Patrick Malley

Moodle is a tool that can drastically change the way students do work in school. But, like any tool, it must be used correctly or it just becomes another wasted technology.

Here are five practical activities using Moodle – the open source course management system – that will totally change the way your students do work in your class:

1. Engage students in an asynchronous discussion on a controversial topic in your field.

Give them a week or two to share their thoughts on a debatable set of facts or an ethical dilemma. Participate in the discussion with them. Prod them when they’re being vague. Ask them to tell you more when they’re too brief. Tell them when they’ve said something insightful, or when they’ve actually taught YOU something!

As you read their posts, grade them on the quality of their writing, not the quantity. To do this, make the forum worth a total of 20 points, then subjectively rate the quality of each post on a scale of 1-5 (you will probably want to create and discuss a rubric for this scale with your students).

If they write mind-blowing, brilliant stuff, they only have to post 4 times (5 X 4 = 20). If their contributions are not amounting to much, they simply have to post more to get the full points for the discussion. By doing this, the forum becomes a tool for shaping students into better, more persuasive writers.

2. Give them a tough quiz that they can take as many times as they want for the highest score.

No, I haven’t lost my mind: this works! Give your students a ten item quiz that randomly pulls questions from a bank of thirty. Every time a student then takes the quiz, they get a completely new set of questions.

By taking their highest score, you encourage them to take it more than once, thus rehearsing the content covered by the questions again and again. The less they know when the begin the quiz, the more times they have to take it to get 100%, the more rehearsing they do. Plus, the number of times a student takes a quiz is a good indicator to you of how prepared they were going into the assessment.

Just think of how much more difficult it would be to cheat off a classmate if you gave a Moodle quiz as homework using this method. No longer could a student call up a classmate and ask, “What’s the answer to number 3?” Every student would have a different number 3! With these Moodle quizzes, students are forced to call each other and ask, “How do you do number 3?”

3. Have students peer review and grade each others’ papers.

Moodle offers an underused tool, called a Workshop, where students can enter their writing for peer review. Once a teacher-designated due date is reached, the writings are purged of identifying information and passed out randomly amongst the other students. They then review and grade the writing using a rubric that their teacher has entered.

I can think of two reasons you would want to do this:

1. It is a lot more interesting to write something for an audience of your peers than it is to write something for your teacher. Students are going to try harder because this isn’t just another boring assignment for my teacher. It is something my classmates are going to read and actually grade.
2. By judging another student’s work using your rubric, they are actively learning the elements of good writing. Enough said.

4. Let your students write their own textbook.

Why not have your students write and maintain a collection of their knowledge in a class wiki? Group your students into editing teams, each responsible for authoring a different segment of the content at different times. The groups that aren’t authoring can do the editing while you monitor it all through the usage logs.

For a good example of this in action, check out this video from Clay Burrell that I linked to last week.

5. Use “My Moodle” to keep them up-to-date on upcoming quizzes, due dates and special events.

A lot of teachers ask me if they can use Moodle to post due dates, or band concert schedules, or fund-raising events. The answer is definitely, “Yes.” Moodle offers an optional landing page that shows students an overview of all courses they are enrolled in.

But … if you’re not doing the things I’ve listed above to hook them in, what reason do they have to go to your site in the first place? While a few students might login just to have a look at your schedule, my experience is that you shouldn’t expect this to be the norm.

I have, on occasion, imagined a completely blended learning environment: one where every class was online; where every teacher was doing something with Moodle. This would really be the best case scenario for using an overview page. Students logging into do a forum for Teacher A would see their upcoming due date for Teacher B, and band concert with Teacher C, and message from Teacher D. So on, and so forth.

Well, this has been fun. I do sincerely hope that you’ve found something useful in this entry. Please feel free to leave any questions or suggestions in the comments.