Communication
Make students feel like they can contribute to the group!
Rules!
- 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.
- Twitter > rapid response and comment in labs and in lectures - use Tweetdeck
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 specialism
- Interesting links etc > post links to interesting articles, videos etc.
- Wishlist / suggestion box forum? (could be anonymous)
Add dynamic content
Much of this can be automated.
- add events to the calendar
- 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
- add RSS feeds to relevant materials (e.g. news or 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
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 - a useful source and the useful new questions can be added to the existing bank
- Keeping track of 600 questions (tag them so they can be found again)
