...
- Never answer a question by email (unless it's personal) > reply is "post this to the forum" Why? Because 359 other students have the same question
- Respond to general questions quickly
- Respond to course work related questions more slowly or better still with "anyone out there have any suggestions?" > You don't really explain the material until you explain it to someone else.
- Post regularly to the Learning Exchange and encourage students to do the same
Tips!
- Having a Twitter tag for the module allows for rapid response and comment during labs and in lectures - you can use Tweetdeck to look at these during / after the class
- Encourage students to upload a profile picture to make conversations in the discussion forum and elsewhere easier to follow
- Allow students to rate posts to highlight the especially useful contributions
The 5 types of forums
- Announcements from staff
- Admin Q&A - for general questions
- Topic specific fora (so staff and students can subscribe selectively - in large groups colleagues can distribute the workload of replying by subscribing to their specialismInteresting links etc > the forum related to their specialisms)
- Learning Exchange > where staff and students post links to interesting articles, videos etc.
- Wishlist / suggestion box forum? (could be anonymous)
...
- develop revision quizzes for students to help them gauge their progress and provide detailed feedback regardless of whether they got the answer correct or not
- give a small percentage of the final grade for engaging with the Moodle course activities
- High score - games > using the quizzes block
- confidence based marking to build virtuous feedback loops into revision.
- Revision quizzes - peerwise - In addition to revision quizzes - encourage students to use Peerwise to contribute their own questions (add a link to your Moodle course) these questions become a useful source and the useful of new questions that can be added to the existing bank for future years
- Keeping track of 600 questions (tag them so they can be found again)