Page 108 - BLENDED LEARNING

Figure 4: Quizzes can be in hot potatoes, Moodle’s own quiz format or an external
site such as Quizlet or Zondle

c. Projects
We designed a series of group projects. These have several purposes:
■ ■ to encourage everyone to interact, online and face-to-face, and engender a
sense of community
■ ■ to get across the message that we are not delivering all the information that they
need to know, nor could we, but that they have to become aware of what they
should work on and set out to augment their knowledge accordingly
■ ■ to foster the sense that if they work together on some tasks there could be a
positive synergy, that they could help each other in useful ways and that they
could go on to use what has been created by others.
To all of the above ends, each week (or block) there is a group project. Groups
are set up with a mix of face-to-face and online course participants and they are
remixed every week. Each project leads to creating something that they can publish
through wikis or forums and will help other groups to revise in future. Projects are not
evaluated by tutors. Moodle facilitates online collaborations (Stanford, 2008: 58), which
can be teacher-to-student or student-to-student. Asynchronous forums and wikis
allow participants time to compose their messages, which encourages reflection as
well as ‘deeper’ more considered thinking than in synchronous exchanges (Sharma
and Barrett, 2007: 107). Presentations can be crafted by several people together
before being published. End results vary enormously but are always interesting.

104 | Creating a blended Delta Module One Creating a blended Delta Module One | 105