COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN THE ONLINE CLASSROOM

1. The Forum activity allows students and teachers to exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a 'thread'. Files such as images and media maybe included in forum posts. The teacher can choose to grade and/or rate forum posts and it is also possible to give students permission to rate each other's posts.

GUIDE: Creating a forum

2. The Chat activity allows course participants to have a real-time synchronous discussion in a Moodle course. Different themes may be used (although note that you lose the conversation thread if you change mid-chat) and an accessible interface is available.

GUIDE: Creating a chat

3. The Glossary activity allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary. While it can be set up and used only by the teacher, its main function is as a collaborative exercise.

GUIDE: Creating a glossary

4. The WIki activity allows students to create a collaborative document by building pages together, similar to Wikipedia. Unlike other collaborative editing programs (such as Google docs) the Wiki is a standard Moodle activity and so no extra permissions or logins are needed. Although Wikis are usually collaborative, it is possible to allow each student to create their own Wiki for individual use.

GUIDE: Creating a wiki

5. The Database activity allows the teacher and/or students to build, display and search a bank of record entries about any conceivable topic. The format and structure of these entries can be almost unlimited, including images, files, URLs, numbers and text amongst other things.

GUIDES TO CREATE A DATABASE: