Moodle Lessons

Make the most out of the lesson tool in Moodle:

Two Buzz words thrown around in E-learning are Chunking and Branching. These are two of the most effective methods of displaying learning, especially with modern Technologies. Chunking and Branching can be optimised with the technology used, coupled with human interaction with these devices.

Moodle lesson tool allows you to develop excellent modules that will embed learning functionality. The branching lesson allows you to embed good formative and summative learning. Examples would be how I would test topics learnt and mid formative checks during the learning phase.  During classes a good activity would be Flashcards to check learning and progress. This can be done within Moodle.

This tool is exceptionally useful for branching quizzes, diagnostic testing and case study work. It’s quite good to open up a lesson and really develop the scenario through branching, having the multiple options and potential inputs.

Another excellent use would be customer support, health care, IT Support simulations these could be developed step by step gaining good experience. The potential mistakes could be branched to potential failures as can good decisions. A good example of this is developing a business enterprise branching courses coupled with gamification the course was a bit like playing monopoly without a dice, but really embedded business sense into learners.

Lessons can be chunked and broken down into manageable parts for learners to complete as they progress through the course. Moodle lesson supports this functionality well.

Moodle Workshop Activity

Moodle workshop activities allow an excellent method of collaboration, teamwork and overall work-group environment. The use of peer assessment coupled with the platform setup on Moodle allows good peer to peer learning, if setup correctly it allows the development of a learning community that learns from itself, the level of knowledge and experience is phenomenal.

To develop and use the workshop activity well, you are required to develop an effective communication strategy from the beginning. It is important to embed collaboration and group work from the start of the course. Have activities that require Learners to collaborate early on, ice breaker activities such as motivations for completing the course, hobbies and support orientated tasks. Furthermore this needs to develop into communication that directly impacts learning and should be moving towards formal peer to peer assessments.


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Moodle Reporting Strategy!

How Reports Work in Moodle:

 

Moodle is a powerful LMS, one of the key features is the ability to run reports based on its usage. In a distance learning environment, student interaction with resources is a key signal of their motivation, participation and understanding of the course. We will discuss a strategy of how this can be maximised. Furthermore the interaction with Moodle activities enable educators to find the best tools available for certain course and users.

Logs:

These show you information about either a student or an activity e.g. lessons, quizzes, databases e.t.c this tool allows you to filter to specific tasks.

 

The uses of this tool are: The tool allows the educator to see which activities are being used and who is using them, this then allows them to analyse why these activities are being used and compare them with others.

 

E.g.:  Tutor has developed a database activity which is seldom used by her Learners however her Scorm based activity is used a lot.

 

This gives you both an insight into the student population on the course as well as their activity. The key here is the tutor should analyse the courses doing well and not so well and try and understand why. It could be a motivational issue or it could be the way the activity is written, either way logs allow you to see how the activity is used.

 

With regards to Student Logs, you can look at participation time as well as which activities which are frequent and which are vague to the user. This gives the educator an understanding on how the learner works, what type of activities they prefer and how to best provide learning for the student. For assessment Learners can be assessed on their participation in discussions and forums to a granular level, see exactly how they contributed.

Activity Reports:

Similar to logs however supports activities only within an unfiltered method, it shows you all activity within a specified course.

This tool can be used to see the activity taking place within a course, one of the advantages of this reporting is it allows comparable options, this can be sorted within columns focussing on their headings. As an instructor I would use this in order to support me in viewing how the students interacted with the course resources. As discussed under logs.

Course Participation:

This allows instructors to view how a student participates within a course, exceptionally useful for monitoring student activity, it also has the capability to e-mail participation reports to student and instructors.

This tool gives an instructor complete information about student usage, whether they accessed a course, viewed an activity or read a document. All is tracked and left for instructors to analyse. I have used this before when motivating students, I would discuss their participation and encourage them to spend more time on certain resources, furthermore it also allowed me to be able to find students who learn quickly and others who take longer to study subjects.

In addition this tool also supports automating e-mails or messages to students who aren’t participating, so for e.g., you set a database task which requires users to fill in certain definitions, a message would be sent out to all that haven’t yet completed this activity once you run the report, it is a good and efficient way of providing gentle motivational reminders.

Events:

There are many levels of events from teaching and participating. They allow Instructors to implement a certain event based on an action e.g. assignment grading, course updates or completion of a section.

 

The key to using events successfully requires tutors to develop specific event triggers based on learner interaction. This includes both positive and supportive triggers. When a Learner is doing well, the event can be used to affirm their participation coupled with providing stretching exercises. In situations where learners are struggling support alternatives can be triggered. e.g include providing a link to additional support via a URL, opening up a new course for a learner, getting in contact with the instructor for individual support options.

 

References:

For a step by step guide on how to run reports please visit the following website: https://www.oit.umass.edu/support/moodle/use-reports-track-student-activity-moodle

https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Events_list_report

 

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