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One of the most effective ways to do so is to make sure that you base your selections of instructional materials on course outcomes and on the learning objectives for each unit. Keep in mind what you'd like your students to be able to do after they complete the course. What is the basic, enduring knowledge they will take with them after the course is over? What kind of fundamental change do you want to occur in terms of the student's abilities? What kind of new skills will they be able to perform?
Once you answer these questions, you will have a list of learning outcomes. Keep them in mind as you select the instructional material you wish to use in your course.
It is often convenient to develop a map or a diagram that connects your learning outcomes with the course materials and the assessments you will use. Consider what you want your students to learn, and how you'd like them to perform. Also, you shape the sequence you will build and how you'll present the materials.
It is often convenient to develop a map or a diagram that connects your learning outcomes with the course materials and the assessments you will use. Consider what you want your students to learn, and how you'd like them to perform. Also, you shape the sequence you will build and how you'll present the materials.
We'll start with an approach that is very easy to implement, which is ideal if you're just getting started and need a solution that would be good for all kinds of e-learning, including mobile learning and guided independent study.
Basically, we'll use the Forum tool to organize all the instructional content. In Moodle, the Forum is the key tool and you'll use it often. Later, as you feel more comfortable, you can add more tools (Book, Chat, Assignment, Choice, and so on). For now, however, we will focus on getting you operational as quickly and easily as possible.
Using the Forum tool to structure your course and to organize your content is conceptually very elegant. Students simply move from forum to forum, and they access the material they need. Any comments they have, writing assignments, or discussion items can be completed in the appropriate thread.
When you use the Forum tool, you will use the Moodle text editor to create messages. Keep in mind that your messages can contain text, graphics, audio, video, presentations, and more, which allows you flexibility and ease of use.
As you plan your course, it's always good to have a certain number of forums dedicated to student success and support. This is where you can post welcome messages, timelines and course calendars, lists of assignments, syllabus, links to useful resources, and a place for students to ask questions and share their experiences.
A key student success forum is one that clearly states what you hope to achieve in the course. By listing course outcomes in a separate forum, you'll shape the students' approach to the course content, and they will have a better idea of how to organize the information they will encounter.
After you've developed your "student success and support" forums, you start creating a separate forum for each unit, which begins to identify the learning objectives, and the resources you'll put in each one to create a learning environment. It is often a good idea to create a separate forum for each graded assessment. Having a separate forum for each assessment will make your job easier if you have changes to make, or if you want to replace it with an assignment tool.
In fact, by populating your course with a series of separate forums, you are creating a flexible template that can be easily modified by replacing a forum with another, or with a different type of tool (Choice, Assignment, Chat, Database, Book, Journal, or more).
It is often helpful to create a course map wherein you draw all the elements you'll have in your course. List the course outcomes, and then map each one to the instructional material, activities, and assessments that go with each one. This will help you as you start building your forums.
Here is an example of how you can put together a course in which you organize the content around forums:
As you can see, the structure is very straightforward and avoids the complexity of multiple tools. Keep in mind that more complex tools can always be added later to replace a forum structure.
Start by selecting the activity tool, Forum, and opening a page that requires you to indicate the settings for the forum you wish to add.
Remember that each group will consist of only a single student. So, in this process, when we discuss groups, we're really talking about individuals.
The following steps illustrate how to create a separate forum for each group in your course:
If you have not already enrolled students in the course, you should do so before creating the groups. If the students are already enrolled, move to Create a Group for Each Student in the next section.
The following steps illustrate how to manually enroll students in your course:
After all of your students are enrolled, go into the course and create a group for each student.
The following steps illustrate how to create groups and assign students to them:
To assign a student to a group:
The student's private forum will look like any other Moodle forum. However, only the student and teacher will have access to it.