The Book module makes it easy to create multi-page resources with a book-like format. This module can be used to build complete book-like websites inside of your Moodle course.
Previously created websites can be imported directly into the Book module. Books can be printed entirely or by chapter.
The book module allows you to have main chapters and sub chapters, but it goes no deeper. In other words, sub chapters cannot have their own sub chapters. This was an intentional decision by the creator of the book module. He intended this to be a simple resource for teachers and students.
The book module is not interactive. You can, however, link to choices, forums etc., from within a book. And you can include multimedia objects like Flashmovies in your book.
In this example it shows you the types of objects that can be included in a Moodle Book it also discusses navigation through a Book.
You can of course embed any html based media into a Moodle course page and or resource this is not restricted to the Books module - see below
2. A Moodle quiz
The Quiz activity module allows the teacher to design and set quizzes consisting of a large variety of Question types, among them multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in the Question bank and can be re-used in the course or other courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback and/or show the correct answers.
Features
As educators, we can’t tell what’s going on inside the heads of students, so we need ways for them to demonstrate what they understand and what they don’t. Quiz helps with that process.
Feedback about performance and self assessment are important parts of a learning environment. Feedback can be a useful tool for students to gauge their own performance and help them become more successful. There are several ways and levels to give feedback to students on each question or overall. These feedbacks or scores can be displayed at different times by quiz's review options.
A wide variety of Quiz reports help the teacher go beyond the Grades. A well-designed test, even a multiple-choice test, can give you critical information about student performance. Quiz's reports can focus upon a single student's attempt of each question, or perform a robust question analysis based upon groups of students answers.
Moodle’s quiz module has a large number of options and tools, making it extremely flexible. You can create quizzes with different question types, randomly generated quizzes from categories of questions, allow students to have repeated attempts at a question or retake quizzes multiple times, and have the computer score it all.
There are different scoring options for each quiz and of each question type in the Question bank.
Different presentation methods can make even the same quiz look different. Questions and or their answers can be shuffled. The number of questions displayed per page can be set automatically, or page breaks forced where you determine.
These features open up a number of strategies which usually aren’t practical with paper based testing. It’s hard enough to score one batch of quizzes, nearly impossible to score it 10 times for each student retest, or to regrade a quiz because of any number of reasons. When the computer does the work for you, it’s easy to give students a chance to practice taking a test, or to give frequent small quizzes. You can explore how to apply these advantages on theEffective quiz practices page.
3. Choice
Choice module
(Redirected from Choices)
A choice activity is very simple – the teacher asks a question and specifies a choice of multiple responses. It can be useful as a quick poll to stimulate thinking about a topic; to allow the class to vote on a direction for the course; or to gather research consent.Choice requires some preparation time for creating your activity and thinking about what results you would like to achieve, but your participation with activity itself is likely to be minimal.
Educational Benefits of Using Choice
Pedagogically, the choice activity can be used to provide an opportunity to share starting points through which learners are encouraged to think about and articulate existing knowledge and understandings of a topic. For example, you can ask students to make ‘choices’ about a statement such as “in learning to become a teacher, the most significant issue for me is” (giving the following choices): trust, theoretical underpinnings, communication or delivering materials to students.
This has two benefits: firstly, it forces participants to engage with their choice and think, in advance of a further related activity (you might wish to follow up such a choice activity with a forum discussion or a reflective activity like the online text assignment), about the context and consequences of this choice. Secondly, it allows tutors and students to gain a better understanding of existing views/understandings/knowledge related to the question, idea or concept at hand in the Choice activity.
The choice activity in Moodle only allows a participant to select one choice from a variety of options (that you provide), but you may set the activity so that participants can change their choices. You can also set the activity so that it ‘closes’ or ‘locks down’ on a specific date, making all choices final from that point on. This allows participants to change their minds several times before a final date.
4. Wiki
A wiki activity is a collection of collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki page is a web page everyone in your class can create together, right in the browser, without needing to know HTML. A wiki starts with one front page. Each author can add other pages to the wiki by simply creating a link to a page that doesn't exist yet.
Wikis get their name from the Hawaiian term "wiki wiki," which means "very fast." A wiki is indeed a fast method for creating content as a group. It's a hugely popular format on the Web for creating documents as a group. There is usually no central editor of a wiki, no single person who has final editorial control. Instead, the community edits and develops its own content. Consensus views emerge from the work of many people on a document.
Moodle's wiki is built atop an older wiki system called Erfurt wiki: http://erfurtwiki.sourceforge.net.
In Moodle, wikis can be a powerful tool for collaborative work. The entire class can edit a document together, creating a class product, or each student can have their own wiki and work on it with you and their classmates.
It may be useful to think of a wiki's front page as a structured table of contents. Essentially, a wiki is organized by its links.
Wiki Basics
Wikis are a simple, flexible tool for collaboration. They can be used for everything from simple lists of web links to building entire encyclopedias. Wikipedia is the largest wiki in the world (http://www.wikipedia.org). As of August 2007, Wikipedia contained over 2,000,000 articles in English alone, on everything from general topology to split infinitives. The entire Wikipedia site is written by volunteers from around the world. An article is started by someone with an interest in the subject, and then anyone in the community can add content, edit other people's work, or add another page elaborating on a sub-topic. It has become so large and so frequently used that there is a lively debate about how authoritative a collaborate work without a central editor can be.
Of course, wikis in your own class won't be that extensive. But it's important to have a plan for your wiki before you release it to the class. Students need to know the purpose of the wiki and how it fits in with the class. If it's a personal wiki, will they be graded? Is it simply a staging area for group work that will be submitted later? Students need to know so they can submit appropriate work. A brainstorming wiki is very different from one that will be submitted for a grade.
You'll also need to decide on an editing policy. Will you be a central editor? Or will you let the students be completely responsible for the work? How will you deal with offensive content?
In most circumstances, you'll find that you can trust students. But on the rare occasion a student does do something offensive, you will need to have a policy to deal with it. Will you roll back the changes by that author? Or will you create a new version by deleting her content? Creating a new version leaves a trail you can use for evidence later, but it also makes it easier for the perpetrator to restore her comments.
5. Forums
Forums activities can contribute significantly to successful communication and community building in an online environment. You can use forums for many innovative purposes in educational settings, but teaching forums and student forums are arguably the two more significant distinctions.
Guidelines for Teaching and Learning Forums
When you decide to use a discussion forum as an activity in an e-learning environment it is important to be aware that your time will be needed in some sense in order to make the activity successful. If your goal is to encourage discussion, the forum will only work if:
a) participants feel there is a need/reason to participate and they will gain something from the experience. Incentives for learning, gathering support, etc. should be explored and encouraged early on in order to clearly convey the purpose of the forum to others. Anyone considering offering grades or marks for participation is advised to think very carefully about the difference between quantity and quality of discussions in forums.
b) a sense of community and purpose can be fostered amongst participants. This sense of community can be fostered through tutor/teacher initiative and scaffolding, or primarily through the students/participants themselves depending on the intentions of the activity.
Selecting forum type
Moodle has four kinds of forums each with a slightly different layout and purpose.
Which of the forums will best suit your needs for a particular activity? In order to answer this question it is useful to think how you might lead such a discussion in a face-to-face environment. Would you throw the question out to the class and sit back to observe them in their answers? Or would you break them up into smaller groups first and ask them to have discussions with a partner before bringing them back to the main group? Or perhaps you would like to keep them focused on a particular aspect of a question and ensure that they do not wander away from the topic at hand? All of the above approaches are both valid and useful, depending on your learning outcomes, and you can replicate all of them in Moodle forums.
A standard forum for general use
The standard forum (view here) probably most useful for large discussions that you intend to monitor/guide or for social forums that are student led. This does not mean that you need to make a new posting for each reply in each topic although, in order to ensure that discussion does not get 'out of control', you may need to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time finding the common threads amongst the various discussions and weaving them together. Providing overall remarks for particular topics can also be a key aspect of your responsibilities in the discussion. Alternatively, you could ask students to summarize discussion topics at agreed points, once a week or when a thread comes to an agreed conclusion. Such a learner-centred approach may be particularly useful once the online community has been established and, perhaps, when you have modeled the summarizing process.
A single simple discussion
The simple forum (view here) is most useful for short/time-limited discussion on a single subject or topic. This kind of forum is very productive if you are interested in keeping students focused on a particular issue.
Each person posts one discussion
This forum (view here) is most useful when you want to achieve a happy medium between a large discussion and a short and focused discussion. A single discussion topic per person allows students a little more freedom than a single discussion forum, but not as much as a standard forum where each student can create as many topics as he or she wishes. Successful forums of this selection can be active, yet focused, as students are not limited in the number of times they can respond to others within threads.
Question and Answer forum
The Q & A forum (view here) is best used when you have a particular question that you wish to have answered. In a Q and A forum, tutors post the question and students respond with possible answers. By default a Q and A forum requires students to post once before viewing other students' postings. After the initial posting, students can view and respond to others' postings. This feature allows equal initial posting opportunity among all students, thus encouraging original and independent thinking.
Tips for Question and Answer
When the Question and Answer mode is selected, Moodle hides the replies to the initial thread post by the teacher but not the entire forum itself.
Tip: Post each question as a thread in the forum and then have students post replies to the question. In this fashion, Moodle will protect the replies from being viewable by other students but allow the initial post/thread visible for reply by all students.
Tip: Do not post the question in the forum summary because every student answer will become a thread and visible to all students. In this scenario, it may appear as if the Question and Answer forum is not working correctly, since the new initial posts in the thread are intentionally designed not to be hidden, just their replies.
Tip: If you have set up groups for your forum the facilitator needs to post a question to each of the groups and not to 'all participants' as questions asked of all participants (students) are able to be read by ALL students. Questions posed to group members are only visible to those group members and replies are only visible once a group member has posted a message.
Concepts for use in forums
Participation and Scaffolding
Whilst one of the great advantages of e-learning is the flexibility it affords participants, this does not mean that days or weeks should pass without response and discussion in a forum (unless it is appropriate for it to do so). This is perhaps most especially true at the beginning of a course or programme when students and tutors are new to each other and in need of welcome messages/encouragement. Whilst e-learning, and discussions in particular, can support learning that is not always tutor/teacher-centred, your role will be important, especially as an online community begins to develop. It is during these initial stages of introductory material that a group of students can become a community of participants who begin to grow in their understandings of course material and individual contributions to the knowledge construction process.
As the discussions progress and learners become accustomed to the mechanics and the tone of the forums then there are key ways in which your input can be reduced, thereby helping to foster a community that is less dependent on the tutor/teacher. Even then, however, you will probably want to be a presence in the discussions although you may choose to be one of many contributors rather than the font of all wisdom.
Commitment and Participation
Ask yourself if
you wish to have involvement in the forum or if you want the students to lead and own the space
you want the forum to add value to the face to face environment or have a life of its own in its own right outside the lecture theatre/classroom or seminar room
you are prepared to make appropriate contributions to the discussion in order to:
encourage discussion if students are quiet
help shape ideas if students begin to wander off-task
your role will be defined as discussions/a course progresses
you will explicitly but gradually relinquish control of the discussions
you will encourage and support learners to share control of discussions(for example you might ask a learner/group of learners to summarise contributions to a discussion thread/topic or you might ask learners to initiate discussion topics)
Student Centered Forums
With the growing popularity of social networking software like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and the like, students are leaving schools and coming to Higher and Further Education with a new technological sophistication and with new expectations for communication. And as school, colleges and universities recognise that reflective and life long learning are significant goals in education, student centered learning and the creation of student centered spaces online are also gaining credence in educational settings. We know that effective learning requires access to social and academic networks for both study material and emotional support; as such, online communities can offer a holistic knowledge construction and support mechanism and recognize that affective activity is effective.
Social forums, often called ‘Virtual Cafes’ or ‘Common Rooms’ can be set up for courses or for programmes, depending on the student need. Such spaces provide a common area for students to come together and discuss unlimited topics, including social activities and educational ideas. They are supportive spaces for students, most successful with large first and second year courses where students would not otherwise have the opportunity to communicate with others outside their own tutorial group. It is arguable that students will experience a greater sense of community within and a sense of belonging to an educational institution or individual department having had the experience and convenience of the social forum on their course; this could arguably have implications for retention.
These spaces are typically highly active, especially in first term. Depending on your institution, they are usually self monitored by students, who understand that the same ‘rules’ and ‘netiquette’ that apply to them within any computing space, also apply in Moodle.
The News Forum
Moodle courses automatically generate a News forum which defaults to automatically subscribe all participants in a course. The name of the News Forum can be changed to something more appropriate, such as ‘Important Announcements’ or the like. This is a useful feature and many use this forum in a Moodle course to announce exam dates, times or changes to exams, lectures or seminars, as well as important information about course work throughout a term or special announcements relating to events.
Teacher/Tutor forums
Prior to Moodle 1.7, each course had a teacher forum, accessible via a link in the course administration block.
A teacher/tutor-only forum may be added to a course by creating a hidden forum. Teachers are able to view hidden course activities whereas students cannot.
Some forum suggestions to consider
If your course is at a distance, if your face to face time is limited, or if you just wish to foster a sense of community in your Moodle course which supplements your face to face course, it is good practice to begin with a welcome or introductory message or thread in one of your forums. This welcome or introduction from you invites participants, for example, to post some specific details to introduce themselves to you and their peers. This can be your icebreaker or you can have an icebreaker separately.
If you have two questions for participants to answer, starting the two strands or topics within the forum itself will both help learners to see where to put their responses, and remind them to answer all parts of your question.
Remember that you are communicating in an environment that does not have the benefit of verbal tone, eye contact, body language and the like. Careful consideration of your communication is, therefore, necessary.
Postings to a forum are always written but they can take different forms and you may wish to consider what form best suits the activity. For instance, you might choose to articulate a form of contribution in order to be explicit. Thus you might say, 'This is a think-aloud forum in which, together, we will try to tease out ideas and possibilities' or 'This is a formal forum in which you are invited to share your ideas on (topic)' and, where you select the latter, you might have already suggested learners plan those ideas offline or in another kind of activity within Moodle.
Create a forum where only the teacher can start discussions, but the students can only reply. Each thread you start contains an essay question (or several similar ones). The students make a bullet point plan for the essay and post it as a reply. This works well as a revision strategy as the students can see how others have approached the same task. Once everyone has posted their plan, you can start a discussion as to which plans seem better and why. Creating a scale to use for rating the posts can be useful so that the students can see how helpful other people think their effort were.
