Online learning can be a rich prospect: online courses can offer profound advantages to instructors. Rather than trying to balance everything in the brief “class period” of a traditional day, an online instructor can create activities that stretch for days, encouraging more reflection from participants.

Improved communication

When students post words in a public forum in Moodle, they are developing themselves as authors. They are shifting from a readership of one instructor to a classroom of peers.

One of Moodle’s strengths is its ability for peers to privately rate each other’s work. Instructors can create custom rating scales like: I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point; or That idea makes some sense; or I wish I had thought of this idea. It only takes a few days of receiving feedback like this from sixty peers for an author to begin to understand that what he says matters and could be stated more clearly.

Instructors can also give private (or public) feedback to a post. A science instructor can expect very specific diction in lab discussions; a literature instructor might demand evidence for every assertion; a construction-site safety instructor might want every writer to quote protocol.

A Moodleroom can, therefore, promote and demand a higher level of communication from a participant than a traditional classroom. In a classroom discussion, it is impossible for speakers to receive detailed feedback from peers. In a Moodleroom, this feedback about communication can be an expectation of the course.

Equitable participation

In Moodle, all interactions and exchanges between people and resources are recorded and available for constant review. An instructor can see levels of participation at a glance from a log report. He might, thereafter, choose to send a friendly note requesting more (or less) activity from a particular student.

Likewise, an instructor might review a full report of a participant—or a full report of feedback that the student has received from the teacher. This review might trigger another note to the student, or a subtle shuffling of course activities. In either case, Moodle gives instructors tools to better understand how each participant is involved (or not involved) in a course.