Conversations between peers and facilitators can have different purposes, levels of openness, visibility and timeliness. Participants can take various roles in a discussion, be evaluated for contributions or be asked to evaluate their peers. Moodle offers different activities to provide opportunities for dialogue and reflection and you will learn about them in this unit.
A diversity of opinions can provide a new perspective on problems and solutions. Learning environments that provide opportunities for open discussions facilitate exposure to diverse opinions. Unrestricted and unlimited sharing of opinions can generate new ideas. The principal activity that enables open discussion in Moodle is a Discussion Forum, and especially the types called Standard forum for general use and Simple single discussion. In learning environments with many participants open discussions can be highly active. Good facilitation skills are needed to steer and guide participants. Moodle offers several options for following discussions, such as email notifications of new posts (Subscription) or tracking of unread posts (Read tracking), and to help reward good contributions, Ratings. These and other topics will be covered in this section.
Structured discussions are guided and goal-oriented activities. Restricting the number of possible replies or visibility of replies may seem limiting, but it can also help participants to organize their thoughts, make the scope of the activity clear and encourage contributions. The Q and A forum discussed in this section,will help you to achieve it. The News forum is for one-way communication and can help to guide participants through the learning experience and make rules and requirements explicit.
Chat, Messaging and the Comments block can also support communication in Moodle. They offer opportunities for real-time, personal or immediate group exchanges and can help create a more dynamic and personalized environment.