Introdcution to teaching online course using Moodle

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  • 1. Teaching an Online Course through Moodle

2. General procedure for OnlineTeaching1. Create and organize an online course2. Post course syllabus & schedule, and send out communication3. Students enroll into the course4. Communication between Student Instructor5. Tracking the progress of students6. Giving Assignments7. Assignment submission by students8. Conducting Exams9. Grading students work10.Receiving feedback about the course 3. 1. Creating an online course An instructor usually considers these factorswhile building a course online What course material is needed In how many different ways we can present ourcourse material How the course can be organized Because all students have different learningstyles and respond differently to variouslearning activities, it is important to offer theminstructional materials in a variety of formats. 4. Course material Moodle supports a range of formats of contentwhich 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 interactivelearning exercises different from and complementaryto Moodles own resources and activities. The External tool module offers a way for teachers tolink to these activities from within their Moodle coursepage and where available to have grades sent backinto Moodle. Students only need to log in to Moodle; they do nothave to log in a second time to the connecting site. Sites which allow connection to Moodle in this way areknown 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 morefrequently in Moodle to divide the coursesyllabus are Topics format and Weekly format. The Topics format takes the center section ofyour course and breaks it down as a series oftopics that you will be covering, or units thatyou are going to be covering, throughout yourcourse. Weekly format breaks down the course anddistributes the topics equally across the timeperiod set for the course. 7. Course presentation Two settings in Moodle allow instructor toconfine the presentation of some coursematerial Conditional activities enable teachers to restrict theavailability of any activity or even a course section(in Moodle 2.3 onwards) according to certainconditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activitycompletion. Hidden sections option allows you to hide somesections of the course from students. 8. Course presentation The content can be delivered in a flexible andinteractive way using the Lesson module. The lesson module presents a series of HTMLpages to the student who is usually asked tomake some sort of choice underneath thecontent area. The choice will send them to aspecific page in the Lesson. Lesson module can be used eg: to introduce anew topic, interactive fiction, decision-makingexercises .etc. 9. Organization of the course Moodle allows thecourses to be groupedinto Categories By organizing thecourses into Categories,moodle makes thecourses to be sequencedand structured in amanner that enableslearners to achieve thestated goals. 10. 2. Post course syllabus and schedule Post the course syllabusand course schedulealong with coursedescription asannouncement in thenews forum. Once posted in newsforum, an email isautomatically sent to theregistered users. Or we can manuallysend notification to allregistered users usingPeople block. 11. 3. Enrollment into a course Upon receiving news aboutthe course, students goand take a look at thecourse description andenroll into the course orrequest for enrollment. Once a student enrolls, hebecomes a true participantof the course where he canaccess all the contents ofthe course. There are various ways anenrollment into a coursecan happen. 12. Enrollment methods Manual Enrollment Self Enrollment allowsusers to enroll themselvesinto a course, eitherdirectly or via anenrollment key. The enrollment key issupplied once payment ismade through phone oremail. Guest access 13. Enrollment methods Cohort Sync A cohort isa set of users which hasbeen added either to thesite as a whole or to aparticular category andthen made available to acourse. Course metalink Thisallows users who are inanother course to beautomatically enrolled intoyour course as well. Paypal This allowsusers to pay for a course. 14. 4. Student-InstructorCommunication Once enrolled, students should be able tocommunicate with the instructor so they canreceive prompt assistance when they encounterproblems or have questions. Moodle has many ways of keeping thecommunication alive between students andinstructor 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 coursemembers or all participants in the course. Through automated email notification system -students can receive an email when a quiz isgraded, instructors can choose to receiveemails when students submit assignments, orinstructors can email students when anassignment is graded. 16. News forum The News Forum a unique forum, automaticallycreated with the course for instructors to postannouncements. Only instructors and TAs can post to the NewsForum. By default, posts made to the News Forum areemailed to class members. Moodle gives you half an hour to edit a newpost before it is sent out as email. 17. Live Chat The Chat activity allows course members tohold real-time, text-based conversations withother course members. Different chat roomscan 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 andcollaborate using Forums, sometimes called"discussions." Instructors can create topics or, depending onthe Forum type, allow students to originatetopics, to which course members can "post" areply, or "message." By default, course members can subscribe toreceive emails containing content posted to theForums of their Moodle courses. 19. Discussion Forums There are five built-in forum types, however some aremore suited for content sharing and assessment whileothers 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 andCollaboration 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 canbe tracked using these 3 settings: Course completion Activity completion Course reports Course completion shows the progress a student ismaking towards finishing the course according tospecific criteria like meeting a grade level or a manualchecking "complete" by either the student and/orteacher. Course completion can be used to check if a studenthas completed the recommended prerequisitecourses. 22. 5. Tracking progress of students Activity completion Report is a helpful way for studentsto be able to track their progress in a course. Thestudent has an easy to see checklist of what they havedone so far. It can also be linked to Course completion in order toallow both students and teachers to watch progressthrough a course. As each activity is checked off as"complete", the student moves further towards finalcompletion of the course. It can also be linked to Conditional activities in order toallow the teacher to set criteria upon which a studentis allowed to progress through a course and accessmaterials. 23. Course reports Moodle allows instructors to request reportstelling which course material have beenaccessed, 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 thematerial, 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/soundfile/image to keep an ongoing journal or do an iterativeassignment Offline assignment or Real world assignment 25. 7. Assignment submission Students can submit an assignment in 2different ways :- File submission allows students to submit/uploadfile(s) to be assessed. It collates students work intoone space. Online text submission allows students to type orcopy-paste text into a window in Moodle forinstructor review and assessment. Students can also post comments on theirsubmission and receive reply from teachers. 26. 8. Conducting exams Along with assignments, an instructor can alsoconduct exams using the Quiz module inMoodle. Quiz module allows the teacher to design andbuild quizzes consisting of a large variety ofQuestion types. The standard question types available inMoodle 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 feedbackand/or show the correct answers. Teacher can set time limit to an exam. The order of questions in the quiz can be randomlyshuffled each time a student starts a new attempt atthe quiz. A single quiz can automatically select random and/orspecific questions from differentcategories 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 befound in the gradebook, or Grader report. When an activity in a course is assigned a grade, itis automatically added to the gradebook. Scores will be automatically populated for gradedactivities into the Grade book. The Grade book can aggregate a final score for theclass and convert it to a letter grade. Students can view their grades in individualizedreports that protect their privacy. You control whatgrades 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 variouscomponents of the course and address areasthat may need revision. They also communicateto students that their input is valuable. In Moodle, Feedback and Survey modulesallow instructors to create and conduct surveysto collect feedback. Survey module has a pre-defined set ofquestions while Feedback module allows towrite your own questions.