Moodle is the University's virtual learning environment, used to deliver course content and provide engaging online activities for students. Moodle is the core of the Digital Learning Environment (DLE).Explore the various tools within Moodle and utilise these features to create more interactive and engaging courses.
Quiz activities in Moodle
Quizzes in Moodle can range from providing a quick fun learning experience, through to fully marked formative assessment. The Quiz activity consists of a large variety of question types, including multiple choice, matching, short-answer and numerical. These questions are kept in the 'question bank' and can be reused in different quizzes.
- The teacher can allow the quiz to be attempted multiple times, with the questions shuffled or randomly selected from the question bank. A time limit may be set.
- A single quiz can automatically select random and/or specific questions from different categories of questions.
- Choose of how questions behave. It can be like a classic test, where the student gets no feedback while attempting the test, only later. Moodle can reveal the feedback to the student during the quiz.
Assignment activities in Moodle (eSubmission)
eSubmission is the process of submitting assignments electronically. In the Digital Learning Environment (DLE) students can submit a digital copy of their work which can then be reviewed and graded by academics in one central place.
Assignment activity features:
- Anonymous marking
- Group submissions
- Marking guides and rubrics
- Allocate markers
- Turnitin integration for originality checking
Download our 'Summative eAssessment' guide.
Forum activities in Moodle
Forums provide an easy way to communicate with your students and can encourage them to communicate amongst themselves. Forums can be used as a way of presenting work for peer assessment or demonstrating something before asking for feedback and discussion from your students. Some of the main advantages to using forums are that they:
- are asynchronous - students can think about what they want to say; this is especially good for students for whom English is their second language
- allow questions and concerns to be answered once by the tutor and are then available to everyone
- facilitate peer-learning, by allowing either formal or informal peer-support
- are good for gathering ideas and exploring concepts
- give everyone an equal opportunity to participate
- provide means for tutors to gauge students' understanding
Chat activities in Moodle
Chat tools or Instant messaging may often be thought of more as an annoyance when teaching than as a useful tool. However, used with care, they can provide real-time interaction, communication and collaboration between your students, wherever they are; both during teaching time and in their personal learning time.
There is no doubt that effective use of the Chat tool requires precise organisation, an established need for it and a captive audience, so works best when students are already gathered for an in-class event or for a synchronous online learning event such as a webinar.
Wiki activities in Moodle
The wiki activity enables participants to add and edit a collection of web pages, embedding a variety of media. A wiki can be collaborative with everyone or members of a group being able to edit it. Alternatively, personal where each student has their own wiki that only they can edit. A history of previous versions of each page in the wiki is kept, listing the edits made by each participant. This can be useful for assessing each individual's contribution to a group project.
Wiki activity features:
- Allowing a group to create lecture notes or study guides
- For students to collaboratively author an online book, creating content on a topic set by their tutor
- For collaborative storytelling or poetry creation, where each participant writes a line or verse