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Interactive Resources in Moodle

blendedlearning's picture

If you would like to create your own interactive materials, Moodle offers several advantages. In addition to being relatively easy to use, even without coding ability, Moodle's extensive wiki "MoodleDocs" is full of instructions, explanations, and best practice suggestions.

Related resources:
Creating Quizzes on Moodle
Creating Flashcards on Moodle
Moodle Scheduler

  • The Moodle Quiz and Lesson activities allow you to do some fairly complex things, but you can also ignore the advanced features and still create something workable when you are just starting out. MoodleDocs and MoodleNews provides suggestions for creating effective quizzes using their tools, as well as best practices. For an alternate perspective on using Moodle quiz features, Wikiversity has an extensive page featuring a professors exploration and use of the tool.
  • Anything you develop in Moodle can be imported into your other Moodle courses (and exported in formats for other LMS, although not always as cleanly). This means:
    • You can reuse and re-invest in materials. For example, you might just set up questions for the first iteration, and adjust the answer choices and add context-specific feedback as you get data on how students respond.
    • You can share materials with other instructors. You can use the import/export features to share .zip archives of resources with anyone. You can enroll another user as a "Teacher" in your course, which includes permission to export. The Moodle community has a forum for exchanging course materials as well.

Moodle activities have fairly sophisticated, built-in features for assessing and tracking students. Some types of questions can be auto-graded and give students immediate feedback. Even where auto-grading isn't possible, however, a Moodle question can foster student learning by prompting students to articulate their understanding of material, by providing generic feedback to guide their self-assessment of that articulation. In all cases, instructors can use the real-time data generated to keep abreast of how well students are mastering concepts or skills.