Goldsmiths - University of London

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Learn.gold Forums: a closer look

Dates

Monday 19th October, 09:15-10:45

Faciliator

Dr Mira Vogel, Learning Technologist, Learning Enhancement Unit

Description

For staff, visiting lecturers and course reps there is a series of hands-on sessions exploring the different activities in learn.gold in more depth.

It's not uncommon for students to feel they lose momentum or become disorientated between the face-to-face sessions on a course. This hands-on workshop takes a closer look at learn.gold Forums for sending messages and for having conversations. Many users of Moodle (the Virtual Learning Environment we call learn.gold) speak highly of the Forum tool because of the different ways you can display and access discussions.

The workshop will begin with a discussion about what using Forums might contribute to students’ learning, involvement with and orientation within the course. We will then have a close look at some discussion Forums from a learner point of view, before setting one up ourselves.

From an editor point of view, we’ll pay attention to the alternative Forum settings and discuss their relative merits, including whether to send posts by email and RSS. We’ll consider the difference between the News Forum in each learn.gold area, and more discursive Forum types. We’ll consider issues in community building, including ways learn.gold has to make conversations more manageable, including moderating, dividing large cohorts into smaller groups, and delegating roles to participants. Finally we will touch on how to use learn.gold records (logs) to get a rough impression of how a Forum is being used by students.

Location

Warmington Tower 307 (to find the room, on the 3rd floor landing take the right hand side door which should be open, and head to the end of the corridor).

Prerequisites

A working knowledge of the basics of learn.gold (see objectives for the Introduction / Refresher workshop).

To book a place

Other things to know

  • Come with your IT Services username and password (the one you use for Goldsmiths email)
  • If you need to refresh your knowledge of learn.gold beforehand, an 'Introduction to learn.gold handout' (and more) can be found in our demonstration course area
  • Bring a drink if you think you'll need one
  • If you sign up, please turn up - the session will run
  • Transferable usability, accessibility and IT skills and principles will be incorporated at every opportunity.

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