Foster Collaborative Learning with the Moodle Wiki | Moodle

PEDAGOGICAL OBJECTIVE

The Wiki activity in Moodle provides a space for students to build a mini-website, which can be done collaboratively or individually. Using a wiki lets students demonstrate learning in multimodal ways, and encourages them to exercise creativity and autonomy in responding to course materials and constructing their responses.

ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY TOOL

The Moodle Wiki is used to create collaboratively authored web pages within Moodle.

Featured Faculty:

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Pat O'Hara

CHEMISTRY, BIOCHEMISTRY-BIOPHYSICS

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY AND FOOD SCIENCE : FROM TEST TUBES TO TASTE BUDS

Description

Lab Wiki

In the course Molecular Gastronomy and Food Science: from Test Tubes to Taste Buds, Professor O’Hara has students work in groups to build a Wiki page that reports their experience and research related to an in-class lab.

Working in Groups

Students who are science majors are grouped with non-science majors. The Moodle site and the Wiki use Moodle’s Groups feature, which gives each group its own Wiki space to work in, while allowing everyone in the class to view other groups’ work.

Framework

O’Hara provides an assigned framework for each Wiki page, which must contain sections dedicated to: 1) the science behind the experiment, 2) its relation to the syllabus, 3) a creative interpretation, 4) analysis of Social Science or Humanities-related aspects, and 5) a reflective summary.

wiki page with image of cooked watermelong

Multi-media

Due to the versatile online nature of the wiki the students are free to use any and all types of content: writing, video, audio, images, animations, etc.

Accessibility Bonus

This project provides students with opportunities to demonstrate learning in multimodal ways. By allowing students to present their project through writing or visuals or digital media, etc, Prof. O’Hara is attempting to reach all learners and account for variability in learning. At the same time, O’Hara’s careful scaffolding of the assignment guides the students toward making meaningful connections and sets clear expectations.