Teaching with Moodle

Hi Souman,

I really interested too and would be willing to be a beta tester.

Cheers,
Glenys

Hi Souman,

Here are some of my reflections on your questions (my experience is mainly with distance learning, not blended):

1. "How to form group, such that collaboration will happen optimally? (What are the factor we should consider? Like: Age, communication skill, time, sex etc)"
   When I've made groups I've tried to make them as heterogeneous as possible as regards : sex, nationality, communication skills, participation, level in the language (they weren't working in their native language), profession, access to the Internet, ... At other times I've let students form their own groups, base on their own criteria. Both have worked well for different kinds of projects. The biggest problem in each case was the students who "disappear" without informing their partners.
2. I found it was time consuming to track the progress of groups and individuals. I looked at the individual student's reports (on Moodle) to see how often they'd been logging in and what they'd been doing. I looked at the forums and wikis to get an overall impression of whether or not the group was keeping up with the schedule.
3. I like your suggest of publishing average number of posts to encourage individuals to beat the average. I also plan to use the forum rating system in the coming year which I've never used before. But I think that the most important is to propose focussed tasks which engage their interest and which they perceive as relevant to their studies as a whole.
4. My assessments are done in a rather unscientific way (my students are very heterogeneous as regards inititial level in the subject). I take into account the:
   
   • level in the subject
   • participation measured by:
     • number and length of forum, chat, wiki, .. entries
     • time spent on the course (hits on the server)
   • quality of their participation
   • help given to fellow students
   • progress
   • bug reporting to improve the course
     
5. So far, I haven't found a really satisfactory video or audio chat plug-in... and I've done a lot of looking and experimenting. It's essential for language courses.

Hope this helps and eager to read others.
Glenys

Hi Souman,

Apologies for the delay - heavy time of year for marking. I haven't made use of conditional activities but I think they will be big in Moodle 2.0. It might be worth looking at the forums to see what might happen. My idea was that students would need to satisfactorily complete one section before going on to the next. From what I see this won't be an issue at the university level but would be at school level (trying to train them up).

As regards your post, then this looks a good order. Remember, groups can be set within Moodle (see groups and grouping) but it would be useful to specify groups according to project. I can see Glenys' point here. An over-ride for groups would be useful. For example, I've just set a group task where students chose their own colleagues. this has worked well in all cases except two. I want to transfer them and this is easy because it's a hand-written form. In Moodle it would be far more difficult.

Tracking student progress is a common Moodle theme (I think you need to look for progress bar for ideas). I'd be happy with a simple red/green box for each stage. A simple visual system that tells me when they've passed a stage. I'd like that for other ideas as well.

Motivation might be extrinsic to Moodle. However, a post minimum might be useful.

I have longer-term projects and I like to grade each component so that it's like a management task - I train the students in self-organisation by grading each stage (but just a simple 0-10 scale). It would be useful to have a number of grading options for each stage unless you thin k that the item we're measuring can only be done one way. this means the good worker with a poor project gets credit as does the less organised with great work - both ideas needs to be noted.

Both ideas on synchronous communication are great. would love a shared whiteboard function in Moodle.

Hope this helps,

Paul

Paul you were right it was very helpful. 

http://aboutonlinedegrees.org

Hi,

I am really very sorry for not responding to Glenys and Paul, and I don't have any good reason for this .

@Susanne : Thanks for your interest.

I have almost completed the design document of the module and started coding just two days back. Now I am building a module named Rubrics, which will be used for self and peer evaluation in the PBL module. I will post my design documnet very soon.

Regards,

Souman