Teach with Moodle

Peer learning is one of the most interesting areas which technology can support.

Peer learning is about allowing students to learn from their 'peers' i.e. other students on the module, and therefore focuses on student-centred activities, away from the traditional teacher-students approach.

The main idea is around acknowledging that students have a wealth of knowledge and skills which they can share and that students often understand complex problems better when these are explained by other students, rather than the teacher.

Also you get your student active, they can't sit back and wait for you to deliver; they have to find answers (to an extent) for themselves.

Finally, and this is something I have seen in my teaching many times, students who are used to collaborating with other students will be happier in class, unafraid to ask for help from another student, less shy to speak up in discussions, and generally speaking less dependent on the teacher for getting answers.

Here are a few examples of how Moodle and other technologies can help you, but the most important changes will lie in your delivery, not in the technology.

• Think of ways to transfer some of the content you normally present in class to an online presentation and use this new-found face-to-face time for case studies, problem-solving, experimenting, debating ideas and outcomes, analysing. Get your student to do this work in pairs in class and feed back to the rest of the group, or consider using clickers at various points of the session. The pre-work online could be presented  through an online presentation, relevant reading, an online discussion, opinion polls based on prior sifting of twitter feeds etc. Eric Mazur has been a fervent advocate of peer instruction for over 20 years. Find out more about peer instruction through the twitter feed left.
• Get your students to ask for each other's help, support, prior knowledge before a session (giving them specific guidelines) via a Twitter hashtag for the course, or a Chat activity.

Tools described in Topics 22 to 25 (on video, audio, Turning Point and social media such as Twitter and Blogs) can be used to help you design your delivery.

You may also want to investigate TED-Ed which allows you to remix existing video content and add an MCQ or an open question which students can discuss (in Moodle, for instance) before a session. An example can be found here: http://ed.ted.com/on/j5LUZuPf