Using Moodle 2.0 discussion forum for language teaching

The discussion forum continues to be my favorite Moodle tool for supporting my EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course because it’s great for promoting

• transparency
• interaction
• collaborative, student-centered learning
• fluency in writing
• reflective writing and critical thinking

Also, its course management features make evaluating students a lot easier.

Suggested activities

1. Post listening and reading questions

• Embed lectures or insert links to readings for students; have them answer reading or listening questions. (note: check the copyright policies if your Moodle course is hosted in a university.
• This helps to promote greater transparency when students can see one another’s answers and evaluate their own against others. Note that the discussion forum can be set up so that students can only view others’ answers after they post their own. (see “course management features” below)

2. Have teacher or student-led discussions

• On Moodle 2.0, it’s easy for students to share video or other files. The students can add a video and post discussion questions for other students. This allows the students to take more control over their learning.
• Given the asynchronous nature of the forum, students are often more capable of providing more reflective and in-depth comments.

3. Peer reviews

• Have students to post their assignments on the forum
• Assign them in pairs or small groups; and have them evaluate each other’s assignments based on a rubric.

4. Ask questions and socialization

• Have students to post their questions on the forum, so that the teacher doesn’t have to answer the same question many times on email
• Some students socialize and provide supportive comments to one another online. This facilitates cohesion as well as language use.
• Some students have a different persona online and it’s quite interesting.
• Also, as in classroom discussion, if conducted properly, teachers can participate with students on a more equal footing.

Course Management Features

1.  The General Forum VS the Q & A Forum

• There are different types of forums. If you want to set up the discussion in a way that students can’t see other students’ answers before they post their answers, use the Q&A forum. If it doesn’t matter whether the students see others’ postings before they post, then use the General Forum.
• Depending on what you want to do, sometimes using the general forum shows that you have more trust in the students; it gives more support for the students as weaker students can see other postings before they post. However, if the stakes are high, i.e., a huge percentage of students’ marks depend on it, it may be better to use the Q&A forum.

2. Assigning Grades

• You can assign grades (qualitative or quantitative) for individual postings. The grades are recorded directly onto the Gradebook. This makes it easier to evaluate students’ participation at the end.

Final words

Should students be required to participate?

There are different views on this. Some believe that required participation (especially for an online course) takes away learner’s autonomy and may not be appropriate for learners who like to learn independently.

But as far as using the forum to support an EAP class, my view is that the discussion forum should be the front and center of the course, and participation (both in quality and quantity) should be graded. Some learners are not familiar with the technology; and they will not use it unless they are required to. In my experience, many students enjoy using the forum and find that it helps them to improve their writing.

How can I correct students’ grammar on a discussion forum?

You can always copy and paste and use highlights and etc. The forum is relatively dynamic that any conventions can be established.

But actually, I think using the discussion forum can help those language teachers who can’t help correcting students’ grammar in writing focus more on meaning.

Moodle and other education technologies in language teaching

Moodle has been developed based on the social constructivist principles. At present, its course management features are great and a number of tools, including the discussion forum and glossary, allow for some level of collaboration; however, the platform, itself, is not open and, thus, limits the full potentials of the the blogging and wiki tools.

In fact, learning management systems, like Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, and DesireToLearn, have been criticized for guarding the walls of the university. Unlike other open platforms, wikis and blogs, these learning management systems fail to open up access to education, promote continuous learning, or bridge the learning networks confined to a classroom to other larger learning networks.

Despite its drawbacks, Moodle, if used properly, still has a lot to offer to language teaching. For instance, at the language institute at a university I currently work for, Moodle can help not only to move in a more paperless, environmentally-friendly direction, but also to increase transparency and facilitate collaboration, however temporary. Moreover, using a web-based tool can greatly improve the quality of learning materials, replacing black and white photocopies with multimedia learning objects.

The following Prezi presentation show some of the Moodle tools as well as other more open platforms, i.e., Social Bookmarking and Screencasting, that I’ve used to supplement Moodle to further enhance learning experience.

Note that the tools on the X-axis are organized according to how similar they are to paper-based technology. The tools, i.e., Link to a file or Add a Glossary,  on the left closely resemble paper-based technology, while those closer to the left are more digital. As for the Y-axis, the tools lower on the axis, i.e., online quizzes, are less social; the tools higher on the Y-axis allow for more learners’ collaboration – something to keep in mind when it comes to choosing the right tools for presentation, participation or collaboration.

 

 

A brief overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the tools

1. Link to file

• Advantages
  • Moodle has a huge storage capacity and allows instructors to share large files (100MB per file) with students.
• Disadvantages
  •  Sharing files this way requires uploading and downloading and can be time consuming.
  • Other Moodle features discussed below offer more efficient ways to present information.

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2. Add a webpage

• Advantages:
  • Instructors can create a webpage to present
    • copy and paste text-based materials
    • embed multimedia media files (i.e., lectures, movie trailers)
    • embed PowerPoint slides (via SlideShare)
      • Slideshare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. Instructors can embed presentations on their Moodle. Alternatively, they can create their own PowerPoint, upload it onto Slideshare and embed it on their Moodle.
  • embed a screencast (via Screenr)
    • Screencast is a digital recording of the computer screen and the user’s voice. It can be used to
      • create learning objects
      • have students make voiceover for sitcoms and political speeches

• Disadvantages
  • Not interactive. Only teachers can create a webpage and add content to it.
  • If instructors put too much text on a webpage, it can be frustrating for users to scroll through.

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3. Add a book

• Advantages
  • contain a table of contents
  • break a long webpage into multiple chapters
  • students don’t have to scroll down and read a giant “wall of words” on a webpage
  • Course management features
    • can control which chapters students can see
      • though this option should be used to prevent cognitive overloading rather than controlling access to information
• Disadvantages
  • Not interactive. Only teachers can create a book and add content to it.

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4. Add a glossary

• Advantages
  • sort vocabulary and collocations
    • alphabetical order
    • category
    • author
    • date
  • add automatic hyperlinks
  • students can add and edit
  • great for learning
    • business vocabulary
    • the academic word list
• Disadvantages
  • lacks an attractive design

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5. Link to a webpage

• Advantages
  • create links to websites and copyrighted materials
  • can link to eResources at York Library.The electronic journals can be linked to but not downloaded and then uploaded onto Moodle.

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6. Social Bookmarking (via Diigo)

• Advantages
  • highlight on the browser
  • share highlights and comments with a group
  • allow for facebook-like interactions; users can “like” or “comment” on an article
  • turn reading into a social activity
• Disadvantages
  • Has not yet been integrated with Moodle; thus, users need to have a different login

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7. Discussion Forum (the best interactive tool on Moodle)

• Advantages
  • both teachers and students can post messages
  • increase transparency
    • students generally take an interest in the work of their fellow students
  • teachers can
    • post reading / listening discussion questions
    • post good sample assignments
    • have students post their assignments (conversation partners and U-life reports)
    • organize student-led discussions
  • Great course management features
    • Using the Q & A forum, students will not be able to see other postings before they post their answers
    • Can assign grades to messages
      • Rating scales
        • percentages
        • connected vs. isolated learners
        • excellent / good / satisfactory
• Disadvantages
  • Discussion board messages usually don’t have an existence beyond the duration of the course; though the discussion questions you post can be recycled and reused in another course

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8. Hot Potatoes Quiz

• Advantages
  • can create multiple-choice, cloze, matching, crossword, and jumbled sentence exercises
    • not only grammar quizzes but also can insert a reading or link to multimedia materials
  • generate results for teachers
    • the scores
    • the number of attempts
    • the time spent on the test
  • allow teachers to better identify the students who need more help
  • provide individualized, formative assessment
  • save class time
    • especially in a multi-skill course in which not all students need a particular kind of practice
  • can support inquiry-based learning
• Disadvantages
  • Does not support user interactions
  • Extremely individualized learning can be extremely boring

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9. Survey (via Survey Monkey or Poll Daddy)

• Moodle 1.97 does not allow users to create their own survey
• Use Survey Monkey or Poll Daddy
• Advantages
  • conduct needs assessment
  • mid-term and final surveys
• Disadvantages
  • the free account only allows for 10 questions per survey

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10. Choice (poll)

• Advantages
  • can conduct a quick poll
  • the results can be anonymous or non-anonymous
• Disadvantages
  • can only ask one question at a time

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11. Wiki (via wikispaces)

• The Moodle Wiki is not the most user-friendly and because only students who have access to the course can have access to the wiki, it is not an open platform and does not tend to have an existence beyond the duration of the course. Therefore, it’s better to opt for other more open platforms, i.e., Wikispaces.
• Advantages
  • encourage collaboration
  • user-generated learning materials
  • build learning communities
  • foster informal learning
  • develop the ability to navigate in networks
• Disadvantages
  • Wikispaces is not integrated with Moodle
  • Will look into other options.

Soft educational technologies in the age of networked intelligence #change11

Using the definition of technology as “orchestration of phenomena to our use”, Jon Dron in this presentation, distinguishes between soft and hard technologies. Soft technologies are more “needy”and require active orchestration of phenomena by humans; hard technologies, on the other hand, do not require much human intervention, given that the act of manipulating the technology is already built into the technology itself. For instance, orchestrating the technology is already contained in the technology. For instance, a fridge is a hard technology that is easy to use; on the other hand, Facebook is a soft technology that is incomplete if there are no users.

These definitions, I think, are illuminating for teachers or instructional designers when it comes to choosing a technology to support learning. For example, having language learners to use a hard technology, i.e., completing self-contained online lessons, in a classroom are unlikely to promote discussion among students; thus, negating the benefits of being with other students in the classroom. Likewise, using soft technology for distance education, i.e., blogs and discussion forums, often requires the support from the facilitators or other learners, without who learners may feel isolated and unmotivated.On the other hand, hard technologies, like giving podcasts to mobile learners to listen to can be useful; while using a soft technology that have many students vote for a particular issue in a big lecture hall can help to encourage participation.

Come to think of it, a tool, like YouTube, for instance can be both hard and soft. YouTube videos are themselves a hard technology. Teachers provide the YouTube link and students watch it. On the other hand, YouTube can also be soft, if students are encouraged to upload their own videos or do a voice over for a video.

The following technologies are those that I use ranked from hard to soft technologies

• Self-contained online lessons and quizzes; most iphone games
• Textbooks and videos (sometimes requires the teacher to contextualize the ideas for the students.
• YouTube videos (can be very hard or very soft)
• Moodle: a learning management system used for displaying course information; has a forum that allows for facilitated discussions
• Wiki:hard if it’s solely used as for displaying information; soft if users are encouraged to edit the pages
• Twitter: used for sharing links
• Diigo: used for sharing bookmarks
• MSN, Skype, or QQ

As Jon Dron pointed out, the selection of hard vs soft technologies depends on what our needs are.

Yet, there may be the needs for educators to incorporate more soft technologies in teaching. According to Don Tapscott, we are entering a new age, (not the information age) but the age of networked intelligence, marked by increased connectedness, collaboration,and people tapping into the intelligence of one another to fuel innovation. And for that, soft technologies may be better in promoting the ability to collaborate and innovate.