Chapter 3. Collaborative Activities

It has often been said that the quality of an online course can be assessed through the quality of the interaction.

The fact that Moodle makes it possible to have high-quality, personalized, and very meaningful interaction means that it is possible to construct high-quality courses and to engage multiple strategies in order to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Moodle 3.0 allows a wide range of collaborative activities because it not only provides its own platform for both live (synchronous) and archived (asynchronous) collaboration, it also allows you to incorporate your existing social media chat, such as from Twitter, Skype, or BigBlueButton. It just depends on the level of openness that the administrator allows and, most of all, how the interaction relates to the learning objectives for the course.

In this chapter, we will review the benefits of structuring a course around collaborative activities such as those found in Forums and in Chat. We will discuss what unique benefits can be found in Chat activities and we will review how to build chat rooms and how to construct productive questions to use in Chat.