Summary

Moodle offers several options for the student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction. When deciding which social activities to use, consider the level of structure and the level of student-to-student/student-to-teacher interaction you want. For example, chats and wikis are naturally unstructured with a lot of opportunities for the student-to-student interaction. These are good ways of relinquishing some control of the class to students. A forum offers more structure because entries are segregated to topics. It can be moderated by the teacher, making it even more structured.

You may want to introduce a chat and/or forum at the beginning of a course to build esprit de corps among several students and then move on to a collaborative wiki (such as a group writing project).

In the next chapter, we will see how to encourage collaboration among students using wikis and glossaries.