- Moodle 3.x Teaching Techniques（Third Edition）
- Susan Smith Nash
- 1110字
- 2021-07-16 10:49:54
Guiding and motivating students
The best online courses create learning communities in which all learners have a sense that they are part of a friendly, supportive group. They eagerly post in the forums and they respond to each other quickly in a positive and productive way. They share their thoughts and impressions and you start to feel as though people are really getting to know each other. Learning is fun, even exhilarating. Some students can't wait to log on and participate.
Moodle 3.0 encourages productive interaction and collaboration and it becomes easy to share information that humanizes the learning space. For example, you can very easily use your smartphone to video a few introductory thoughts and then upload it directly to YouTube. You can then embed the post (which will include a small image/screen-capture for your video). If your videos are less than 2 minutes in length, you'll engage your students and also encourage them to share thoughts and ideas.
Creating the learning environment
There are a few tried and tested ways to optimize the interactive forum experience. Here is a brief list:
- Provide timely feedback and make sure that you maintain a positive and productive tone
- Be sure to provide positive, encouraging suggestions
- Post videos, audio files, images, and personal thoughts about that content
- Post questions that are engaging and which tie to learning objectives
- Encourage individuals to connect the course material to personal experience and then post about it
- Make participation in the forums a part of students' grades
- Model positive forum behavior by showing open-mindedness
Asking permission and setting a policy
Some activities in Moodle are almost always individual. When students complete these activities, they have a reasonable expectation that their work will not be shared with the class. For example, when a student answers a quiz question, he/she reasonably expects that what he/she wrote will not be shared with the entire class. Other activities do not carry this expectation of privacy. For example, when a student posts to a forum, he/she expects that their post will be read by the rest of the class.
Students feel good when they see their work acknowledged. They also feel confident when they know what is expected. We can use the forum to answer students' questions, but there are other ways to use the forums to acknowledge work and to help the students develop an "I can do it" attitude.
One good way is to build a forum that includes samples of successful student work. The students can see how other students-often students in the past-approached their work. They can get a good idea of how to get started and they can feel less intimidated by fear of the unknown.
Let's create a forum named sample work. Before posting work from a student in the sample work forum, consider if the student can reasonably expect that work to be private. If so, ask the student's permission before posting it. In any case, be sure to remove identifying names and labels. That is, remove anything from the work that would indicate which student created it. This might make the student more comfortable with having the work posted in the sample work forum.
If you expect to use the sample work forum in a class, you should clearly indicate that in the course syllabus and introduction. The idea that they have guidelines and live documents as instructional material and models can be a big relief to students. However, if any student is uncomfortable with having his/her work posted (even if it has been anonymized), please be sure to let them know you respect their wishes. The forum should be a friendly and supportive place.
Types of forums
In Moodle, you can create several types of forums. Each type can be used in a different way to get the best out of it. The types of forums are:
Each of these forum types can be used to create a different kind of sample work forum. The subsections coming up cover the use of each forum type.
You select the forum type while creating the forum on the Editing Forum page:
The forum consists of one topic at the top of the page and everything else on that page is a reply from the students. Readers can reply to the topic but not create new ones.
This is especially useful if you want to select the best work as an example for each topic or week in your course. You can always end each topic or week with the best work as an example so that discussion can take place around it.
In a standard forum, the default setting allows students to create new topics and post replies to the topics. This makes it an open forum, which would be useful if you want your students to be able to post their own work or if you want to post examples or models that you could label "sample work".
One way to keep the sample work forum organized is to allow only the teacher to create new topics. Each topic is an example of student work, posted by the teacher. Students discuss each example by replying to the topic. To accomplish this, you'll need to disable the students' ability to create new topics.
By default, the Student role in Moodle enables students to create new topics in a standard forum. You can disable this by referring to the following steps:
- Select the forum in which you want to disable the students' ability to create new topics.
- Select Update this Forum.
- Review the Forum administration |Permissions and then customize who has the permission to modify the different categories and aspects of the Activity: Forum:
- Select Student. This brings up the Overrides page.
- For the setting Start new discussions, select Prevent.
- Click the Save changes button.
In Moodle, you can administer permissions by prohibiting roles and by using the settings Prevent and Allow:
However, you could set this to Prevent for a specific course because a course is a lower context than the entire site; for that course, the permission Prevent will override the site-wide setting of Allow. A single activity, such as this forum, is the lowest context in Moodle. You may also choose to Allow roles rather than Prevent.
