Facilitating Conversation and Community Among Students

Facilitate conversation and community among students using tools like Moodle discussion forums, Google Workspace collaboration features, and Panopto videos.

Moodle

Discussion Forums

Discussion forums can be a great way for instructors to keep students connected in their classes. While there are many different types of forums to choose from, a few popular options stand out for building a strong classroom community in Moodle.

Announcement Forum

The Announcement Forum is automatically added to every Moodle class. Everyone in the class is forced to sign up for it, meaning Moodle will automatically email your posts to all of your students. A big benefit of this is that students who join your class late can easily read all the old news they missed.

Standard Forum for General Use

This is an open space where anyone can start a new conversation topic at any time. It is the best choice for a regular forum where students can reply to each other and create ongoing conversation chains (similar to a blog website).

Q&A Forum

This Question and Answer forum lets teachers post specific questions for students to answer. The unique part is that students cannot see what their classmates wrote until they post their own answer first.

More information is available on the Adding and Using Forums in Moodle help page.

Quickmail

Quickmail is a messaging tool built within Moodle that allows instructors to send a message to the entire class or to select students. Students can send messages to other students using Quickmail too.

Google Workspace

Google Groups

Google Groups is a great messaging tool for instructors to stay in touch with their students. Every Moodle class gets its own matching Google Group with the same student list.

Besides sending messages, you can also use Google Groups to easily share things in Google Workspace:

  • Google Drive: Quickly give your whole class access to My Drive folders, Shared Drives, or individual Google Docs all at once.
  • Google Calendar: Invite your entire class to a calendar event just by typing the name of your course’s Google Group into the “Guests” box, instead of adding every student’s email one by one.

For more information, see the help page on Google Groups for Courses.

Google Chat

Google Chat is a communication tool for messaging amongst the Lafayette community either through direct messages or group messages using “Spaces”.

Chat Features

  • Attach files from either your computer or hard drive, Google My Drive and Shared drives
  • Create a new Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide on the fly.
  • Start an impromptu Google Meet or see everyone within the Chat or Space Google Calendar.

Benefits of Using Google Chat to Facilitate Conversation

  • A good solution for asynchronous communication with students such as Q&A or for synchronous communication such as Office Hours (see Managing Virtual Office Hours).
  • The ability for instructors to create a Google Chat Space to message students in a course. Instructors can easily invite students to join the Space by adding the Course Google Group to the membership. See Google Groups for Courses for information on adding your entire class to a Space.
  • Students can create one-on-one discussions with each other or create a Space to connect with a group of students in a class.
  • The ability to add threaded discussions in a Space.

Google Slides

Google Slides offers a Q&A feature where presenters can start a live Q&A session in their presentation and present questions at any time. Viewers can ask questions from any device. For more information, see Google’s help documentation on Accept and Present Audience Questions using Google Slides.

Panopto Media

Welcome/Introduction Videos

One of the many ways to facilitate conversation and community within a class is to create welcome or introduction videos to become more acquainted with each other. Using Panopto, Lafayette’s streaming media platform, members of Lafayette can create, store, and distribute media to the public and internal audiences. Instructors can access their media library within Moodle and can share videos with students in their course, as well as where students can create and upload videos as part of an assignment. One’s Panopto media content is available from both media.lafayette.edu and Moodle.

More information on using Panopto can be found on the Audio and Video Resources help page.