Communication
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These tips are based on a presentation given at the Goldsmith's Teaching and Learning Conference by Andrea Sella |
Communication
Ensure students feel like they can contribute to the group!
Rules!
- Never answer a question by email (unless it's personal) > you should reply is "post this to the forum" Why? Because 359 other students have the same questionSetup
- 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 specialismSocial cafe > the forum related to their specialisms)
- Learning Exchange > where staff and students post links to interesting articles, videos etc.
- Wishlist / suggestion box forum? (is this could be anonymous?) > suggestion box
- Twitter > rapid response and comment in labs and in lectures - use Tweetdeck
Add dynamic content
Much of this can be automated.
- add events to the calendar > you can now import calendars into Moodle using the ical import feature
- use the upcoming events block so students get reminders about due dates etc.
- add the recent activity block so students see new materials as it's posted
- create a student contributed glossary of terms
- add RSS feeds to relevant materials (e.g. news or , journals and magazine articles)
- put pictures on each page
- if you tweet add a Twitter widget to your Moodle course homepage* create a student contributed glossary of terms
- put pictures on each page
Assessment
- 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)