Sample of strategies
Strategies for Online Teaching
Mastering Course Vocabulary
Familiarity with the vocabulary used in a course is a fundamental pre-requisite for understanding and processing course content. How do students develop the language used by experts in a field? Instructors can use the Moodle course management system's Glossary activity to create and enable students to access a course glossary.
Some of the ways instructors can have students use course glossaries are to:
1. Have students create their own glossaries or submit terms and definitions to a common glossary;
2. enable students to submit comments about existing glossary entries;
3. ask students to evaluate glossary entries; and
4. link terms used in text on the course site to their glossary definitions.
Related resources: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Glossary_module
Providing Students with Choices
Having personal choices can have positive and motivational affects on individuals. This is true as well when students, either individually or as a group, are allowed to make choices about what and how they will learn in a particular course. Instructors must often cover specific content in a set amount of time, but they may be able to provide students with limited choices. One way to do this is with the Moodle course management system's Choice activity.
Below are a few examples of ways instructors can allow students to make choices in the classroom.
1. Conduct a poll to determine which two of six topics students will study in depth.
2. Conduct a poll to gather feedback from students about the status of an assignment or pacing of the course. Choices could include "ready to move on," "need another day," or "need help."
3. Let students select project or presentation topics from a list of options. They also can form groups based on their areas of interest.
Related resources: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Choice_module
Sharing Student Resources
It is very useful to teach students how to find resources in the real world. To do so, instructors often ask students to find or critique resources (books, journals, Web sites, etc.) about a specific subject and hand them in for review. Instructors can use the Moodle course management system's Database activity to create resource sharing learning activities.
There are many different types of activities that could be set up to enable students to share resources and critiques of them. Below are a few examples.
1. Enable students to collaboratively create a searchable listing of articles about a particular subject and to comment on each others' work.
2. Have students display their own creative work and enable other students or the instructor to provide constructive criticism about the work.
3. Enable students to share critiques of Web resources, online writing styles, Web site designs, and the like.
4. Ask students to create a searchable database of current events relevant to a specific topic or of sources of information for a presentation.
Related resources: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Database_module