An experiment with embedding minimum core literacy skills

As an experiment with embedding minimum core literacy skills in a computer animation lesson, I took the opportunity to implement the Glossary feature of the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that we have access to here at the college.

The aim of the Glossary activity is to provide a collaborative forum in which learners can build a list of terms and their definitions in relation to the course content. This could be a useful activity at the start of a course to gauge existing knowledge within the group, and as an ongoing activity through the course.

The activity has the additional benefit of allowing the facilitator to determine a learner’s core English skills and provide them with the opportunity for both tutor and peer feedback.

The glossary was added to the Computer Animation VLE and set up as follows:

The above settings provide the glossary with the ability to allow peer feedback in the form of replies to an entry, include multiple versions of a word and its definition, and display the learner's name next to any entry that they add, which is useful for assessment purposes.

The learners in this particular group are quite competitive and the task itself was introduced as a competition for the learners to come up with the most and the best definitions to words related to animation. Additionally they were told that they could not copy and paste quotes from the internet, but instead should come up with their own definitions.

The learners were also told that the terms described would be voted on by the other members in the group at the end of the session. They were also directed to peer moderate the entries by copying each other’s entries and pasting into a Google search to see if the definition had been copied from elsewhere. This increased the spirit of competition and deterred plagiarism.

The group engaged well with the activity and the results are discussed below.

Once the activity was completed, all glossary entries could be viewed in alphabetical order as seen in the following image.

Additionally, the glossary can be filtered to group terms by the learner who entered them. This allows the facilitator to get an good overview of contributions to the activity, and identify any learners requiring additional support.

At the end of the session, the group voted for what they believed to be the best entries, especially where duplicates exist. While this process was carried out, the group members provided peer support, suggesting corrections for spelling and grammar mistakes throughout the glossary, as seen in the example below.

Before peer feedback

After peer feedback

While the occasional entry was off topic, or entered for humour, these were still voted on by the class for the opportunity for inclusion. In the examples below, the word 'Introduction' was kept as it was a good example of using English skills, whereas the entry for ‘the’ was voted for deletion due to being irrelevant; but not before the learner was corrected by his peers on the lack of a capital letter at the start of the sentence.

Others were just deleted...

The end result is a useful glossary of terms, which the students can refer back to during the course, along with a neat feature of the VLE which searches for glossary terms in the course page of the VLE and creates tool-tip links to glossary entries for detected words.

Finally, a block was added to the sidebar of the VLE to display a random glossary entry every time a learner accesses the course page. This keeps the glossary activity present in the learner’s minds, and reinforces terminology learned on the course.

If anyone else decides to try using the Glossary with their groups, I'd be interested to hear about how it went.