4 April 2012: Building and Evaluating Participation Online: Teaching with Participation Forums and Participation Map for Moodle 2

Presenter: Presenter: Brant Knutzen (University of Hong Kong)

Hosted by Professor Geoffrey Crisp, RMIT University, Australia starting 07:00AM UST/GMT.

This session discusses principles and frameworks for building and evaluating student participation in online forums.

The Participation Forum is a new type of Moodle discussion forum which automates the marking of student participation. This allows teachers to regularly use group-based discussions as formative learning activities supporting project / assignment development, with a consistently high level of student engagement. 
The Participation Map is a new way to visualize discussion activity, creating a "data portrait" with both qualitative and quantitative descriptors of student activity at the group and class level. The fully anonymous mode supports research comparisons between experiment and control groups while protecting data privacy.

Both tools are being updated and will be released as open source projects as of July 2012 from http://brant.knutzen.se/

Until then the older versions can still be obtained.

Bush Grapher (now Participation Map) http://study.ln.edu.hk/tlc/content/opensource-software-bushgrapher

Other old version sources:

• Bush Grapher for Moodle 1.9 bush_grapher_for_moodle_19_v1.3.zip
• Bush Grapher for Moodle 2 bush_grapher_for_moodle_20_v1.3.5.zip
• Participation Forum for Moodle 2 participation_forum_for_moodle_2_v1.0.zip

Examples of these older versions are on the Transforming Assessment websites

• Bush Grapher in Moodle 1.9
• Bush Grapher and Participation forum in Moodle 2.1

The archive is 1 hour and 4 minutes duration (including post session discussion).

Multiple formats are available (the content is the same in each).

Blackboard Collaborate/Elluminate v11 archive version

This uses the classroom system itself to re-play a recording of the event. It provides a higher level of interactivity than the video versions (see below), almost as if you were attending a live event. You are also able to jump forward, back and pause the recording.

• Click: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2012-04-03.2218.M.355E480915A902B0731AF79CECA4C0.vcr&sid=2009132
• Next: 
  in Firefox/Internet explorer you may be promoted to open with/run or save the file - choose open with/run. 
  in Chrome a prompt will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the window - choose 'keep', then click the file name.
• The Blackboard collaborate player should begin launching via JAVA.

If you are having trouble accessing the classroom system please read the help page.

You Tube version (Flash video)

A screen cast of the session. 

Start playing via You Tube (note: this is a single file): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR-xHflXfZs (You can choose to view in standard definition or high definition and in full screen mode).

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