 So it's really nice to be here. This is our first Moodle mood and we have the honor to already talk here, so Be kind and thank you for letting us talk here Yeah So today what we want to present a few ideas concerning collaborative learning spaces and how to facilitate them in Moodle as Educators as well as administrators My name is Sebastian Palmer and this is Selma Kovaciewicz. Oh, sorry My colleague. Okay, maybe it will come back. We hope. Yeah, there it is and We are from the University of Applied Sciences Vienna and we're working there as Moodle administrators as well as educators for the teachers and Moodle support as well Yeah, sorry, okay Maybe this will work, okay, so I'm connecting learners and Enabling student collaboration is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in education right now I can tell you that as a student and as a teacher as well Because in the last years we all know people haven't been having much physical contact and the connecting is getting much harder So why should you as a teacher or administrator facilitate the collaborative learning? The positive outcomes are obvious in the dialectical Scientific literature it improves learning processes. It achieves learning goals that you want to achieve and It strengthens student social skills, which is also part of many curricula So but it doesn't come without a lot of challenges In In online and hybrid hybrid settings, so there's no default room like in the classroom Where people can meet and there's no clear communication channel and know there's some social and technical barriers okay so traditionally as Teacher you only had to get the students in one classroom. Maybe give them like a little group assignment and they already naturally start to collaborate work together and When you do this in a hybrid or online setting you really have to Think and you really have to do a little bit more effort to achieve the similar results okay so Thankfully we got moodle. So there are a lot of functionalities and plugins already there that you can use and that you can That bring you to this goal to connecting your learners We already had like quite a few talks For amazing like plugins and tools that do this that achieve this and there are also like third-party apps that can Do a lot of things but today we want to show you like Show you how you can do this with like very simple moodle and tools and Maybe you already have all of them on your moodle server yeah so there are core functions and plugins as well as like several activities that we want to show today and Always important is minimizing the efforts for teachers because otherwise they won't do it and Having similar structures and course layouts so that the students know where to define the channels that they can need So the first example would be our course template at our university We have this installed for all the bachelor courses and it when the teachers are getting their courses this is the template which they get and They have a forum for students there, which is already pre-installed and pre-configured as well as the activity hot question where students can collect their questions So we have this and this the teachers doesn't don't have to do anything. So this comes already important we have our own plugin for that and This is an easy way to like establish a baseline of communication for the students so they can start collaborate to collaborate Okay, so The next thing we want to show something more specific and for that my colleague would show you specific requirements that teachers Wanted to have applied for moodle. Yeah, so Yeah, thank you Sebastian for this interesting insight on why you should use collaborative spaces for your students We had quite a few teachers who approached us with a very specific scenario and requirements and most of them you can see here so Teachers wanted to create a space where students can interact but also find each other way easier and So some of the requirements where that there was some sort of personalized profiles so students give information like for example and it depends on the scenario but for example if you want to learn a Language or if you want to offer a language that you can speak so you can teach and learn languages together or for example if you're a new student and you want to meet new people and You want to make new friends. Maybe you want to sort of set a space for people to Get to meet each other based on their interests and their hobbies that they share with their personalized profiles Or maybe they share some insights on their learning processes So they can actually build learning groups and study groups So that was a very important aspect and the most important aspect was matching the matching process because the teachers they they had lots of exel files which we all know are very scary and All of this exel files included lots of Information about the students and they had to actually do the matching process on their own so that was a lot of work very ugly and So this is a very important requirement how the matching process can work without the teachers having to do that manually and Of course, it should be some sort of search function where students can search through various criteria and of course communication and interaction between students and Yeah, we're just gonna dive into an example on how we actually did it So this is maybe you can take a few fractions out of it because this is a very specific Scenario that we already built in some of our courses. So when it comes to creating personalized profiles, we suggested the activity database where students can make entries based on the scenario So for example in this case, this is just a very small Fraction of the whole screenshot, but in this case students are able to Give information about which languages they speak which languages they offer to speak and which they would like to learn And then they can match with others who maybe want to learn the language that someone already speaks so this is Can be done with the database and when it comes to the matching process This can also be done very well with the database activity because Students can go through the existing entries and they can check whether they find someone who seems interesting to them so it was important to shift the whole matching process from the lecturers to the students and Hopefully if they make a match, they will find a Find a good partner here on this in the entries and then The next step is when you've went through the entries and you found someone you may want to Create a group. So there's a group choice activity that we use Give may notice that there are Those tiles in here in the last few slides. So these tiles Is are implemented in the courses as well Because when you click on those tiles, it immediately gets you to the activity. So immediately where The students should be because when you think of the database activity, it's a bit more complex to navigate through and With this guideline, we hope that when people click on that the students they immediately get to the entries or All of the entries are Shown as a list so they don't have to go through the whole database activity, which is a bit scary too Yeah, so when they found someone they can match with the idea is that if they didn't find someone You just join an empty group and then you hopefully Other students join as well But if you found someone you think is might interesting to you then you can of course join them You can see their names and you can join their group. So that's the idea and it's really important to Combine if you think of the activities that you want to use to also combine them together So that it makes sense. That's why we have the tiles and also just additional descriptions so that Do the students know what they need to do Mm-hmm And then of course the next step would be maybe to chat with your with each other so that you can also see whether You connect or not and for this purpose of we have we use very basic the forum And it's really important to include in the settings that you want to use separate groups because we are working with groups and Otherwise you will see all entries and that's maybe not that interesting to you and The next step is to this might all of these things are of course optional But it might be interesting for students to share their materials their Scripts their notes and therefore we recommended the shared folder to start student folder and Students can share their material here and it's also very important to use separate groups, of course But it's this is important for all activities that follow and what we recommend as well, but this is only for smaller amount of students Maybe to so we have an additional Tile that if you click on it, it leads you to another forum and people can ask Their teachers to set up a big blue button and activity for them This is again only recommended if there are not too many students in your course And teachers will immediately be notified via email Mm-hmm, and Yeah, and one last step that we had was some sort of motivation for our students to actually do this whole process and the idea was to give them bonus points if they Actually attend a quiz so the students this is the student quiz activity or students in the group So you also have to do a separate groups here. They commit their questions and Then they have to actually attempt the quiz and then after they attempt the quiz they will get bonus points too and It's also recommended if you want to do this whole process Maybe to work with activity completion to say you can only do the quiz if you are in a group and you know Set some restrictions as well. So this is a very quick go-through to all of these Process because we don't have that much time unfortunately, but this is again summary, this is all the Activities that we use and again, it's very important to Use these based on your own scenarios and we also had some Lecturers who implemented this already and in one of the courses in one of the language courses We had about 60 entries in the database within the first week. So It's it shows that students are interested to also connect online and to actually give them the space to Connect in Moodle and in a virtual room as well Yeah, so we hope that this was helpful to some of you and maybe you can connect your students in a way That they probably wouldn't have met Otherwise, thank you and now I'm time for questions We have about We have about two minutes for questions. So please raise your hands if you have questions Hi, I like to know which course format you use for this entire course because I saw tiles and I wasn't Wasn't sure where it was a town so much So for this course we use the basic topics format and we included the tiles and we created them using html So that's not something we wanted to do our Teachers, but as we don't have to set it up just one time So we thought we doing it in html. So they look pretty. Yeah But you can also use the Tile form because there's a format with Creating all the tiles for yourself. So you don't need to do that and maybe you can add an additional tile With it because we have it because those are just tiles that we created on our own We have also a subscription in the course But if you only want to use the course format with the with the tiles then it may be helpful to create an additional Tile and you put all the information there as well for the students and maybe Work with the activity completion. So they have to read it before they can go ahead. Yeah Thank you for the question. Hi, I Have more and more schools and students who ask for audio and video instructions on assignments as different Steps of the instructions you give them any ideas on how to incorporate audio and or video Comments or instructions for students in this Okay Okay, just a quick answer I think you can in every like in every part of our course you could add like audio and visual material and Even the students can at this student folder can add like audio for to communicate I think maybe you have to work out which way the best but I think it's easy to include a video there as well