[Sean Smith on EFL] Using MOODLE as a teacher`s tool

Most teachers use the internet with their students in one form or another including e-mail, to contact students, and to set up Yahoo groups to have a simple message board and file repository. Teachers also take advantage of the internet by directing students to websites related to lessons, show YouTube videos, and of course, by using it as a lesson planning resource.

However, e-mail, Yahoo groups, and YouTube are not geared toward education.

Setting up a website as a centralized location with pedagogically sound content is an excellent alternative to the above options. Building such a site from scratch would seem to be nigh impossible due to the need to know various programming languages.

The answer to this is MOODLE (moodle.org), which is fully designed with educational principles in mind and fully functional for teachers and administrators. The best part of MOODLE, for the budget minded instructor, is that it is open source, and thus free of cost other than the price of paid hosting, which can be had for less than $100 a year.

MOODLE is feature-intensive and has something for every teacher. The appearance is easily customizable with one-click theme selection. Additionally, it is possible with some knowledge of CSS to create your own theme using the chameleon theme as a starting point.

Some of the many features useful to EFL instructors include: multiple courses, different course formats including weekly, topic, and discussion, enrollment keys, WYSISWYG editor, and logs. Other features include a module, forum, wiki, quiz, glossary, downloadable files and embeddable media, grade book and a mailing list.

These features can be split into two categories, classroom or educational and administrative.

I find the ability to e-mail students as a group incredibly helpful. E-mail notices can be sent via the news forum, which acts like a mailing list. This mailing list set up so you can send e-mail to students site wide, in specific courses, or specific groups of students within a course.

Additionally, you can send private messages/e-mail to individual students. I use this feature when I forget to tell students important information in class, when I am sick and have to cancel class, and to contact students who have skipped class several times.

Instructors can choose from three different formats; weekly, topic, and discussion. I find the weekly format to be the most useful as I can set the course to have 16 weeks; the same as the semester. However, some content based courses could clearly benefit from a topical organization where your site would have, for example, six sections completed over the semester.

Logs are a powerful way to keep track of what students are doing on your site. The instructor can see what everyone has done for the whole day or part of a day. Additionally, the teacher can choose one particular student and track which activities they have completed, how many times they have looked at resources or downloaded materials for class. This is very useful if the instructor is including website usage as a component of classroom evaluation or participation.

Finally, the grade book is probably the most useful and powerful administrative usage for the teacher. Every activity that students do on MOODLE can be assigned a grade. Grades are organized in the grade book according to categories set up by the teacher. Furthermore, points can be weighted in various ways, including the option to have work count for extra credit.

At the end of the course grades can be downloaded in ODS, Excel, or CSV format. Additionally, instructors may add grades for work completed offline. Finally the grade book adds transparency to the course as each time a grade is assigned students automatically receive an e-mail notice with a link to their grade. In the grade book learners are able to see their current grade and progress throughout the course.

There are numerous features to make use of for the language classroom. Those include: groups, message boards, assignments, embeddable audio and video, downloadable files, wikis, quizzes (with multimedia), chat and more.

Groups are one of my favorite features. Using groups allows you to set up activities with students, obviously arranged into groups, that can be configured to be completely separate, visible, or turned off. Separate groups ensures that groups cannot see or interact with each other. Visible allows groups to see other groups but not interact, and of course with groups turned off, everyone works together. This setting can be configured at the site level, course level or individual activity level. I use this setting when teaching multiple sections of the same course so that each class is separate, but I only have to prepare activities once.

Message boards are exactly as you would expect, however they come with some extra configuration options including: the ability to restrict the board to one long thread, restrict students to starting only one thread, but being able to respond to all threads and also assign grades to individual posts, which will be immediately added to the students` grade book with e-mail notification. Forums are clearly a great way to build interaction among students.

The assignment module is multifaceted and a powerful way to receive and grade individual student work. This module comes in four flavors: offline, online text, upload a file, and advanced uploading of files. "Offline assignments" are for placing instructions of activities done in class. "Online text" is essentially a private journal that only the instructor can read and respond to. "Upload a file" allows students to upload any type of file including, MS Word, Photoshop, wmv, mp3 and more. This is excellent for having students upload essays. Advanced uploading allows students to upload multiple files at one time.

In all areas of MOODLE it is possible to embed media. The instructor can embed files that they have uploaded to the site including flash, mp3, wav, avi, and wmv. These files will automatically be embedded by the MOODLE site with the built in media player. Additionally, it is very easy to embed videos from popular sites such as YouTube.

MOODLE also has a powerful quiz module that allows for the creation of a question bank as well as multiple question types and answer formats. Additionally, quizzes can have media embedded into both the question and the answer.

One of the best options for me is the ability to upload files for students to download and preview before class. The file management tool is very easy to use and organize. I have students download handouts each week before class. I also have essay templates set up so that when I receive completed essays, they are formatted the way I like: font, font size, line spacing, page numbering and header.

There are two other modules that I think are excellent for language learning but have not been able to use myself. The first is the wiki module and, like all MOODLE modules, has several options and configurations that will help the instructor set up a class wiki. The second is the chat module. Unfortunately, due to restrictions with the budget hosting I use, I am unable to use chat due to potential overuse of resources. If you have your MOODLE on a dedicated server or VPS hosting, using chat should not be an issue.

If you would like to know more about MOODLE visit the official site moodle.org



To contact Sean or comment on this column, visit his website eflgeek.com -- Ed.