Martin, thank you for your comments. They made me rethink my ideas and plans, and this is what I've come up with.
Martin wrote:
In Moodle, teachers can be given the right to create new courses, and they can give students write access in those courses, so a lot of what you're saying here can be implemented simply as a course for each "selfstudy" group.
Certainly, it is possible for students to be given editing rights to a course. In this way, students can make their own quizzes and questions using the standard Quiz module. In fact, I have done this: set up courses in which students are given the same control as a traditional Moodle 'teacher'. However, there are four drawbacks to this method of encouraging Autonomous Learning.
- Not all Moodle teachers are able to create another course for students to use as their own Self Study page. Either they are paying a hosting company to 'rent' just a single course space, or their moodle administrator has put limits on the number of course teachers can set up.
- Having a course in which a number of students have editing rights would make self study possible, but it would not be possible to easily or automatically track and record what individual students do. Alternatively, giving each student their own Moodle course would make it possible for a teacher to see what individual students were doing, but it would not be automatic; they would have to access each course. Furthermore, for a teacher in charge of a lot of students this would not be very practical. In other words, the benefit of my proposed module is that student activities; both creating and doing quizzes, could be automatically recorded to the Gradebook.
- Even if teachers are able set up a course or multiple courses for teachers, in my experience not only would this be too time consuming, but it would also be too complicated for many teachers. It would be much easier for them if the ability to initiate, track, evaluate and record grades of self study activities were in the same course as all the other course activities.
- Giving carte blanche to 'certain' groups of students to create their own activities is not always feasible. It could lead to at best a chaotic course, and at worst students 'accidentally' deleting each others questions and quizzes.
4 key objectives of SelfStudy function/module and possible solutions
Notwithstanding these four points above, I appreciate that replicating things, that Moodle already does, does potentially complicate matters. So, I've narrowed down my key objectives to the following 4 goals:
- make it possible for students to create their own questions and quizzes in the same way that teachers can currently do so, but with the possibility of simplifying quiz and question creation (e.g. simple initial quiz set up, limit the question types, etc.)
- allow students to share these questions (="communal autonomous learning")
- allow teachers to easily track, evaluate, and grade these questions, this includes automatic grading where possible
- allow students (and teachers) to select questions from ‘Smart Question Lists’
I can see two ways of fulfilling these goals whilst at the same time limiting the replication or duplication of existing Moodle functions:
Possible solutions ONE ...
- to objective 1) - use existing Moodle feature: have teachers create courses for individual students or groups of students (as is possible now)
- to objective 2) - new feature: make it possible for students of the same cohort to see what quizzes and questions are available to them without having to access each separate student's course.
- to objective 3) - new feature: devise a means of tracking student self study activity all in one central course and record data to gradebook
- to objective 4) - 'improvement' of existing Quiz module: create a new functionality within the present Quiz module that allows quizzes to be automatically generated from the Question bank (=Smart Question Lists)
Possible solutions TWO ...
- to objective 1) - new activity module: SelfStudy module, which allows students to access the existing Quiz making engine
- to objective 2) - existing Moodle feature, with an adaptation; the Quiz Module already allows quizzes to be made public (sharing). However, this would need to be adapted to make it possible to prevent students deleting or editing & saving questions made by other students, i.e. they should only be able to save-as-new shared questions
- to objective 3) - new feature (part of a new SelfStudy module): make it possible to track student question and quiz making, including recording evaluations to the gradebook
- to objective 4) - 'improvement' of existing Quiz module: create a new functionality within the present Quiz module that allows quizzes to be automatically generated from the Question bank (=Smart Question Lists)
Graded & Supervised Autonomous Learning: a contradiction?
Yes, but the reality is that most students need a bit of a stick as well as a carrot; some supervision and encouragement. Also, many teachers need to give grades at the end of a course. So, whilst Martin's suggestion re giving students their own courses that they can edit works for highly motivated students, it does not work for most of my students, nor does it help those teachers that want to encourage self study, but at the same time need to track students and hand in grades based on students' activities and performance.
So, given that I think that "Communal SelfStudy" activities are essential, and that the ability of teachers to track, evaluate and record this SelfStudy is equally important, I need to think of a new module, or an adaptation of present modules and functions, that is not disruptive of the present system - i.e. minimum duplication.
Any ideas or suggestions about how SelfStudy (as defined by the above 4 objectives) could be enabled via a new module, or enhancements to present functions will be most welcome
And thank you again Martin for your helpful feedback.
