Lessons are a powerful tool to create interactive content for your students. The benefits of lessons are:
- How you can build adaptive content with branching scenarios (i.e. role play simulations, decision making exercises, interactive fiction, differentiated revision guides, etc.)
- Lessons chunk information (like a book) rather than displaying an entire page of text
- Can include questions throughout the activity
- Can be summative or formative
- Self-directed learning of a new topic – the learner starts out knowing nothing but can progress at their own pace, reviewing what they are unsure on and moving on once ready
- Allow for different learning styles – for example, some students may prefer video over text; therefore, you can include the different modalities in which the student can review the information
For more details into the use cases of lessons, checkout the Ideas for Using Lessons Moodle documentation.
But with all the nice “bells & whistles” also come a few disclaimers we’d like to provide up front if interested in using lessons for your course:
- Planning is essential with lessons. Consider what you want your lesson workflow to look like BEFORE jumping into Moodle to create it.
- Lessons can get complicated fast and are easy to mess up, hence why planning is important.
- Reports or logs can be a bit hard to interpret.
- There are MANY, MANY settings in lessons you can choose from. We strongly encourage restraint in doing so.
- There are some loopholes that could affect a student’s grade if lessons are not setup correctly. Please review the Potential Lesson Setting Pitfalls page before creating your lessons.
Watch the video below to learn how to create a Lesson in Moodle.
How to Grade Essay Questions
- Navigate to your course and select the Moodle Lesson.
- You should see a few tabs listed. Click the one that says “Grade Essays”.
- A list of all the students’ essay responses will appear. You will have to go through and click each one to grade.
- Once you select one and review the response, you’ll see a field entitled “Essay Score”.
- Select the drop down and grade based on your own rubric. Then select “Save Changes”.
- Status for that student will change to “Graded” once complete.
Last Updated: Nov 2022