Hi fellow Moodlers!
First some background: I'm working on developing practice activities for English as a foreign language (EFL) students who are training to take a speaking exam (Trinity College London's Integrated Skills in English). They're blended learning courses, i.e. a mixture of regular f2f classes plus online practice & extension activities.
In one phase of the exam, the examiner poses a problem or dilemma to the candidate, e.g.
Examiner - "For the next part, I'll tell you something. Then, you have to ask me questions to find out more information and make comments. You need to keep the conversation going. After four minutes, I'll end the conversation. Are you ready?"
Candidate - "Yes."
Examiner - "I am thinking of changing my job so I have looked into various courses. Now I don't know which course to choose."
Candidate - [candidate responds] etc..
The students practice this phase of the exam in writing because it reduces the immediate pressure & gives them time to think & develop their ideas & strategies for responding to this kind of conversation.
The students will start their online conversations in class on their mobile devices, mostly phones, & continue them after class.
Eventually, they'll be given regular online only assignments that the teachers can monitor & grade (mostly participation & some formative feedback).
Most but not all will have the mobile app installed.
The conversations typically occur over several days & having app & email notifications is very useful.
The students practise in pairs, one playing the role of the examiner, the other the candidate.
I keep the pairings as flexible as possible (self-selected) so that the early starters don't have to wait for slower students to respond. They quickly learn who's responsive & who waits until the last minute!
So far, we've been using the Forum activity module but there's an issue: The minimum possible "time to edit" for Forum posts in 1 minute & it's after 1 minute that push & email notifications are sent out. Much of the time this is OK but when we're initiating the task in class & all the students are getting started, & when students are posting at the last minute, it'd be nice to have something more responsive & immediate, i.e. no 1 minute delay between submitting a comment & getting a notification.
I guess the functionality we're looking for is closer to Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., i.e. Post a comment & the receiver gets an alert immediately, but with the monitoring & feedback capabilities of the Forum module.
I think greater immediacy will also encourage students to write shorter responses which are more conversation-like than typical forum discussions.
For privacy, oversight, & GDPR reasons (We're in the EU), we can't require students to use 3rd party apps & this will be required coursework.
Has anyone had similar experiences with using Moodle like this?
What kinds of solutions/advice can you offer?
TIA! 
Hi Matt,
Sounds like a good course to me 👍
Have you tried group messaging? That’s pretty close to WhatsApp actually and built right into moodle! Just put the pair of students into a group and direct them to the messaging and they can start right away. If you want to monitor (and grade) what’s happening in the group, just add the teacher as well and use an assignment activity (without submissions) for it.
An alternative would be our social comments block. It’s actually built to allow students to comment on things, but can surely be used as well for your purposes. You can download it here: https://moodle.org/plugins/block_socialcomments or try it out here: https://labs.bdecent.de/course/view.php?id=415 (log in with demo/moodle or sign up for your own account if you want to see the email notifications)
Please note that currently, students still need to refresh the page to see a new comment. We’re working on a solution for that.
Another alternative would of course be moodles own chat activity.
The messaging built into core seems to be the best solution to me, especially because it’s very nice when used with the mobile app, but maybe you want to check out the other solutions as well.
Hope this helps!
Stefan
Sounds like a good course to me 👍
Have you tried group messaging? That’s pretty close to WhatsApp actually and built right into moodle! Just put the pair of students into a group and direct them to the messaging and they can start right away. If you want to monitor (and grade) what’s happening in the group, just add the teacher as well and use an assignment activity (without submissions) for it.
An alternative would be our social comments block. It’s actually built to allow students to comment on things, but can surely be used as well for your purposes. You can download it here: https://moodle.org/plugins/block_socialcomments or try it out here: https://labs.bdecent.de/course/view.php?id=415 (log in with demo/moodle or sign up for your own account if you want to see the email notifications)
Please note that currently, students still need to refresh the page to see a new comment. We’re working on a solution for that.
Another alternative would of course be moodles own chat activity.
The messaging built into core seems to be the best solution to me, especially because it’s very nice when used with the mobile app, but maybe you want to check out the other solutions as well.
Hope this helps!
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
Thanks for the diverse range of suggestions!
The messaging option sounds the most appropriate in this case but it'd be nice for classmates to see others' dialogues too. However, I can see it being useful as an option to try out & see how well it works!
I'll check out the add-ons too
Cheers!
Why don't you just use the Chat module? You can have different sessions for different people and set it to allow others to see historical chats.
Yes, in some cases, I can see chat being useful. It's the flexibility & additional features of the Forum activity that I'd like to exploit, e.g. in-context private & personalised feedback on specific posts/comments, post & comment management options, grading & rating.