Category: How To

Moodle: Students rating forum posts

Lisa M Lane

One of the most useful features in Moodle, apparently enabled by default in 1.7, is the ability for students to rate forum posts, using any “scale” developed by the instructor. My students rate forum posts using a scale that includes choices like these:

  • Open Question
  • Informational Statement
  • Reflection on Material
  • Engages Others
  • Adds to Understanding
  • Uses Class Resources
  • Late Post
  • Off Topic

We can thus engage in a discussion of what makes a meaningful contribution to a forum, as well as the topic for the week.

In Moodle 1.7, this was just a matter of a checkbox called “Use ratings” in the updating of a Forum. In 1.8, the establishment of user “roles” means that the setting must be enabled as a Permission for a Student role. The “rate post” feature thus cannot be enabled by a Teacher unless the Administrator has enabled it in the Teacher role to override settings *and* specifically override settings for students (see Using Moodle forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=72179).

This was designed to make it easier to customize access and use, but it sure is cumbersome. Without getting the setting changed, only Teachers can rate posts, and they may not be able to see that students can’t do it anymore if they’re accustomed to Moodle 1.7. And it took me awhile with Moodle documentation to figure out that overriding the Student role can be done at the course level, so long as Teachers are permitted to do it. Because Teachers can also override Student roles (if permitted) for each forum, I thought at first I’d have to do this for all 16 forums in each of 3 courses (you do the math).

But really, it’s worth it to get your Admin to enable this permission if you’re a teacher in Moodle. The pedagogical opportunities of students rating each others’ posts (and yours!) are too cool to pass up!

Advice for Beginners

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Margie White‘s presentation at the @ONE conference, though supposedly about Effective Time Management Techniques, was actually an outstanding primer on how to start teaching online.Her first main area was organization. First one must organize oneself, focusing without interruptions and avoiding multi-tasking unless you’re really good at it. You organize your students by being clear with instructions and answering class questions in a public place, like a discussion forum. Organizing materials can best be done by using your own file system, instead of typing things into the Course Management System. (This was dear to my heart, as I’ve been advising folks to do this for years!). I was also delighted to hear her advise that instructors organize and learn their technology: CMS, browser, manipulating images, html (also dear to my heart), accessibility, and screenshot programs.

Next came a discussion of consistency, in materials and course design so that students develop habits of moving through your course. She recommended repeating things in multiple places, using a template for presentation pages, and creating a pattern of online assignments (i.e. “due every Wednesday”). For good instructor workflow, Margie recommended creating the schedule around the instructors’ times for grading and working on the class.

Last was planning (though of course all of this requires planning!). An important point here was Margie’s encouragement for staggering the opening times of course content, as opposed to showing the whole 17 weeks at once. An entire course calendar may be used, but materials only made available a few weeks ahead, to prevent overload. One unique recommendation was keeping a text file of “canned” comments often given on assignments, which can also help retool instructions for the next semester. Working on student boundaries was part of planning: helping students keep up, and being flexible while not allowing them to ignore deadlines.

An outstanding review of what every instructor needs to know, and some ideas I’ll be using myself!

A Better Discussion

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I have been applying a technique to online discussion this semester that I have been very happy with, and I’ve been telling people about it. Discussion has been for a long time the unhappy weak spot in all my classes. I would create a discussion conference (Blackboard) or forum (Moodle) each week, with either questions to discuss or topics to work with. I tried to post a variety of topics so that the students would have options and would be able to discuss, rather than just post the same answer over and over. I required two posts per week, the first post by Wednesday midnight, and a second post replying to another student, by Sunday midnight.

In Blackboard, the limited threaded format caused serious boredom on my part. Every discussion every week in every class looked the same, my conference followed by nested links. I either had to click on each one to follow the topics, or “collect” them to read them all, but even sorting by date I couldn’t see who was replying to whom and it was all text and …. boring, boring, difficult and boring. So I wouldn’t go in that much because with forty students per class it was overwhelming, so I didn’t catch all the arguments and flaming, and when I went in to post myself to lead the discussion in a different direction, my own posts mixed in with all the others and were ignored, even when I started using an asterisk in the subject line so they would see it was me. Yuck. Partcipation would decline, and they weren’t really talking to each other anyway.

So I did some research. I read Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, Robert Tinker (Atwood Publishing 2000). The book had lots of great ideas, as you can see in my summary. I chose the role of “Leader of a Group Process” and posted a “tickler” on a single thread for each week (an idea I got from an article).

So for the week we study The West (my guinea pigs were US history students), I found a video clip from Edison labs of Native Americans from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. They are doing the Ghost Dance. All I asked was “What issues from this unit come to mind?”

From Sunday to Wednesday, I let them answer however they wanted. I notice over the past decade a tendency for college students to emphasize the affective aspects of their existence (how they “feel” about things, rather than rational thought). For this topic, students responded with pity (or callousness) — either way they were disturbed by the clip, which is what I intended. I let them wallow in affective areas till Thursday, when I posted. I summarized what they had said, freely quoting from their own posts, then guided the discussion toward a topic of historical perception and victimization. That let them know that:

1. I had read their posts and cared about what they said

2. I was guiding the discussion in a direction based on their own comments

3. the affective concerns would now be deepened into historical analysis

Because I was in Moodle, I could see all the posts on one screen, and made mine bold text, titling it “Take discussion from here, please”. Most did, replying to my summary/guidance post.

This technique has gotten me everything I want. I only go in to each discussion a couple of times per week, I can see the whole thing in one glance, I am getting faster at creating the summary with the quotes, and the discussion is deepening to the desired level at the end of each week. Participation levels are high. I’ve decided I prefer depth in discussion to breadth, especially since I wasn’t getting breadth anyway, and early student evaluations say they are happy.

Note: One student dropped the class early on. I emailed and asked if her dropping had anything to do with my class. She wrote back saying yes, she felt I was teaching us all to pity the Indians, and she didn’t come to college for that crap. (She had only seen the first part of the discussion.) I explained to her my entire pedagogy, including the affective aspects and my goal for analysis. She changed her mind and returned, and is now helping guide the discussion. There may be a lesson here for revealing ones pedagogical goals!

TechEd #2: Quick Multimedia

Lisa M Lane

Nanda Ganesan of Cal State LA gave a presentation on “Rapid Development of Multimedia Modules” in which he demonstrated not only good presentation technique (I took heed since I am presenting April 20 at Miramar!) but great information on how to quickly create enriching materials.

The goal is simulating the in-class experience as closely as possible. I was gratified to hear Dr. Ganesan refer to PowerPoint with narration as “sleeping aids with no side effects”, since I consider most of them to be the 21st century version of film strips. He did not reject PP entirely, however, and part of his demonstration showed how one could use a webcam to create video inside PP.

What most impressed me was his use of a “smartpad”. Using Camtasia and an electronic pen (Seiko’s $99 Inklink), Dr G created quick presentation diagrams (his sample was a computer network), explaining as he drew. This gave spontaneity to what was obviously a recorded presentation. In my classes, there are certain lectures where I use a chalkboard (really!), such as my childish (but creepy) sequence on the development of trench warfare in WWI and my diagram of the Iran-Contra scandal connections. These would be quite effective online using this technique, much more so than the still diagrams I use instead.

Throughout the demonstration (and he let the audience choose demonstration rather than presentation — very on-the-fly!), Dr G showed basic setup of big programs like Camtasia, Captivate and Snagit (I would use $69 Snapz on my Mac instead). His point was that only a few settings need be changed to get started and create something FAST. This made getting started look much less daunting for workshop attendees! Plus, the product one creates doing things quickly adds that spontaneity that helps recreate the classroom experience.

So I got a good lesson on how to present a workshop (do what the audience wants), good reasons for creating units on the fly (which I tend to do anyway), and ways to make a “how to” workshop more effective (show just a few key things and make it look easy).

TechEd #1: Wikis

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Debbie Faires of San Jose State University helped me understand some good uses for wikis. I currently use wikis only for quiz development (students add and edit questions, from which I choose for the quiz if they do enough work!). I began this last year using pbwiki (see the original wiki we made by using “history103” as the password). Now I use the wiki inside of Moodle.

Debbie noted that some of the best wikis have WYSIWYG editors, like Seedwiki which has a formatting bar instead of code. For most wikis, you must know the syntax to create links. She was fond of Google Docs, where each user is color coded for easy reference, and the wiki opens automatically in edit view. Flickr, I was reminded, can be used to have students annotate images easily, as a collaborative project. And Bubbleshare (which I learned about at a WOW2 podcast) can create slideshows to share. Debbie also reintroduced me to Zoho.com, which has chat and show applications as well as wikis.

One use is document creation collaboration among faculty. It is recommended that one not use the word “wiki”. I already violated this tenet when MiraCosta developed its Technology Plan in a wiki on my advice, using the defunct schtuff.com, now absorbed by pbwiki. I realize now that more people would have been less afraid to use the sucker if I’d called it a “collaborative document” or just “a document we can all edit”.

But the most fascinating aspect of the presentation was the usage tips. Here’s what I can do with a wiki:
* Appointment signup — everyone can see everyone else’s time slots, and sign up for meetings or office hours
* Ongoing collections — sustained collections of information that stay and are updated from semester to semester
* Podcast editing — students add time markers to class podcasts to make it easier for all students to scan to a particular topic
* Assignment sharing — students add their assignment and all appear on one page, making a large document collection
* User guides — students creating user guides (to the Course Management System, for example) to help other students
* Student book reviews — students can share individual readings with others
* Lecture links — students can create and update links that have gone down or moved
* Spreadsheet creation — the online form of each student or group giving a report on one aspect, but all are responsible for learning the whole thing (the example was each group being assigned a particular nation and reporting on working conditions)
* Resource page — student-created and edited collection of readings

One instructor assigned students to report individually on the conglomerated knowledge represented in the wiki, and assigned individual grades this way.

Debbies presentation wiki (of course!) can be found at TechEdWiki.pbwiki.com.