An activity is an interactive learning segment that an instructor can add to their course. This includes assignments, forums, quizzes, podcasting, and many others. In this activities support section, we review the specific activities available to instructors, including how to add each to a course, and best practices for how to use each activity.
In the Add an activity drop-down menu, you may notice an activity with a note in parentheses. This alert instructors of activities that are still in pilot, undergoing testing, or other special considerations. For example:
- Wiki (do not use groups): this activity cannot be used with groups.
If you wish, you can also add the Activities side block to your course. This block lists the various activities used in your course, allowing for easy student navigation to your course activities.
Types of activities and their use
The following provides a description of each available activity that instructors may use. To view specific information on adding and using each, select the activity name. We are currently adding to this documentation, and will add links to new topics as they are available.
If you are interested in creating Groups within your course for students to work within activities, please review our Groups information.
Activity |
Types of Uses |
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Assignments |
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Drop box
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Allows instructors to send marked assignments and comments back to students. Students can upload multiple files to instructors (maximum set by instructor). |
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Online Text Submission
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Students can write text directly online, with no uploading of files. The instructor has the option to comment within the student's submitted text. |
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Offline Activity
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Useful when the assignment is performed outside of Moodle. For example, it could be a written assignment that you collected in class. Students can see the assignment title in the centre block, and when selected, also a description of the assignment (if you added one). However, students cannot upload files. |
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Communication |
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Chat
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Real time (synchronous) online conversations between and with students. It is recommended that you only use this with a small number of students at one time. |
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Forum
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Forum (asynchronous) communication can be used to facilitate class or group discussions, without requiring real-time interaction. See the discussion forum section under the Communication support section. |
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Other Communication Possibilities
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The Course Menu, can also provide a listing of all participants in a particular course (enrolled students, instructors, TAs). This is not your official course list, but shows those who are enrolled in your course and allows to to contact individual students. |
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Online Quizzes |
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Quiz
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Allows the instructor to design and set quizzes consisting of a large variety of questions types (including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer questions). The quiz is an excellent self-test tool, but we do not recommend that you use it for summative assessment. |
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Hot Potatoes
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A program that you can download to build interactive, short answer, multiple choice questions and then upload into your Moodle course. We do not recommend you use online quizzes for summative assessment. |
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Rich Media |
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Media Player |
The Media Player activity module deploys video, audio, slideshows and playlists in Moodle. |
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Podcast
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Create an audio/video series that students can follow outside your Moodle course. |
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Other Activities |
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Lesson
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Allows Instructors to construct an online resource (much like a book) and intersperse 'check for understanding' opportunities embedded directly with in the activity itself. |
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Choice
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Choice activity, you can pose a question to your students, to which they respond by selecting one of several choices. |
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Feedback
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Allows instructors to create a survey to gather student opinions. |
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Glossary
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Create a Glossary of terms related to your course, or have students add terms. Each time one of the glossary terms appears in your Moodle course, it will be automatically highlighted and linked to the glossary definition (if enabled). |
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OUWiki
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A collection of collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki is a web page that everyone in your class can create together, right in the browser, without needing to know HTML. |
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OU Blog
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Adds course blogging functionality. Considered a Pilot to test reliability and overall adoption. |
Once you have created an assignment in Moodle, students will see it on the course page, and it will show up in the Gradebook with the point value you have selected. When you enter grades for the assignments, these are automatically added to the Gradebook.
Additional Information and Help
- Override what a student can and cannot do within a specific activity. Some activities allow instructors to give students more (or less) permissions within an activity. We show you how - but be careful using this.
- Instructor Forum for the Activity modules: This is an area where instructors can post each other questions, answers, and best practices for the use of Moodle Activities. It is a resource for instructors to build, based on their experience.
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): A list of questions and answers that instructors have asked Moodle Support, but which do not fit into any one category.
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