In this chapter, we discussed the fact that Moodle enables students to learn from each other through interaction and collaboration. We also looked at the advantages of chat over asynchronous forums and reviewed the fact that the chat allows students to have quick feedback and to feel they are a part of a learning community as they share their perspectives, respond to questions, engage in peer review, and share text, graphics, and media files in order to develop collaborative projects. In addition, they can feel they are gathering information for projects or assessments and thus the chat can help them obtain information, as well as to organize it so that it ties to the learning objectives. After the chat session has concluded, transcripts can be edited and used as course material and conversation can proceed at a leisurely pace. This gives participants time to think.
Moodle 3.0 offers much flexibility with respect to chat because it allows you to incorporate access to applications...