Interaction involves collaboration

Some people think of Forums and Chat activities as being interactive but they do not look at the collaborative nature of the activity. In Moodle, the instructor has the opportunity to make all the discussion activities in a place where students can learn to collaborate with each other as they post their papers, read and post in response to their fellow students, and work together in peer reviews of papers and other work.

All interaction in Moodle involves collaboration, at least at a very basic level. So it is, in essence, a focused and purposeful interaction. To be effective, it's important to have an overall goal and measurable outcome for your interaction and/or collaboration. For example, you may say that you'd like to have open office hours in the Chatroom and you can invite students to drop  in and chat. But what will they do? Why will they do it? Certainly you may be accomplishing the goal of establishing human connections and forging an emotional bond, but that's not really enough.

You need to make a connection to a learning goal. For example, if you put together a synchronous chat room and give it a name, such as Project 1 Topics, you can ask students to drop in and share their topics and their ideas on that topic. They can also share links to resources and also pose questions and insights they might have. Thus, the activity could tie to the outcome of identifying a key topic to study or to a higher-level goal such as creating a collaborative project.

Collaboration and interaction in Moodle can be either synchronous or asynchronous. Asynchronous interaction (discussion boards, forums, wikis) can form the foundation of the course and help develop a viable, thriving learning community. In the previous chapter, we discussed how we can put together a course built around Forums and that the advantages to such arrangements include the ability for students and the instructor to discuss the instructional materials (texts, videos, audio, multimedia presentations, and more) and to share their perceptions and projects. By engaging in a conversation, they develop a sense of community. By sharing work and by examining samples, they learn through emulation and example. There are many effective ways to learn when students interact with each other. In addition, they feel motivated and develop a sense of confidence.

Positive interactions in the forums can motivate students and help them learn from each other. It may take some time obtaining responses to some questions and, in some cases, students may prefer the idea of real-time communication or chat. The advantage of real-time chat is immediacy. You can get immediate answers and you can also share them later by saving a transcript and making it available to team members.

In fact, for students who are used to almost instant communication via text messages or social media such as Google Hangouts or Twitter, the asynchronous communication of a Forum may seem frustratingly slow. They prefer brief, instantaneous communication. So, for students preferring to send and receive quick (and often very brief, if we look at Twitter) text messages, a good solution may be to put together chat solutions. In Moodle, online chat is very easy to implement and it allows students to communicate with each other in real time.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, Why  use  Moodle's  Chat  when  we  can  incorporate  Skype,  Twitter,  BigBlueButton,  Google  Hangouts,  and  other  well-known  third-party  synchronous  communication  solutions? Again, it's a combination of security, control, and convenience. With Moodle 3.0, Chat has more settings and is more flexible and the instructor/administrators have the ability to define groups and to schedule chat times. Above all, it's possible to save the transcripts so that no one misses anything. Finally, because all the actions take place within the Moodle platform and it does not require access to a cloud-based application, there is a great deal-more security. You do not have to worry about student posts somehow ending up on non-course social media sites.

One caveat to remember with Chats is the fact that students must be scheduled to participate in the chat at the same time. This can cause some issues if your students live in disparate time zones. With careful scheduling, this issue can be overcome.

With text messaging or Chat, students can share ideas and thoughts. They can also send each other files and post presentations, graphics, video, and more. They can react and respond to each other's work and can revise, emend, and expand the work of others. For students used to a web-enhanced world, Chat is ideal.