Using Moodle | O'Reilly Media

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

If you teach, you've probably heard for years about the revolution the Internet would bring to teaching and learning. As with so many promises of revolution, the changes haven't materialized. Instead, a new suite of tools, called course management systems (CMSs), can be used to enhance your teaching by taking advantage of the Internet without replacing the need for a teacher.

CMSs are web applications, meaning they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser. The server is usually located in your university or department, but it can be anywhere in the world. You and your students can access the system from anywhere with an Internet connection.

At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. Aside from access control, CMSs offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. Let's take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

Uploading and sharing materials: Most CMSs provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTML editor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want.
Forums and chats: Online forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats , on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for everything from course announcements to entire lectures. I know one professor who, unable to speak due to throat surgery, held his entire class using online chats and readings. Student workgroups can use online discussions for class projects.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

CMSs are web applications, meaning they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser. The server is usually located in your university or department, but it can be anywhere in the world. You and your students can access the system from anywhere with an Internet connection.

At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. Aside from access control, CMSs offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. Let's take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

Uploading and sharing materials: Most CMSs provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTML editor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want.
Forums and chats: Online forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats , on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for everything from course announcements to entire lectures. I know one professor who, unable to speak due to throat surgery, held his entire class using online chats and readings. Student workgroups can use online discussions for class projects.
Quizzes and surveys

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Part of my day job is to administer a commercial CMS for a large university. I've been researching CMSs for a few years now, and I've become a huge fan of Moodle because it is open source, built on a sound educational philosophy, and has a huge community that supports and develops it. It can compete with the big commercial systems in terms of feature set and is easy to extend. Let's take a closer look at some of these advantages and why they are important to you and your institution.

The phrase "open source" has become a loaded term in some circles. For those who are outside of the techie culture, it's hard to understand what a weird and powerful idea this has become, and how it has forever changed the world of software development. The idea itself is simple; open-source simply means that users have access to the source code of the software. You can look under the hood, see how it works, tinker with it, or use parts of it in your own product.

So why is this important? For one, open source software is aligned with the academic community's values of freedom, peer review, and knowledge sharing. Just as anyone can download and use Moodle for free, users can also write new features, fix bugs, improve performance, or simply learn from looking at how other people solved a problem.

Secondly, unlike expensive proprietary CMSs that require hefty maintenance contracts, Moodle costs nothing to download and you can install it on as many servers as you want. No one can take it away from you, increase the license cost, or make you pay for upgrades. No one can force you to upgrade, adopt features you don't want, or tell you how many users you can have. They can't take the source code back from users, and if Martin decides to stop developing Moodle, there is a dedicated community of developers who will keep the project going.

Martin's background in education led him to adopt social constructionism as a core theory behind Moodle. This is revolutionary, as most CMS systems have been built around tool sets, not pedagogy. I would call most commercial CMS systems tool-centered while Moodle is learning-centered.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Moodle also stacks up well against the feature sets of the major commercial systems. I've been investigating alternatives to Blackboard and WebCT for over a year now, and I've been very concerned about feature compatibility between any alternative and the current systems. If instructors can't do what they've been able to do with their commercial system, they'll reject an open source alternative immediately. Moodle is the only open source system currently available that can compete with the big boys' features.

In fact, the educators in the developer community have given Moodle some features that the commercial vendors haven't even thought of. That's the advantage of an educator-driven, open source system versus a marketing-driven, for-profit system. In Table 1-1, I compare the features in the two leading commercial CMSs and Moodle.

Table 1-1: Feature comparison
Feature	Blackboard	WebCT	Moodle
Upload and share documents	Y	Y	Y
Create content online in HTML	N	Y	Y
Online Discussions	Y	Y	Y
Grade discussions / participation	N

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

In this chapter, we'll cover the basics of the Moodle interface and some of the options you have when setting up your class. Then we'll start adding some content to your first Moodle class.

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Moodle is a web-based tool you can access through a web browser. This means that in order to use Moodle you need a computer with a web browser installed and an Internet connection. You also need to have the web address (called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL ) of a server running Moodle. If your institution supports Moodle, it will have a server with Moodle up and running. You can then get the server address from the system administrator. If you don't have access to a server with Moodle installed, and you'd like to set up your own, visit the Moodle website for instructions on setting up a Moodle server on any platform.

After you've gotten the URL , open your web browser and type the address in the address bar. You'll then be taken to the Moodle main screen.

When you first visit your Moodle site, you'll see the main screen with the site news and the courses you are teaching or taking (see Figure 2-1).

Figure 2-1: Moodle main screen

Take a moment and familiarize yourself with the interface. Moodle uses a number of interface conventions throughout the system. Frequently updated or important information is presented in the middle of the screen. On the lefthand side of the screen you'll see several "blocks" that list available courses and site news. Blocks are useful for holding all kinds of tools and content. I'll be using the block terminology throughout the rest of the book.

On the upper right, you'll see a dropdown menu with language options. As of August 2004, Moodle has been translated into 40 languages by the developer community. Anyone who uses Moodle, both students and teachers, can select the language in which Moodle's tabs and instructions will appear. For example, if I choose to view the site in Norwegian, the system labels will be translated into that language. However, Moodle does not translate user content. Any user-generated content remains in the language in which it was entered.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Moodle is a web-based tool you can access through a web browser. This means that in order to use Moodle you need a computer with a web browser installed and an Internet connection. You also need to have the web address (called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL ) of a server running Moodle. If your institution supports Moodle, it will have a server with Moodle up and running. You can then get the server address from the system administrator. If you don't have access to a server with Moodle installed, and you'd like to set up your own, visit the Moodle website for instructions on setting up a Moodle server on any platform.

After you've gotten the URL , open your web browser and type the address in the address bar. You'll then be taken to the Moodle main screen.

When you first visit your Moodle site, you'll see the main screen with the site news and the courses you are teaching or taking (see Figure 2-1).

Figure 2-1: Moodle main screen

Take a moment and familiarize yourself with the interface. Moodle uses a number of interface conventions throughout the system. Frequently updated or important information is presented in the middle of the screen. On the lefthand side of the screen you'll see several "blocks" that list available courses and site news. Blocks are useful for holding all kinds of tools and content. I'll be using the block terminology throughout the rest of the book.

On the upper right, you'll see a dropdown menu with language options. As of August 2004, Moodle has been translated into 40 languages by the developer community. Anyone who uses Moodle, both students and teachers, can select the language in which Moodle's tabs and instructions will appear. For example, if I choose to view the site in Norwegian, the system labels will be translated into that language. However, Moodle does not translate user content. Any user-generated content remains in the language in which it was entered.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Right above the language selection list, you'll find a hyperlink that says "Login ." Click the link and Moodle will present you with the login screen, as shown in Figure 2-3. Your username and password will depend on how your system administrator set up the system. Moodle has a number of options for user authentication, including email authentication, or an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server, or users can register their own accounts. Self-registration is the default method, and many sites use this.

If you need to create your own account:

Click the "Start now by creating a new account" button.
Fill in the new account form by creating a username and password for yourself (see Figure 2-4).
Enter a valid email address because the system will send you an email to confirm your account. You won't be able to log in again until you confirm your account.
Click "Create my new account."
Within a few minutes, you should receive an email at the account you specified on the form.
Click the link in the email (or copy and paste it into the address window in your browser) to confirm your account.

Figure 2-3: Login screen

You now have a verified account. Your account isn't automatically associated with the courses you're teaching. You'll need to find out from your system administrator how to enroll your account as an instructor in a course. By default, the system administrator will have to enroll you as an instructor in a course.

Once you have successfully confirmed your account and logged in, you will find yourself back at the main page. As Figure 2-5 shows, your username will now be displayed at the top of the screen.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

On the left side of the main screen, you'll see a block that includes a list of all the courses you are teaching or taking as a student. You can access your courses by clicking on the course name in the block, as shown in Figure 2-8.

Figure 2-8: Main screen course list

Let's start with the upper lefthand corner of the course screen, as shown in Figure 2-9. There you'll see the name of your course as entered when the course was created. Either your system administrator entered your course name by hand or she got it from your institution's course database. (Read the "Course settings" section below if you need to change the name.)

Figure 2-9: Course layout

Below the course name is a bar that fills with the hyperlinked names of pages as you navigate from one page to another. Also known as "breadcrumbs," these links track where you are in the course and allow you to easily to find your way back to where you started or to return to a page. Frequently, the best way to return to the course main page is to click on the course ID in the breadcrumb trail. For example, in Figure 2-9, you would click on Mdl101 to go back to the course main page from another page in the course.

Below the navigation bar are three columns, which are also shown in Figure 2-9. The far-left and far-right columns contain tool blocks, while the center block contains your course content and activities. The topmost tool block on the left is the People block. From here, you and your students can view the individual profiles of other participants in the course and check who is a member of student workgroups.

Beneath the People block is the Activities block. As you add forums, quizzes, workshops, assignments, and other activities to your course, the activity types will be listed here. By clicking on the activity type, students can view all of the activities of that type that are currently available to them. For example, if you gave a quiz every week, each content block would list a quiz, and all of the quizzes would also be listed under the quiz link in the Activities block.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

By now, you're probably wondering, "When the heck do I get to add stuff to my course?" I've provided a lot of background here so you'll understand some of the options you have. But now's the time to start building your course.

Let's start with a News item to announce to the world that your online materials are coming soon. The News forum is a special type of forum (for a full description of forums, see Chapter 4). The News forum is automatically created when the course is first generated. Everyone in the course can read the postings, and the news is automatically emailed to them. It's a good tool for making general announcements and sending reminders to students about upcoming assignments.

To add a news item:

Click News forum.
Click "Add a NewTopic." You'll see the screen to add a new topic such as the one shown in Figure 2-18.
Type your new message to your class.
Click Save Changes. You will now be back at the main News Page.
Click on your course name in the navigation bar at the top.

Figure 2-18: The News forum posting screen

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

In this chapter, we've looked at how to create your account and personalize your profile. We've become acquainted with Moodle's user interface and tools, and we got the format of your course set up the way you want it. In the next chapter, we'll start adding different types of content to your new Moodle course.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The first thing most people want to do when they create a course in Moodle is add some content, such as syllabus or a course outline. As I explained in Chapter 2, you can add content to your course using the "Add a resource" menu in the content blocks of your course (see Figure 2-16). In this chapter, we'll use all of the tools in the resource menu. Chapters 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11-,12 will cover the tools in the "Add an activity" menu.

Remember that you need to turn Editing Mode on to see the "Add a resource" and "Add an activity" menus.

The first two tools, "Compose a text page" and "Compose a web page," can be used to develop content directly in Moodle. The second two, "Link to a file or web site" and "Display a directory," are used to manage content developed in other programs, such as Word or PowerPoint . You can also add content from other web sites and take advantage of the rich library of information available on the Web.

Let's begin by creating a simple text page for your course.

A text page is a simple plain-text page with little formatting, such as the example in Figure 3-1. You can add paragraphs and whitespace, but that's about it.

Figure 3-1: A text page in Moodle

Text pages are very easy to create, however. To create one:

Turn Editing Mode on.
From the "Add a Resource" menu, select "Compose a text page." Moodle will then display the page to compose a text page like the one in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2: Compose a text page
Enter a name for the text page.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The first thing most people want to do when they create a course in Moodle is add some content, such as syllabus or a course outline. As I explained in Chapter 2, you can add content to your course using the "Add a resource" menu in the content blocks of your course (see Figure 2-16). In this chapter, we'll use all of the tools in the resource menu. Chapters 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11-,12 will cover the tools in the "Add an activity" menu.

Remember that you need to turn Editing Mode on to see the "Add a resource" and "Add an activity" menus.

The first two tools, "Compose a text page" and "Compose a web page," can be used to develop content directly in Moodle. The second two, "Link to a file or web site" and "Display a directory," are used to manage content developed in other programs, such as Word or PowerPoint . You can also add content from other web sites and take advantage of the rich library of information available on the Web.

Let's begin by creating a simple text page for your course.

A text page is a simple plain-text page with little formatting, such as the example in Figure 3-1. You can add paragraphs and whitespace, but that's about it.

Figure 3-1: A text page in Moodle

Text pages are very easy to create, however. To create one:

Turn Editing Mode on.
From the "Add a Resource" menu, select "Compose a text page." Moodle will then display the page to compose a text page like the one in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2: Compose a text page
Enter a name for the text page.

The name you give the page will be displayed in the content block on the main page. Students will access your page by clicking on the name. Be sure to give the page a descriptive name so students will know what they are accessing.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

You don't have to create all of your content in Moodle. You can also upload and store any digital content that you have created in other applications. Documents you create in a word processor or presentation package can be shared with students in your course. You can also easily add links to other web sites to give your students access to important web resources.

Although it's easy to generate content directly in Moodle, you can also upload any type of electronic file you like. All you need to do is make sure your students can access it with the appropriate software on their computers.

Once you've added a file to your files area, you can easily add it as a resource for your students. There are two resource types you can use to add files. The first method is to add an "Uploaded File" resources (see Figure 3-4):

In Editing Mode, select "Add Link to File or Web Site" from the Resource menu from the content block where you want to add the link to the file.

Figure 3-4: Adding a new resource
On the Edit page, click the "Choose or upload a file" button. A new window will pop up with the files area directory structure.
Find the file you want to add in the files area. You can also upload a new file here if you'd like .
On the right side of the files list, you will see a "Choose" link in bold (see Figure 3-5). Click that link. The Files window will close, and the path to the file will be entered into the filename.
You can choose to display the file in a new pop-up window. Most of the time, you won't need to worry about this with uploaded content.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Uploading content is only half the battle of content management in Moodle. You'll need to ensure your uploaded content is current, and you'll occasionally want to replace or delete files. Fortunately, Moodle has some useful features to help you manage your content once it's on the server.

Once you've uploaded your files, they are stored in the Files area. When you create a link to a file, you store the file in the Files area and create a link for your students to access it.

To access the Files area, click the Files link in the Administration block, as shown in Figure 3-10.

Figure 3-10: Files link in the Administration area

Each uploaded file and file folder has a checkbox beside it. You can select one or more files and then move or archive them using the tools in the dropdown menu on the lower-left side of the file list. By default, it reads "With chosen files...." If you click on the menu, you'll see three things you can do with your chosen files:

Move to another folder

To move uploaded content to another folder in the Files area:

Select the file(s) you want to move.
Select "Move to another folder."
Navigate to the folder where you want to move the selected files.
You'll see a new button at the bottom of the screen that says "Move Files here." Click the button, and the files will move to the new location.

Delete completely

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

There are a few effective practices that can make life easier for you and your students. First, there are file format tricks to ensure your students can download and use your content. Second, make sure the bit size of your files is as small as it can be so your students won't grow old waiting to download tomorrow's lecture notes. Third, there are creative ways to use static content in your courses to help you and your students succeed.

Every file you create and save on your computer has a specific file format. For example, Word files are saved in Word format, and can be opened only in a compatible version of Word. However, this can cause problems if your students don't have the same version of Word you do. A solution is to continue to create your documents in Word but save them as Rich Text Format, or RTF , a format that can be opened by a wide variety of word processing programs. In most versions of Word, you can save a file as RTF by following these steps:

Select Save As... from the file menu.
Choose RTF from the file type dropdown.
Save the RTF copy of your document.

There are a number of file formats for displaying text and images that almost everyone can open, regardless of their computing platform, and you should strive to use these whenever possible. These formats include RTF, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML ), Postscript Display Format (PDF), and picture formats, including pict, tiff, jpeg, gif, and png.

Table 3-2 describes some common file formats.

Table 3-2: File types
File type	Description

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Ultimately, the content you develop and share in your Moodle course is up to you. Static Moodle content provides resources for students as they engage in the learning process. In this chapter, we've looked at how to upload and create content for your Moodle course. In the next chapter, we'll discuss some of the dynamic activities you can add to your class to make it truly compelling.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Forums are a powerful communication tool within a Moodle course. Think of them as an online message board where you and your students can post messages to each other while easily keeping track of individual conversations. Forums are the primary tool for having a discussion online and are the central organizing feature in the Social course type. In fact, you've already posted your first message to a forum back in Chapter 2. When you posted your news item, you were posting to a special forum used in every course for announcements and news.

Forums allow you and your students to communicate with each other at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. Students don't have to be logged in at the same time you are to communicate with you or their classmates. Figure 4-1 demonstrates how conversations are tracked through time, and readers can review the history of the conversation by simply reading the page. Those of us in the computer biz call this type of communication "asynchronous," meaning "not happening at the same time." This can be compared to a synchronous forms of communication like a chat room, instant messaging, or a face-to-face conversation.

Figure 4-1: Forum posting

Because forums are asynchronous, students can take their time composing a reply. There is a lot of research indicating more students are willing to participate in an asynchronous forum than are willing to speak up in class. For learners for whom English is a second language, for people with communicative disabilities, and for the just plain shy, forums offer a chance to take as much time as they need to formulate a reasonable reply. Other students who might be afraid of embarrassing themselves by making a mistake when they speak up in class can double-check their responses before they send them in.

These features create many opportunities for you not only to replicate the conversations you have in class, but also to create entirely new activities that are difficult to do in a classroom setting.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Before we start creating a forum, it is important to make sure we're using the same vocabulary. It might be useful to think of the forums module in terms of a party. Each forum is a room at the party; there's a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room. In each room, there are groups of people having discussions. Each discussion has a thread to the conversation with everyone replying to each other about the topic. Without people having discussions, a forum is an empty, quiet space. Each forum can contain one or more discussions which are comprised of one or more posts and replies.

Moodle forums also allow subscriptions. When a user subscribes to a forum, all new posts are automatically sent to the email address stored in his user profile. This makes it easy to keep track of what's happening in the forums without constantly logging in.

Creating a forum is relatively easy. The key to success is choosing the right options for the type of forum you want to create. Moodle has three basic forum types:

A single, simple discussion: You can create only one discussion in this forum.
Each person posts one discussion: Each person on the class can start only one discussion. This would be useful when each person needs to post an assignment or a question. Each discussion can then have multiple replies.
Standard forum for general use: There can be one or more discussions in this forum, and anyone with permission can post multiple discussions.

To add a forum to your class:

Click Turn Editing Mode On.
Select Forum from the activity menu in the Topic or Schedule section where you would like to add the forum.
On the resulting page, shown in Figure 4-2, give the forum a descriptive name.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Moodle chat tool is a simple synchronous communication tool allowing you and your students to communicate in real time. If you've every used an instant messaging system like AOL, MSN or iChat, you've used a system similar to the Moodle chat. In the forums, you and your students don't have to be logged in at the same time. In a chat, everyone needs to be logged in at the same time in order to communicate.

To use the chat tool, you will need to create a chat room for you and your students and set a time when everyone will log in and meet in the chat room. You can create one session for the entire course or set up repeating sessions for multiple meetings.

To create a chat session:

Click Turn Editing Mode On.
Select Chat from the "Add an activity..." menu.
In the create chat page, shown in Figure 4-10, give the chat room a name and provide directions on how to use the room in the Introduction text.

Figure 4-10: Create chat
Set the time for the first chat session in the Next chat time.
Set the options for the chat room:

Repeat sessions

There are four options here:

Don't publish any chat times

Creates a chat room that is always open and has no specified meeting times

No repeats

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The dialogue tool is a private communication channel between two people in your class. You can set up dialogues to allow student-to-teacher communication or student-to-student communication. Each dialogue you create can host a number of different conversations. You may only need to create one dialogue for the entire class, depending on how you want to use them.

To create a dialogue:

Click Turn Editing Mode On.
Select Dialogue from the Activity menu.
The Introduction text entered in the dialogue-creation screen shown in Figure 4-12 will be displayed when anyone enters the dialogue.

Figure 4-12: Dialogue creation screen
Set the dialogue options:

Delete Closed Dialogues after (Days)

You can close dialogues after they are finished. After they've been closed, the participants can see the transcripts until they are deleted.

Type of Dialogue

This setting selects whether the dialogues should be teacher-to-student or student-to-student.

Allow more than on Dialogue with the same person

This setting determines whether you can have more than once conversation with a given person within a dialogue tool.

Mail Default

This setting selects whether mail notifications of dialogue postings should be mailed to the participants.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Moodle provides three channels of communication for you and your students. Forums provide an asynchronous, public method for sharing ideas. The chats are a great way to have simultaneous conversations online with a group of people. Dialogues provide a private channel for you to communicate directly with your students. Communication is a key to success for any class, and it's even more important in an online environment.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Feedback on performance is a critical part of a learning environment, and assessment is one of the most important activities in education. As educators, we can't tell what's going on inside the heads of students, so we need a way for them to demonstrate what they understand and what they don't. A well-designed test, even a multiple-choice test, can give you critical information about student performance. If the feedback is rapid enough, it can also be a critical tool for students to gauge their own performance and help them become more successful.

Moodle's quiz module is one of the most complex pieces of the system. The community has added a large number of options and tools to the quiz engine, making it extremely flexible. You can create quizzes with different question types, randomly generate quizzes from pools of questions, allow students to retake quizzes multiple times, and have the computer score it all.

These features open up a number of strategies that usually aren't practical with paper-based testing. It's hard enough to score one batch of quizzes, and nearly impossible to score it 10 times for each student. When the computer does the work for you, it's easy to give students a chance to practice taking a test or give frequent small quizzes. We'll explore how to apply these advantages later in the chapter. For now, let's get started building your first Moodle quiz.

Moodle quizzes have two major components: the quiz body and the question pools. Think of the quiz bodies as a container for various types of questions pulled from the question pools. The body is what students see when they take the assessment. It also defines how the students interact with the quiz. The questions in a quiz body can be of any type, chosen manually or at random, and displayed in a set order or a random order. The question pools can contain questions arranged in a manner that makes sense to you. You can create pools based on chapters, weeks in the semester, important concepts, or any other organizational scheme. Pools can be reused in multiple quizzes, shared between classes, and moved between systems.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Moodle quizzes have two major components: the quiz body and the question pools. Think of the quiz bodies as a container for various types of questions pulled from the question pools. The body is what students see when they take the assessment. It also defines how the students interact with the quiz. The questions in a quiz body can be of any type, chosen manually or at random, and displayed in a set order or a random order. The question pools can contain questions arranged in a manner that makes sense to you. You can create pools based on chapters, weeks in the semester, important concepts, or any other organizational scheme. Pools can be reused in multiple quizzes, shared between classes, and moved between systems.

To start, we need to create a body for our first quiz.

When you create the quiz body, you are creating a container for the questions and setting the rules for interacting with the quiz.

To create a quiz body:

Click Turn Editing Mode On.
Select Quiz from the add menu in the content section where you want to place the link to a quiz.
In the Quiz editing page, shown in Figure 5-1, give the quiz a descriptive name. We'll call this first quiz "Chapter 1."
Write an introduction for the quiz. Be sure to include any special instructions for taking the quiz, such as the number of attempts allowed or scoring rules.
Choose opening and closing dates for the quiz.

The default opening and closing dates are the same, and are set to the time you create the quiz. Be sure to change at least the closing date to some point in the future, or your students won't be able to take the quiz at all.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Once students start to take the quizzes, you'll have a lot of data available. If you click on the quiz link in the content block of your course's main page, you'll immediately see the number of quizzes that have been completed by your students. If you click on the attempt summary, you'll see the quiz report screen as shown in Figure 5-17. From here, you can see every quiz attempt and drill down into the individual responses. Clicking on the date and time of the attempt provides each question and answer.

Figure 5-17: Quiz reports

If you want to delete an attempt by a student, click on the checkbox between the student's name and the grade and then click the "Delete selected" button below the attempts list. This is a good way to get rid of your own preview attempts so you have clean data in your reports.

Above the attempts list, there are four links to aggregate reports. These reports are a great way to monitor your students' performance. The first link, Overview, links to the list of completed attempts you saw when you first clicked on the completed quiz link.

The next link, "Regrade attempts," will recalculate the quiz grades if you have changed the possible number of points for the quiz or a question.

The next two reports give you detailed statistics about the quiz results. The first table displays the responses to each question individually. You will only see the results of the non-randomly selected questions. The random questions will appear as blanks in the table. The report also displays incorrect or partially correct responses. Correct responses are displayed as a double dash, except for numerical and short-answer questions. The reports for these two question types always display the student's answer. This report gives you an easy way to tell at a glance where students are having problems.

The next table is the item response analysis as shown in Figure 5-18. This is a great tool for evaluating the reliability of your questions. You can see the three most common answers to each question, the percentage of students who got each question correct, and the discrimination index. The discrimination index correlates students' overall performance on the quiz to their performance on each item; stronger students should have a better chance of getting each individual question correct, and weaker students should be have a lower chance of getting each item correct. If the distribution of correct and incorrect responses is flat (everyone has an equal chance of being correct), then everyone is guessing. If everyone is getting it right (or wrong), then the question is too easy (or too hard). The higher the discrimination index, the better the question is at providing useful data about student performance.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

As we've seen, the Moodle quiz engine is a powerful, flexible tool for monitoring and diagnosing a student's understanding of certain types of knowledge. Using this tool effectively can boost your course's effectiveness and promote student performance. While a computer-scored quiz is a different evaluation than more open-ended assessments, it does give valuable insight into student thinking, especially when you use good strategies and a little creativity.

Of course, using the quiz engine effectively takes some work and practice. The first thing to do is use effective question-design strategies. If you ask good questions, you'll get useful data about your students' performance and understanding of the material. Of course, the converse is also true. There is a ton of literature about effective assessment design available. I'll just highlight a few of the most important ideas:

Tie each question to a course goal. After all, you want to know whether your students are achieving the goals of the course, so why not ask them directly?
Try to ask multiple questions about each important idea in the class. This gives you more data points about a student's understanding.
When writing a multiple-choice question, be sure each wrong answer represents a common misconception. This will help you diagnose student thinking and eliminate easy guessing.
Write questions requiring your students to think at different levels. Include recall questions, comprehension questions, and application and analysis questions. You can determine where students are having problems in their thinking. Can they recall the material but not apply it?
Test your questions. After you've established an initial question bank, use the system reports to determine which questions are useful and which aren't. As you write new questions, give them a lower point value and throw in a few to establish their reliability.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The workshop activity is the most complex tool currently available in Moodle. Workshops are designed so a student's work can be submitted and offered for peer review within a structured framework. Workshops provide a process for both instructor and peer feedback on open-ended assignments, such as essays and research papers. There are easy-to-use interfaces for uploading assignments, performing self-assessments, and peer reviews of other students' papers.

The key to the workshop is the scoring guide, which is a set of specific criteria for making judgments about the quality of a given work. Open-ended assessments are difficult to score reliably, unless there are very specific performance dimensions the reviewers should follow, such as the presence of a thesis and strong evidence supporting each point. For example, if a grader receives 15 student essays, she may review each one in turn. She will probably spend more time on the first few papers, carefully marking the grammar and structure of the essay. As the grader becomes fatigued, she may move to a more holistic scoring heuristic, deciding if an essay is "good" or "bad." The level of feedback given to each student can vary depending on where they are in the pile.

Good scoring guides ask specific questions about the work being evaulated. Making a judgment about whether there is a clearly written thesis statement in an essay is a much easier task than deciding if an essay is "well written." As you develop your workshop, you will create a set of scoring criteria that you and your students can follow when evaluating submitted assignments.

Workshops also allow students to evaluate example assignments uploaded by an instructor. You can upload good and bad examples of an assignment so students can practice critiquing. This gives students a valuable opportunity to calibrate their judgments against your expert opinion. If they realize their evaluation of a work is significantly different from yours, they can work with you to figure out why.

Setting up and managing workshops is a complex process. It can take a while to figure out how the system works. Once you get it up and running, however, it is a powerful learning tool.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Preparing a workshop so students can begin submitting their assignments is a three-step process. First, you need to add the workshop to your course. Second, you need to create the scoring guide you and your students will use to evaluate submissions. Third, if you want students to critique your example assignments, you need to upload those as well.

To create a workshop for peer review of materials

Click Turn Editing Mode On.
Select Workshop from the Add Activity menu in the section where you want to place the link.
On the Workshop page, shown in Figure 6-1, add a title and description.

Figure 6-1: Add a workshop
Select the maximum grade for the workshop assignment.
Choose a grading strategy from these five options:

No grading

Students who review assignments don't give each other grades, just comments. You can then grade the comments, which will give the commenting student his final grade.

Accumulative grading

Later in the process, you can create a multidimensional scoring rubric for students to score each other's work. Accumulative grading calculates the submitting student's final grade based on the cumulative grades received from her peers within each of the dimensions. You assign a scale and weight to each dimension when you develop the scoring guide.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Once you've set up your workshop, you will need to manage student submissions and evaluation. Fortunately, the workshop makes it easy to track student activity as it happens. You can also choose how much feedback you give to students at any given time.

The six tabs on the workshop screen represent the six phases of a workshop. We've just completed phase 1. Phases 2 through 4 allow students to interact with the workshop. Phase 2 allows students to upload their submissions and perform instructor and self-assessments but does not distribute submissions for peer review. Phase 3 allows students to do everything in phase 2, but also distributes submissions for peer review. Phase 4 allows only self- and peer-assessments.

You may not want to use all three phases. There are two strategies for managing workshop phases. The easiest, but not necessarily the best, is to use only phase 3 after you've set up the workshop in phase 1. This gives students maximum flexibility. They can upload their assignments at any point before the due date. The problem occurs when students begin to peer-review each other's work. If students are permitted to peer-review before all of the submissions are in, the submissions won't be distributed randomly. The students who submit and review early will see only other early submissions. Late submitters will see only late submissions. Students who submit too close to the deadline may not give their peers enough time to review their work.

The alternative strategy uses only phases 2 and 4. You can set an interim deadline for student submissions and only accept student work before this due date. After the submission deadline, you'll set the workshop to phase 4 and students will only be allowed to perform peer reviews. This strategy will help ensure an even distribution of student work for evaluation and ensure that everyone has sufficient time for review.

Section 6.2.1.1: Student submissions

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·

Table of Contents

Section 6.2.1.1: Student submissions