Dynamic courses: individual learning paths and online collaborative exercises in moodle 2

Moodle 2 enables new didactic applications like individual learning paths and online collaborative exercises. Their effective implementation requires a top-down approach from didactic goals to practical solutions. Monitoring and intervening the learning processes becomes more important than before.

In Moodle 2, it is possible to define a condition that has to be met by a student before a certain resource or activity will become visible to him/her. The completion status of another activity might be such a condition. From a didactic point of view, a pre-set sequence of activities or a list of options can be offered to the students.

In earlier versions already, students could be placed in groups and a range of activities could be switched to group mode eventually. Further, once a grouping (a set of groups) was defined, activities as well as resources could be restricted to students from one grouping only. This enables creating more sets of parallel groups, or using groupings for different maturity levels or for different stages the students have to go through.

The combination of groupings and conditional activities, gives powerful means to implement online collaborative exercises. This will be deminstrated, discussed and practised during the presentation.