Moodle: Creative Uses for the Choice Activity

Think you can only use the choice activity for basic opinion polls? Think again! Use this Moodle feature to tackle several problems, from managing group sizes to establishing accountability for pre-work. Here are several applications you may want to try.

Manage Group Sizes

Assigning students to groups can eat up precious class time. Rather than wasting class time completing this administrative task, use the choice activity as a means for students to put themselves into groups. Use the choice activity when students need to be grouped by a topic, case, reading, etc. Those that select the same item form a group.

You can limit groups’ sizes via the activity’s settings. When an option has reached its limit, students can no longer select that item and must choose something else.

Additionally, you can keep the activity’s results anonymous to prevent students from forming groups solely based on who’s in which group.

Schedule Appointments
The choice activity can address additional administrative tasks relating to scheduling. For example, if a project or paper requires each student to meet with you individually, use the choice activity as a sign-up tool in which students select appointment slots. (You can limit the number of responses to ensure there is only one student per slot.) An extension of this application is to use the choice activity as a means for individuals or groups to sign up for presentation times.

Check Students’ Comprehension

Sometimes it can be difficult to gauge how well students are grasping a new concept: perhaps several students dominated the class discussion or maybe your lecture took up all the remaining time.  Whatever the reason, you can use an informal assessment via the choice activity to check your students’ comprehension of a specific concept. At its most basic, the choice activity can check students’ comprehension and/or retention, functioning like a multiple choice question.

When appropriate, you can also craft questions that push students to apply or synthesize the content.  Try using “What would you do?” scenarios or have students analyze graphics, videos, or podcasts to answer the activity’s question. 

Provide Opportunities for Student Choice

You love everything about the content you teach, but sometimes students aren’t as enthralled with the subject matter as you are, and student engagement suffers. Thankfully, there’s a strategy to combat this: the more students have a say in what they’re learning, the more engaged they’re likely to be. Use the choice activity to give students a voice, to tell you what they’re interested in. For example, ask them to pick a topic they’d like to explore in greater depth during the next class or to vote for the project they’d most enjoy completing. These polls are especially useful when you only have time to cover one case study (or reading, topic, etc.) during the next class meeting. Assuming all of the cases serve the same purpose, why not let students tell you which case they’re most interested in discussing?

Establish Accountability
Students are often responsible for completing readings between class meetings. Your expectation is that students will complete this pre-work and come to class ready to discuss. Inevitably, though, some students come to class unprepared, thinking they can skate by during a class discussion. With the choice activity, you can send the message that you expect students to complete the pre-work and that you’re holding them accountable for it. If students need to complete the reading to successfully answer the choice activity, then they’ll be more likely to complete the work, especially if a correct answer on the activity goes towards their participation points.

Final Thoughts

Although the applications discussed above relate to the traditional classroom, any of them would work in a hybrid/online course, too, so feel free to try them out in any delivery setting.

Have you tried any of these strategies? What other creative uses can you think of for the choice activity?