Teacher corner (base ...

Asynchronous platform Moodle is adopted for this scenario aiming to support the previous synchronous Python topic regarding functions. In order distance learning being effective, synchronous and asynchronous teaching must be collaborate and complement each other.

Teacher’s notes to the students, are basic for asynchronous online teaching. Initially, a quality set of notes should be uploaded to the corresponding Moodle course. These notes are also the presentation which will be used for synchronous online teaching.

After lecturing is completed, Moodle’s tools can be utilized to engage students and give them enough material to deeply understand functions in Python.

The following assignment can be given to the students: “Write a Python program to read 10 numbers and print a message if the number is even or odd by deploying a function”. Assignment would have time deadline. A more complicated assignment could be given like: “Write a Python function which takes a list and return a new list with the unique elements of the initial list” or “Write a program in Python that reads 5 numbers and print for each if number is prime or not via corresponding function that you will write as well”.

During assignment, students can use forum for asking questions other students or the teacher. “Are there any rules regarding function’s parameters” or “Where do we supposed to read values? In function or in main program?” are some possible questions in the forum. In case, that first assignment is finished quickly (due to the fact that it is easy) teacher can keep up by uploading a second, more advanced, assignment.

After students complete the assignments teacher can return back to them by providing the desirable answers and exchange views with the students. Detection of any mistakes or failures in students’ assignments must be followed while teacher should give a feedback to them.

Quiz tool can also be exploited to quantify students’ familiarization and understanding. Python code parts can be given asking from students to choose the correct output or to fill in Python functions in order to have the desirable output. Such a quiz helps students to understand whereas, guides teacher to help them more efficiently. Quiz’s questions must encourage students to explore python’s capabilities and exploit as many as possible.

Furthermore, forum can be a valuable tool for distance online learning and interaction amongst teacher and students. Forum is a vital communication tool between students but also for teachers. That is the place where solutions are proposed and potentially queries are emerged. Teacher can put a sophisticated topic asking for answers and proposals until the next meeting. This can motivate students for studying and searching. “How big a function should be?”, “How a function can return more than one value?” or “Could be a user create its own library of functions?” are some examples of the topics for conversation in the forum.

Moodle offers a feedback module, which allows teachers to get participants’ opinion for activities that have been designed, helping teachers to further improve course content.