I plan to add an english course to my moodle. Does anybody know whether there are FREE english course materials that we can implement into moodle.
This course should be useful to any moodle site, and if it is included into the moodle installation, everybody can have something to teach at once.
Can anybody refer me to any online english course materials?
thank you.
Hi Saleh (is that the right appelation / if I may)
I can't offer you any right now, but I plan to create some materials for teaching English.
I think that we need an extension of the "cloze" format where it is possible to write something like
(This is from memory so it is probably incorrect)
The man walked {~by, =along, ~in, ~to} the road.
and then import it. That way we would be able create lots of multiple choice, free response,
quizzes using software that we are used to using (our favourite text editor or Excel or whatever).
I also think that we need timed quizzes. (I have been ordered to create timed web based
testing).
But I am not php savvy nor do I have the time right now. But the ability to have lots of quizzes,
with comments on each answer, hints which affect the grade in defined ways, and branching
depending on what answer the student gives (to more of the same type of question if they get it
wrong, different new questions if they get it right) would be helpful in the ESL world.
I think that Martin is (rightly in the case of content courses) a constructionist that is not that into
quizzing, so it is up to us to work out ways of adding this functionality.
Martin's philosphy is right too in an ideal ELS world. I am into constructionism in ESL too
but with shy, lowish motivation Japanese students, the need for bulk quizzing is moot.
I am using Quiztest
http://www.tesol.net/scripts/QuizTest/
to create online tests so that I can get my students to work without doing lots of marking.
I spend a lot of time marking right or wrong answers and entering them into the grade book.
I would like to be able to spend less time doing such repetative marking, have a computer
do the marking and then spend my time speaking to students on line, and offering more
interesting ways to interact. Lately I have had some success with my robot at
http://timothy.vhost.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk-oddcast?botid=b2731c0d1e342bd9
It would be great to be able to integrate robots into the moodle database but that would
need extensive cooperation between the robot providers and moodle.
LON Capa, one of Moodles competitors, interfaces with "hotpotatoes." Hotpotates is not
open source/GNU so I am not keen to use it but it would be nice to find some open source
quizzing alternative that we might be able to integrate. The hotpotatoes quizzing software is
here
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/
As it stands, I have no idea how to expand the moodle database to take account of things like
timing, or branched quizzes. Maybe during the summer holidays?
If we could get a team together to attempt to add to the quizzing functions then that would be
good. But perhaps in non-Japanese, high motivation environment's, moodle's extensive
interaction functionality (lots of forums) is enough?
Umm...I have still not move over to moodle in my ESL due to the difficulty of creating lots of
quiz questions.
In the short term we could attempt to share our quizzes using moodle's present functionality.
When I have some quizzes to share, I will share them.
What functionality do you think that we need?
In general I think that "content forums," specifically a English Teaching Materials content forum
would be a help. But then again, I could post stuff here if I had stuff to post.
Confused in Yamaguchi,
Tim
Sorry Przemek, I don't know. I only know that LON Capa is meant to integrate with hotpotatoes.
I have not attempted to load LON Capa onto my server. I think that I would want to set up my
on server before I try.
Hotpotatoes as a stand alone has the option of sending the results as a mail to someone.
I have not even tried that. I wonder if it sends the answers. Should not be difficult. The
Hotpotatoes site says that it is okay to modify their perl.
Perhaps it would be possible to alter the Perl to enable Hotpotatoes to be integrated with
moodle. Perl comes with all sorts of modules for manipulating databases.
I agree, teachers at my schools ask for the same reason "hotpotatoes-like"-quizzes: just find (also playfull motivating) ways to get students work with the resources of a subject in different ways.
Another way of using quizzes is: "Let students construct a quiz question for - lets say - page 4 and let them explain the correctness of the 4 answers, you will be suprised about so many misconceptions on page 4.." (Moodle must get a quiz-create-option for students then, or they deliver it as a essay and you bring in all these quiz questions..)
Interfacing with hotpotatoes: I took some output from hotpotatoes exercises and made an resource of it for Moodle... The point is that it will stay black-boxes for Moodle and they will never end-up in the student-overviews of Moodle. (I think that I have to look in the create newmodule_template.zip, but on the moment that is broken in CVS.)
Thanks Martin,
When I said "extension of the cloze format," I meant an extension of the moodle cloze
format. I know it exist but I would love it to include comments on each answer, (already
supported by the database), grading (as Tom has recently implemented, and also supported
by the database), multiple choice question layout, flashcard style shuffling of the queston pack
such that porroly resonded questions come out more. I would also like to see, tree esponse
question layout, and timing. Maybe in the summer.
Yes my students are motivated by grades. They are also motivated (as Tom says) but simply
being able to do quizzes. And perhaps (as Quiztest allows) the possibility of being on "high
score" chart shown to all sudents. They are so non communicative and or scared of
communication that it is difficult to get them to submit to journals, forums and assignments
but that is one of the things that I would like to get them to do.
You really need to try teaching English to Japanese students before you can get an idea of the
silence. I have taught learners of other nationalities and the experience is very different. I have
been in classrooms were it is difficult to progress with the lesson since there are so many
questions. But not in Japan.
The quizzes would be a way of getting them to reach a point where they would start to
use the forums etc.
Good luck with moodle.com, I am try to spread the word.
Tim
Moodle already has exactly this feature! It's called the "Missing Word" format (look for the import button on the quiz category page). I'd not heard of the name "cloze" at the time, but a search on goodle.com seems to show it's the popular name for that format.
Actually, missing word (or short answer) is not a cloze task type. A classic cloze test is a longer passage with every nth word removed. The task is to recreate the text by putting in the missing words. However, this type is not very often used nowadays, and rightly so, because the words get removed at random without real pedagogical purpose. A more modern version of the cloze test is simply a text or passage with a number of words deleted. And this type can be very useful in teaching English as a foreign language, because it focuses on testing lexical and structural accuracy, common word collocations, etc. An example is in the attached zip file. Two main differences between Moodle's short-answer question and this cloze test are that 1/ there can be a lot of blanks in one question, and 2/ some blanks can have alternate (multiple) correct answers, e.g the third blank in the attached quiz can be answered with 'under', 'beneath' or 'underneath'.
A modified version of cloze test is a multiple-choice cloze, where for every gap there is a choice of answers to choose from (one correct and a few distractors). Again, an example in the attached zip file.
Neither of them is supported by Moodle at the moment. I have some experience with webct and they don't have any of these two question types either. However, it is possible to use their short-answer question in this way, because it allows to create a number of blanks for each question and specify which answer(s) can appear in which blank. It is not very elegant, because you get the text with numbered typed-in blanks (like this: (1)_____) which is then followed by the actual blanks (form fields), where the student writes the answers. Again, an example in the zip. However, I think this is not possible in Moodle at the moment.
With the multiple-choice cloze, there is a workaround in Moodle, though not perfect. You can create a number of multiple-choice questions and attach the text with blanks to the first one. However, the problem is that the whole set (all of these multiple-choice questions together with the text) should be treated as one question, and with this workaround it is treated as a number of multiple-choice questions.
These two question types (cloze and multiple-choice cloze) are definitely something I'd love to see implemented in Moodle, but knowing how busy Martin is I've never aksed for it, and I don't think I should On the other hand, I do not have the programming skills to do it myself or the financial resources to have it done by somebody else
But who knows? Maybe in a few months?...
Just one final note: the tests in the attached files are not mine. They are taken from a sample of the Cambridge FCE exam available at http://www.cambridgeesol.org/support/dloads/ums.cfm