Overview
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Typically, a teacher has full control over all settings for a course.
- This can include assigning other teachers roles with less privileges
- Choice of Course formats settings such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format
- Individual Course_settings#Force_theme and layout can be created for any course.
- Flexible array of course activities - Forums, Quizzes, Glossaries, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops
- Groups - teacher(s) and students can be placed in one or more groups
- Recent changes to the course since the last login can be displayed on the course home page - helps give sense of community
- Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor
- All grades for Forums, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file) in a Gradebook.
- Full user logging and tracking - activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed "story" of each students involvement including postings etc on one page.
- Mail integration - copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text. Users can set a preference for daily emails in their profile.
- Custom scales - teachers can define their own scales to be used for grading forums and assignments
- Courses can be packaged as a single zip file using the Backup function. These can be restored on any Moodle server.
- Specific course activities and resources can be imported from another existing course
Assignment Module
- Assignments can be specified with a due date and a maximum grade.
- Students can upload their assignments (any file format) to the server - they are date-stamped.
- Late assignments are allowed, but the amount of lateness is shown clearly to the teacher
- For each particular assignment, the whole class can be assessed (grade and comment) on one page in one form.
- Teacher feedback is appended to the assignment page for each student, and notification is mailed out.
- The teacher can choose to allow resubmission of assignments after grading (for regrading)
- Allowing resubmissions can allow the teacher to progress monitor student projects/assignments as they evolve.
- Advanced assignments can allow multiple files to be uploaded. This could keep together preplanning maps, outlines, research papers and presentations. (Not for beginners)
Chat module
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The Chat Module allows smooth, synchronous text interaction
- They can be limited to group members or roles, or be for anyone in the course
- Includes profile pictures in the chat window
- Supports URLs, smilies, embedded HTML, images etc
- All sessions are logged for later viewing, and these can also be made available to students
Choice module
- The Choice Module is like a single question poll. Can either be used to vote on something, or to get feedback from every student
- Teacher sees intuitive table view of who chose what
- Students can optionally be allowed to see an up-to-date graph of results
Forum Module
- Different types of forums are available, such as teacher-only, course news, open-to-all, and one-thread-per-user.
- There are several options for emailing forum posts to members of the course.
- All postings have the authors photo attached.
- Discussions can be viewed nested, flat or threaded, oldest or newest first.
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Robust subscription methods for each forum
- Individual forums can be subscribed to by each person
- Teacher can force subscription for all members of the course, either initially or permanently.
- Groups features allow options for more entry and viewing limitations for students.
- The teacher can choose not to allow replies to their posts (announcements.
- Discussion threads can be moved between forums or split by the teacher.
- Attachments can be made to posts and shown as part of message.
- Forum ratings can be used, these can be restricted to a range of dates.
Glossary Module
- The Glossary module is one of the modules that best illustrates the way that Moodle can fundamentally improve upon the experience of a traditional classroom
- When students contribute to a course in a public place like the glossary, their ideas are given weight and attention and often result in a greater pride or ownership of the assignment
- Allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary
- Student entries can be previewed by instructors before publishing
- Entries can be searched or browsed using alphabet, category, date, and author
- A glossary of terms can be easily referenced by students
- Almost any module of Moodle can be set to hyperlink - automatically - to any word or phrase that is stored in or added to the glossary
- Glossary items can be grouped in categories
- Participants can comment on glossary entries
- Entries can be rated using teacher-defined scales
- Glossaries can be easily exported and imported via xml
- Glossaries can be fully searched
- Glossaries can be viewed with different display formats
Lesson Module
- A lesson is a single activity where a series of pages are presented to the student.
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Pages can allow students to make choices by their answers to questions or by selecting a button with a description. A student choice is also a link to another lesson page.
- This allows for a simple slide show type of presentation, with questions.
- It allows for a branching, adaptive presentation based upon a student's specific choice.
- Navigation through the lesson can be straight forward or complex, logical or random.
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Jumps are associated with each choice that link to other lesson pages.
- Jumps can be to a specific page or to a random page or a page not seen by the student.
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Choices that are answers to questions and can be scored and given individual feed back.
- Question pages include Multiple choice, Multi-answer, T/F, numeric, short answer and essay.
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Lesson settings offer the teacher many options such as:
- Different scoring and grading potentials
- Lessons can build upon each other through conditional dependencies upon one another
- Student attempts, time limits, minimum score and retakes can be set
- Students may see progress bars, running score, reinforcement to student questions
- Password, start and end times, and other restrictions can be placed on students.
- Pages can be created one at a time or imported.
Quiz Module
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Teachers can define a database of questions where they can add these questions to a course quiz or have the questions shared over the Moodle site.
- Questions can be stored in categories for easy access, and these groups of questions can be "published" to make them accessible to any quiz on the site.
- Quizzes are automatically graded, and can be re-graded if questions are modified
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There are many quiz settings options, such as:
- Quizzes can have a limited time window outside of which they are not available
- At the teacher's option, quizzes can be attempted multiple times, and can show feedback and/or correct answers
- Quiz questions and quiz answers can be shuffled (randomised) to reduce cheating
- Quizzes can be attempted multiple times, if desired
- Attempts can be cumulative, if desired, and finished over several sessions
- Questions allow HTML formatting, images and has a friendly tool bar.
- Questions can be imported or exported in many file formats.
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There are more than 10 question types, each with different scoring methods, such as:
- Multiple-choice questions supporting single or multiple answers
- Short Answer questions (words or phrases)
- True-False questions
- Matching questions
- Random questions
- Numerical questions (with allowable ranges)
- Embedded-answer questions (cloze style) with answers within passages of text
- Embedded descriptive text and graphics is possible in questions
Resource Module
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Resources can display of many types of media content files by a single link on the course page, such as:
- Word, Powerpoint, Flash, Video formats, Audio formats
- Internal web pages (HTML formatted) can be created with HTML editor tool
- Internal text pages (no formatting)
- Files can be stored locally or the link point to remote locations
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Files can be uploaded and managed (zipped, unzipped, renamed, moved) in the course
- Folders can be created and managed in the course and students given a link to the folder.
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External content on the web can be linked to or seamlessly included within the course interface.
- External web applications can be linked to with data passed to them
Survey Module
- Built-in surveys (COLLES, ATTLS) have been proven as instruments for analysing online classes
- Online survey reports always available, including many graphs. Data is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV text file.
- Survey interface prevents partly-finished surveys.
- Feedback is provided to the student of their results compared to the class averages
Wiki Module
- Wiki module is a series of web pages that anyone can add to or edit
- It enables document pages to be authored collectively
- Supports groups
- There are many teacher based editing tools.
Workshop Module
- Workshop module allows peer assessement of documents, and the teacher can manage and grade the assessment.
- Supports a wide range of possible grading scales
- Teacher can provide sample documents for students to practice grading
- Being redone for Moodle 2.0
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