Lesson 6: Communication Modules

Communication Modules

Basic Communication Modules

Forums

forum

  • Forums as an easy module with which to start. They are not difficult to learn or use. You can include media and hyperlinks in forums. As you become more comfortable with Moodle, you can replace forums with activity modules if desired.

  • Forums can contribute significantly to successful communication and community building. When you decide to use a discussion forum as an activity in an e-learning environment it is important to be aware that your time will be needed in some sense in order to make the activity successful. If your goal is to encourage discussion, the forum will only work if:

          • participants feel there is a need/reason to participate and they will gain something from the experience.

          • a sense of community and purpose can be fostered amongst participants. Moodle has 4 kinds of forums

  • Teachers have editing rights and can delete posts.

  • Students and teachers can rate posts for their relevance, if the forum is so configured.

  • Can also use to send mass emails to everyone enrolled in a course.

  • Topic 0 is a good location for a forum where students can ask questions about the course, introduce themselves or participate in a team building activity.

Blog

blog
  • By default, every Moodle user has a personal blog for the Moodle site. It is not associated with any particular course.

  • Currently settings allow users to see only the blog for people with whom they share a course. But students will have 2 publishing options when posting a blog post: 1) yourself or 2) anyone on this site (which would mean anyone they share a course with).

  • There is a Blog Menu Block that you should add to your course if you want students to be able to utilize the Blog module.

  • This blog tool does not include a comment feature.

Survey

survey
  • There are prewritten surveys provided to help teachers learn about their students. You can not edit these surveys.
  • For this course, I created a survey in Google Docs and then embedded it in a webpage.
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      Which module would you like to learn how to use?