Wahlström M (University of Helsinki)
28.5.2024, 13:10–13:30, Small Hall (F4050)
The paper presents a pedagogical experiment that made use of the Moodle Database activity module in creating collective course work. The students were working on a newspaper archive and tasked to each make short resumes of articles about the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 for a certain time period. Then the students submitted their texts through the Moodle database interface. The resulting database was then converted into a timeline of the summarized articles as a PDF file, representing the entire duration of the war. Pedagogically the task was successful: It introduced the students to working with an online archive, and resulted in a nicely typeset collective coursework. However several students with limited computer skills found working with the database activity difficult, resulting in problems that had to be sorted out manually. From a teacher’s perspective the preparatory work was somewhat time consuming, but, in theory, this would have been compensated by less work with the finalized database. However, I was unprepared for the kinds of problems almost 10 percent of the students had. Based on later experience with having students submitting exercises in the .GIFT format, I argue that the problems could have possibly been overcome with better instructions. Moreover, for me personally, better coding skills would have saved me time as a teacher in creating the final file.
Recording coming in late July.