● The Quickmail block, or the Participants list. can be used to send email to individual course members or all participants in the course. ● Through automated email notification system - students can receive an email when a quiz is graded, instructors can choose to receive emails when students submit assignments, or instructors can email students when an assignment is graded.
- 16. News forum ● The News Forum a unique forum, automatically created with the course for instructors to post announcements. ● Only instructors and TAs can post to the News Forum. ● By default, posts made to the News Forum are emailed to class members. ● Moodle gives you half an hour to edit a new post before it is sent out as email.
- 17. Live Chat ● The Chat activity allows course members to hold real-time, text-based conversations with other course members. Different chat rooms can be set up for the same course. ● Teachers can also access past chat sessions. ● It can be used to: ● A student temporarily unable to attend in person chatting with their tutor to catch up with work. ● Students out on work experience getting together to discuss their experiences with each other and their tutor ● Regular meetings of staff on large or split campuses to discuss student or curriculum issues;
- 18. Discussion Forums ● Instructors and students can communicate and collaborate using Forums, sometimes called "discussions." ● Instructors can create topics or, depending on the Forum type, allow students to originate topics, to which course members can "post" a reply, or "message." ● By default, course members can subscribe to receive emails containing content posted to the Forums of their Moodle courses.
- 19. Discussion Forums ● There are five built-in forum types, however some are more suited for content sharing and assessment while others work better for collaboration. ● Forums for Content Sharing and Assessment ● A single simple discussion - allows for only one topic started by the instructor. This is best suited for short- term, focused conversations. ● Each person posts one discussion - allows each student to only start one new topic or conversation within the forum. ● Q and A forum - allows an instructor to pose a question to students. Students must post their response or answer before they can view other students’ responses.
- 20. Discussion Forums ● Forums for Student Interaction and Collaboration ● Standard forum for general use - allows for the “standard” usage of a discussion forum with multiple topics arranged in a threaded conversation. Students may start new topics in this format. ● Standard forum displayed in a blog-like format - allows for the “standard” usage of a discussion forum with multiple topics arranged in a “blog' style format with the first post prominent and comments behind a link. Students may start new topics in this format.
- 21. 5. Tracking progress of students ● The progress of students through out the course can be tracked using these 3 settings: ● Course completion ● Activity completion ● Course reports ● Course completion shows the progress a student is making towards finishing the course according to specific criteria like meeting a grade level or a manual checking "complete" by either the student and/or teacher. ● Course completion can be used to check if a student has completed the recommended prerequisite courses.
- 22. 5. Tracking progress of students ● Activity completion Report is a helpful way for students to be able to track their progress in a course. The student has an easy to see checklist of what they have done so far. ● It can also be linked to Course completion in order to allow both students and teachers to watch progress through a course. As each activity is checked off as "complete", the student moves further towards final completion of the course. ● It can also be linked to Conditional activities in order to allow the teacher to set criteria upon which a student is allowed to progress through a course and access materials.
- 23. Course reports ● Moodle allows instructors to request reports telling which course material have been accessed, when, and by whom. ● Moodle produces 4 kinds of reports :- ● Logs show student activity in a specific period of time. ● Activity Reports show number of views for each lesson/course material ● Participation reports show general participation in the course by whole class or individual student. ● Statistics show how many hits there have been on various parts of your site during various time frames.
- 24. 6. Giving Assignments ● To evaluate student understanding of the material, instructor can give an assignment – to type shorter or longer responses directly online – to submit files at different times for a project – to write a response to a video/sound file/image – to answer a series of questions on a video/sound file/image – to keep an ongoing journal or do an iterative assignment – Offline assignment or 'Real world assignment'
- 25. 7. Assignment submission ● Students can submit an assignment in 2 different ways :- – File submission → allows students to submit/upload file(s) to be assessed. It collates students' work into one space. – Online text submission → allows students to type or copy-paste text into a window in Moodle for instructor review and assessment. ● Students can also post comments on their submission and receive reply from teachers.
- 26. 8. Conducting exams ● Along with assignments, an instructor can also conduct exams using the 'Quiz' module in Moodle. ● Quiz module allows the teacher to design and build quizzes consisting of a large variety of Question types. ● The standard question types available in Moodle are Calculated, Description, Essay, Matching, Multiple choice, Short Answer, True/False, Numerical, Embedded Answers.
- 27. 8. Conducting exams ● Quiz module can be used to create quizzes : ● as unit or course exams ● as mini-tests for reading assignments or at the end of a topic ● As practice exam using questions from previous years' exams ● to provide feedback about performance ● for self assessment ● (with the use of the Quiz creator role) to allow students to generate their own quiz questions for a practice question bank.
- 28. Some nice features of Moodle Quiz ● Quizzes can be configured to allow multiple attempts. Each attempt at a question is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback and/or show the correct answers. ● Teacher can set time limit to an exam. ● The order of questions in the quiz can be randomly shuffled each time a student starts a new attempt at the quiz. ● A single quiz can automatically select random and/or specific questions from different categories of questions from question bank. ● Questions can be imported and exported.
- 29. 9. Grading students work ● All the grades for each student in a course can be found in the gradebook, or 'Grader report'. ● When an activity in a course is assigned a grade, it is automatically added to the 'gradebook'. ● Scores will be automatically populated for graded activities into the Grade book. ● The Grade book can aggregate a final score for the class and convert it to a letter grade. ● Students can view their grades in individualized reports that protect their privacy. You control what grades are visible and when.
- 30. 10. Request feedback for the course ● Course evaluations at the end of the course, help determine the effectiveness of the various components of the course and address areas that may need revision. They also communicate to students that their input is valuable. ● In Moodle, Feedback and Survey modules allow instructors to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback. ● Survey module has a pre-defined set of questions while Feedback module allows to write your own questions.