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Boris from Bulkley needs a virtual component to his course. He has a very specific and clear need, and that is good. He wants to design a self-directed module that allows students to develop an understanding of the periodic table and how this theoretical model relates to practice in the lab. This component should be self correcting and provide instant formative feedback that helps students to correct their misunderstandings.
I think Boris should develop a component based on the Moodle Lesson activity followed by a Moodle quiz activity.
Boris should gather together digital resources available on the Internet and organize them into a structured lesson sequence. Perhaps there would be pages on different aspects of the periodic table, different groups of elements, and even specific elements that are commonly used in the lab.
A Moodle lesson consists of pages of information/ activities/ links followed by a question. The answer that the student gives to the question determines to which page the student is sent next. Upon reaching the end of the lesson the students would take the summative quiz.
Each page would contain a series of content (videos, web pages etc) including a formative evaluation. At the end of the page their answer to the question would determine if they could continue. On completing the entire lesson, the students would move on to the pre quiz. The pre quiz would offer formative feedback and allow for multiple attempts. Questions would be chosen randomly from a bank to avoid repetition. Students could practice as many times as they wished until they felt comfortable with the format and content. The final quiz would be a summative multiple choice exam, and the exam would count towards their final grade. The exam would be synchronous in that it opened at a fixed time so that all students had to do it at the same time. It would also organize the questions in random order to prevent students copying. By making the exam time limited, students would not have time to look up answers in their books, but instead have to rely on their understanding of the concepts.
This is a solution to what Boris wants, but I believe that we could take it a step further. Once students had taken the lesson and passed the quiz, Boris could put them into groups in a Moodle forum and set them a problem to solve in which they had to apply their newly acquired knowledge of the periodic table to design an experiment or explain a hypothetical result in the lab or better still an authentic situation. The groups would post their solutions and then their peers could assess them in the forum with formative feedback. Boris would offer final feedback to each group and grade them based on a rubric he had given each group at the beginning.
This is my initial idea, but I have not yet mastered the Lesson activity in Moodle, so I don’t know if it would work out as I imagine it. I will experiment and post again soon.