Learning Management System Moodle

Moodle offers the following options for communicating with students:

• Use the "Announcements" forum in Moodle to inform your students. Your students cannot reply in this forum, it is purely for you to pass on information.

• Create forums to enable exchange between your students and you. You can also use a forum to discuss questions about the course content with your students.

• Use the announcement & messaging function [de] in Moodle to send messages to students via the Moodle course.

• Create an online course room via BigBlueButton [de] or a link to your Jitsi [de] Meeting room e.g. for virtual consultations or group discussions.

Now we come to the core of your Moodle course and your class: the transfer of knowledge.

This can be done in various forms. You can create new content or use your own or existing content from others. In the case of third-party content, if possible, only link to it; if you have copied content, you must provide the correct source of the information to avoid any copyright infringements.

Below you will find a selection of ways to present your content online:

• Provide slides, lecture notes, PDFs

• Record and share your lecture as a video or podcast

• Integrate self-study unit with H5P or the Moodle activity “Quiz”

• Present knowledge as an online book via Moodle activity "Book”

Offer students taking part in the Moodle course the opportunity to deepen, review and apply what they have learned in order to consolidate it.

Moodle provides you with several options to do this, here are some examples of simple ways:

• Knowledge quiz

• Self-learning unit with H5P

• Homework, essays, reflection tasks with submission function in Moodle

• Forum for exchange and discussion

• Offer online meetings e.g. work/discussion in groups via BigBlueButton video conference in Moodle

Moodle makes it possible to give automatic feedback and personal and individual feedback from you as a lecturer. 

Examples of automated feedback:

• Students take a knowledge quiz with different question types (e.g. multiple choice, gap texts, drag&drop), you save the correct answers in advance, the system evaluates the answers and lets the students know how they have done. You can do this with the Moodle quiz as well as with H5P modules. You can see the results.

• Students take a knowledge quiz with empty boxes for their answers, you as a lecturer save an "expert answer" which is displayed to the students after submission. The answer cannot be assessed, but the expert answer can provide guidance for the students. (Moodle quiz free text answer, H5P Essay)

Examples of personal feedback:

• Students submit an assignment as a text or file via a forum post. You give feedback to students via a private message or via a normal forum post, visible to all students.

• Students hand in an assignment via the activity Submission e.g. as free text or as a Word file. Using the integrated assessment tool, you can edit the submissions individually, evaluate them, comment on them and make annotations in the text.

• You integrate free-text answers in a knowledge quiz that you answer individually.

Professor Meer has been giving the introductory lecture in her subject for years.

She would like to conduct a virtual lecture that matches her previous lectures as much as possible. Therefore, she chooses video conferencing and wants to make the slides available online. Once a week, she updates the current link to the video conference and uploads the corresponding slides. During the lecture, participants can ask questions live, but also afterwards via the forum in the Moodle course.

Characteristics:

• Live lecture

• Slides provided online

• Student queries via forum

What is needed?

• Moodle Forum

• BigBlueButton video conferencing system

• Lecture slides as PDF or other file format

Prof. Welle would like to provide a lecture recording to convey the knowledge he teaches in his lecture, and his students will be able to ask questions on the contents online.

He divides the material and records short videos of 10-15 minutes. Every week, he uploads the videos on the current topic together with the lecture slides and provides reflection questions on the content. The participants watch the videos and ask any related questions in the forum.

In addition, he offers a video conference every few weeks for in-depth discussions.

Characteristics:

• Recorded lectures (teaching videos and podcasts)

• Queries via Forum

• Live video conference on questions as needed

What is needed?

• Moodle Forum

• Video recordings stored in GrypsTube

• BigBlueButton video conferencing system

• Lecture slides as PDF or other file format

So far, tutor Finn has conducted his tutorial in person. For this purpose, he prepared the material of the lecture to fit for the tutorial and set specific tasks for the students, who then discussed the content with each other in presence.

He now implements his digital tutorial in such a way that every week he assigns a task to the participants that fits in with the content taught in the lecture, and they discuss it in the forum.In addition, he has set up an area where students can ask questions so that he can also provide them with individual support if they have problems.

Characteristics:

• Online discussion on a given topic

What is needed?

• Moodle Forum

• Assignments as text or PDF

So far, tutor Marie has assigned an exercise sheet every week that the students had to work on until the next class.

As a digital class, she now uploads the new exercise sheet and assignment every week. The participants then have 7 days to submit their answer(s) as a file. After a week, Marie looks through the answers and gives the students individual feedback via a private message and posts a sample solution online for all of the participants.

As Marie has used assessments in Moodle in the past, she also uses the assessment function in the forum.

Characteristics:

• Submission of exercises online

• Individual feedback to participants

• Questions and discussion forum

• Online provision of a sample solution

• Optional: use of Moodle's grading system

What is needed?

• Moodle forum

• Exercise sheet and sample solution as PDF