Creating Flashcards on Moodle

Moodle's flashcard activity is basically what it sounds like -- a set of virtual "cards" with materials on both "sides" that students can use to drill on different subjects. While Quizlet's flashcards are a bit cleaner and less clunky, the Moodle version has the obvious benefit of Moodle compatibility, including the option to track performance. Brainscape suggests five guidelines for maximizing the effectiveness of your flashcards.

To create flash cards from scratch:

1. Go to the place where you want the link to the flash cards to be, click on the "Add an Activity ..." dropdown and choose "Flash Card Set."
2. Give your Flash Card Set a name. If you don't plan to use graphics on the flash cards, you can can IGNORE everything else in this window.
3. You will see a page with four tabs; choose "Edit the cards." 

The buttons for the next page are at the bottom:
Click "Add Question" or "Add Three Questions" to create blank boxes to type your matching pairs into. (Each row has two boxes, for a front side and a back side.) Fill in these boxes and click the Update button to save them. (NOTE: if you add more boxes without clicking update you will lose any unsaved questions!)

Alternately, you can create your flashcards in Quizlet and then import them into Moodle:

To import a set of flashcards you've created in Quizlet:

• Open your flashcards in Quizlet. Click the Export link.

• You are going to copy text from this window so you can paste it into an online converter that format it in a way Moodle will understand.

• Go to that online converter, which is at http://pin13.net/quizlet/, paste the text into the top window. Choose "matching" -- since Moodle can create flashcards from matching questions -- and then save the text generated in the bottom box.

• Now you want to import these questions into Moodle. Click on "Questions" in the Administration block on your Moodle site (left side). When the Question Bank that appears, click the "Import" tab.

• Finally, you are ready to create the flashcards. Go to the spot in the main column where you want to place the link to the cards (at least for now). From the "Add Activity ..." dropdown, choose Flash Card Set.

• Give the flashcard set a name and tell it to use the question you just imported to make the flashcards. You can IGNORE all of the other options in this window.