For a long time, asking students to write in Moodle was a risky endeavor. A lot has changed over the last decade though and Moodle’s become a fine place for student writing to happen. This is a product of improvements to:

• Moodle session times (which can be customized)
• Moodle’s customer TinyMCE Autosave feature (which periodically saves student writing to the database; the default TinyMCE Autosave leverages the browser instead, a less secure method).

In a recent conversation with a school, they posed a unique and interesting assignment prompt to us at Cursive so we wanted to put it through the paces to see how Moodle and Cursive could deliver if the assignment instructions and writing environment were specified as Moodle itself. Let’s take a look!

Prompt: Find three credible sources to write a short lit review. You should give each source a close reading and then write your summary. Be sure to pick three sources that appear to have an interconnectved theme for your research. Each summary should be approximately 100 words (a total of 300 words).

(I like this prompt because the act of summarizing is such an important part of exhibiting critical thinking and working through connections between articles. From a writing skills development perspective, summarization is great practice to improve overall writing as well¹)

Instructions:

• Use Moodle as your authoring environment
• Please paste quotes directly to the text editor (and provide the original link when prompted)
• Leverage the “Difference” feature which updates regularly to check whether pasted text is accurately in quotes or additional paraphrasing is required.
• You can “save changes” and come back to “edit submission” as many times as you want until the assignment deadline.

User Experience:

The ability to come back and edit was easy. I never lost text.

Our demo site is set to an 8 hour duration which is long but my activity time was ~10 minutes each writing session (three total).

TinyMCE does have a “Full Screen” mode (and there are other advanced features such as “Footnotes” that can be added as a premium service). This was somewhat similar to writing in Google Docs’ “Pageless” format.

Cursive’s Moodle plugin added some additional context about how much time I spend actually writing (less than reading and task switching) in addition to helping to differentiate between what I wrote and what I pasted (green).

1. “Training Advanced Writing Skills: The Case for Deliberate Practice” in Educational Psychologist by Ronald Kellogg & Alison Whiteford (Oct 2009) https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600 ↩︎