E-Learning and Online Teaching

Juliana Payson shows how to integrate Moodle and WordPress for a better online learning experience.

The WordPress site is also where students can exchange information on their projects via blog and share videos, while the Moodle site is where Professor Stern holds online course discussions, collects her student’s final submissions, and distributes her reading homework. The Professor has also set up “blog collectives” in which students are required to comment on those of other students in the same collective. By doing so, she hopes, she will encourage her students to read one another’s work and thus benefit from mutual learning. And some of the blogs are “dual purpose”—one part in which the student writes a response that integrates the screenings and the readings of the question, and a second part in which “anything goes”—that is, as long as the student makes one post a week by Sunday at midnight (and he also has to have determined at the beginning what he is going to post about).