ACTIVITIES AND RESOURCES FOR THE COURSE ORGANISATION

Note: Depending on which version of Moodle your institution uses or which settings are selected by the administrators, there may be differences, e.g. in the layout, individual activities or the range of functions of individual activities. It is best to find out about the characteristics of your current software version on the provider's website or from the administrators of your institution. 

After the welcome text, resources and activities are usually used at the beginning of the course with the aim of supporting the organisation of the course. This enables communication and exchange, provides materials in various formats and offers links to further information. Individual possible components are also described.

 

In order to facilitate exchange within the course, the activity forum is available. Teachers can often use the message forum for course organisation, where information about the course, exams or current events is posted by the teacher. The course participants automatically receive a notification, but are not allowed to post any contributions themselves.

Another possibility is to use the forum activity as a kind of notice board. Standard forum for general use is suitable for this. Each course participant can start as many discussions and give as many answers as they like. If there are questions about working with the platform or difficulties in completing individual tasks, the learners post their contributions and collect feedback from both the group and the teacher. This avoids similar questions being asked more than once. The discussions can be referred to throughout the course.

With the additional functions, the forum is better controlled: "pin this discussion" pins the discussion branch and is always displayed at the top and "star this discussion" prioritises the discussion and is displayed above the others, but below the pinned topics. 
 
The glossary is a list of relevant terms and their explanations. The glossary entries can be created by the teacher or by the learners themselves. The choice depends on the expertise of the learners and the didactic intention of the teacher. Creating glossary entries can be a challenging task, especially for beginners. If the glossary contains the terms that are relevant for the entire course, it makes sense to place the activity at the beginning of the course room. The activity can also be part of the smaller units (individual subject blocks/learning modules).
 

Moodle offers various resources for storing materials relevant to the course – see the next section Activities and Resources for building the learning modules for more details. The following resources can be used for course organisation:

  • Individual documents are uploaded in different formats as a file: A presentation, handout, description of the module, but also files that are relevant for working with certain software.
  • If the teacher wishes to provide several files, the folder is used: For providing the picture sets or collections of materials or for exchanging/storing the materials among the teachers. In this case, folder should be set as invisible to learners. 
 

The web link (URL) refers to the external resources: For example, online materials that are offered by the publisher in addition to the textbook or exam preparation materials that are available online. 
The activity chat is used for text-based synchronous communication, where exchanges on specific topics can take place. Experience has shown that this function is rarely used by course participants. If the participants want to meet in the chat, both the time and the rules for communication in the virtual space are discussed in advance.