The Journal of the JALT CALL SIG
ISSN 1832-4215

Archives

Gordon Bateson

Vol. 5, No. 1, Pages 91-99

As a way to cater for an increasingly diverse range of abilities and demographic backgrounds in tertiary education, while at the same time promoting efficiency and transparency in classroom administration, online learning management systems (LMS), such as Moodle, hold great potential for the teacher willing to incorporate a degree of technology into his or her teaching practice. One exciting possibility that these systems offer is to allow students to interact with multimedia materials which are not only engaging but also ubiquitously available via the Internet. However, the very fact that an LMS can be accessed anytime from anywhere via the web often means that that the LMS as a whole, and the content creation tools of the LMS in particular, are based on static web-pages which can be slow and cumbersome for editing tasks. It is often far easier for teachers to create content outside of the LMS, using content authoring software with which they are familiar such as Hot Potatoes, and then import that content into the LMS.

The recently completed QuizPort module for Moodle allows such externally created content to be administered via Moodle, and furthermore allows teachers to define different paths through the materials depending on students' navigation choices and responses to challenges within the content. The learning path is decided in part automatically according to the student's responses, and in part manually by offering the student navigation choices about what to do next. In this way, the materials adapt to the learner's ability and preferences. This paper gives detailed examples of how to use the QuizPort module to create these kinds of adaptive learning materials for Moodle.

[Full PDF]