{"id":3814,"date":"2020-07-06T21:21:43","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T20:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/?p=3814"},"modified":"2021-01-09T00:39:26","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T23:39:26","slug":"online-elt-call-activities-in-moodle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/07\/06\/online-elt-call-activities-in-moodle\/","title":{"rendered":"Online ELT & CALL activities in Moodle"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Great news! For those of us who use Moodle to create online English language learning\/teaching (ELL\/ELT) activities & courses, things just got better. Previously, I\u2019ve held off from writing about H5P because, although it is very useful & has great potential, I found the Moodle integration problematic & difficult to manage, but with the latest Moodle upgrades I think that we can take online ELL\/ELT to a whole new level.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

H5P Integration<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Moodle 3.9 now has much tighter integration with H5P, a framework for creating & deploying 43 types of multimedia learning resources & activities, many of which are ideal for computer assisted language learning (CALL), e.g. dictations, learners can record themselves speaking, various matching & memory games, flashcards, & various cloze & gap-fill activity types, & an experimental feature that allows a speech analysis service to grade learners’ spoken responses to prompts & questions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

H5P resources & learning activities can be embedded anywhere in Moodle, e.g. as the initial prompt or activity in a forum discussion thread, in Moodle quizzes & tests, & in lessons & presentations.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Institutionally supported free & open source<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Like Moodle, H5P is free & open source software (FOSS) & supported by several universities & non-profit organisations. This means that continuing development & adoption are assured & the community of developers & users is set to continue to grow substantially. They’re also building a free & open H5P learning resources repository\/library so that course creators can publish & import ready-made learning resources & activities into their Moodle courses & edit & adapt them to their specific situation, context, & learners’ needs. This kind of collectivising learning resources certainly helps to lighten the typically substantial load of materials writing & development for individual educational organisations, thereby bringing costs & development times down.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Check out some examples<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

You can see & try out examples of the activity types, not specifically designed for ELT but they give you a good idea of what they look like & how they work. See the H5P resource & activity types summary page here: https:\/\/h5p.org\/content-types-and-applications<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Especially useful for CALL<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Of the 43 H5P resource & activity types currently available, the following are of notable interest for CALL:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

    \r\n
  • Interactive video<\/strong>: Useful for socially situated (contextualised) dialogues, & watching recorded language presentations with interactive prompts, pauses, & questions, as well as many other applications. You can really get creative with this one.<\/li>\r\n
  • Presentations<\/strong>: Collate & sequence multiple H5P resources & learning activities into complete coherent mini-lessons. H5P items can also be sequenced & mixed in with Moodle quiz items.<\/li>\r\n
  • Audio recorder<\/strong>: Ss can record themselves & submit it to their teacher for review, feedback, &\/or grading \u2013 Also note that Moodle itself has audio & video recording capabilities so that you can, for example, create voice &\/or video discussion forums (similar to VoiceThread). Learners just click, talk to their computer\/phone, & submit.<\/li>\r\n
  • Multimedia flash cards<\/strong>: Flash cards with text, images, & audio. Great for reviewing language in terms of meaning, form, & pronunciation (MFP). Flash cards also strengthen memory of basic language elements, which results in faster recall & more fluent, complex, & accurate spontaneous speech & writing (similar to Quizlet but with better multimedia support).<\/li>\r\n
  • Dictation<\/strong>: Traditional dictation activity, except that learners control the audio playback (as many times as they need\/like) & there\u2019s option to provide additional versions of each section of speech, e.g. reduced tempo (time-stretched audio) or clearer, more emphatic annunciation. Learners\u2019 responses are graded as % of correct words \u2013 each correct word receives a grade rather than the typical whole answer being graded in a binary (exactly) right or wrong fashion.<\/li>\r\n
  • Drag & drop<\/strong>: Multimedia multiple matching activity \u2013 Learners can match text, images, & audio. It has a wide range of applications from vocabulary to dialogue sequences & TPR (be aware that drag & drop has issues with accessibility & section 508 compliance).<\/li>\r\n
  • Drag & drop cloze<\/strong> (gap-fill): Learners have list of language items, e.g. words, to insert into correct positions in text. Similar to multiple choice cloze but quicker & easier to create & easier for learners to complete. Especially suitable for lower-level learners, i.e. CEFR A0 \u2013 A2.<\/li>\r\n
  • Cloze <\/strong>tests<\/strong> (gap-fill): Learners type in the blanked words into a text. Although Moodle\u2019s Quiz activity also does cloze deletion tests well, the text formatting & input in this H5P activity type is easier to read & therefore exerts lower extraneous (i.e. bad) cognitive load. An advanced cloze type allows for multiword blanks & gives percentage scores for the number of correct words within a blank, which is useful for practising Cambridge keyword sentence transformations. (BTW, cloze deletion texts are among the most valid & reliable forms of reading comprehension test known).<\/li>\r\n
  • Hotspots<\/strong>: Learners identify items in an image by clicking on them. Can be used to teach & test vocabulary & phrases in contextually relevant images\/scenes.<\/li>\r\n
  • M<\/strong>emory game\/match the pairs of cards<\/strong>: The classic memory games that learners seem to love & help to strengthen retrieval, fluency, & accuracy in spontaneous language production.<\/li>\r\n
  • Image sequencing<\/strong>: Drag & drop the images into the correct order. Good for TPR style activities, e.g. to check initial\/gist understanding of narratives, stories, news items.<\/li>\r\n
  • Mark the words<\/strong>: Indicate words in a text, e.g. nouns, pronouns, objects, subjects, noun verb phrases, adjacency pairs, mistakes, etc.. Good for getting learners to do analyses of texts &\/or error analysis\/proof reading practice.<\/li>\r\n
  • Personality quiz<\/strong>: A good ice-breaker\/getting to know you activity for fun & cultivating social presence.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

    What other Moodle activities do better than H5P<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

    H5P also has multiple choice & multiple matching question types however it\u2019s better to do MCQs with Moodle\u2019s Quiz module. The Quiz module has more options & it includes automated item analyses to help you to improve the quality of MCQ items at a granular level, e.g.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

      \r\n
    • F<\/strong>acility index<\/strong>: How easy the learners find the item),<\/li>\r\n
    • D<\/strong>iscrimination index<\/strong>: How well the item distinguishes between low & high knowledge learners, i.e. the learners\u2019 level of understanding),<\/li>\r\n
    • D<\/strong>istractor efficiency<\/strong>: How feasible\/convincing the wrong answers (distractors) are & how consistently proficient learners get an item right & low-knowledge learners get the item wrong \u2013 Contributes to the discrimination index.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

      Also see Moodle\u2019s Feedback activity for opinion polls & different kinds of feedback, which allows teachers to share the aggregated results with learners, e.g. Opinion polls can be used to spark forum discussions as they show learners where consensus\u2019 & differences on a specific topic are across the whole group.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

      Over to you<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

      As you can see, there\u2019s a long list of options to explore that can strongly enhance the instructional quality of online learning interactions & instructional sequences, as well as making them more varied & enjoyable for learners. What online ELT ideas do you think you could implement with these tools?<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Great news! For those of us who use Moodle to create online English language learning\/teaching (ELL\/ELT) activities & courses, things just got better. Previously, I\u2019ve held off from writing about H5P because, although it is very useful & has great potential, I found the Moodle integration problematic & difficult to manage, but with the latest Moodle upgrades I think that we can take online ELL\/ELT to a whole new level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,7,8,9],"tags":[19,39,53,71,74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4613,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions\/4613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}