Activities

An activity is a general name for a group of features in a ScholarLMS course. Usually an activity is something that a student will perform in order to interact with other students and/or the teacher.

ScholarLMS gives your learners the opportunity to interact with other learners or with the instructor. This can be achieved via various tools available within ScholarLMS. The platform supports over 15 such activities which are: assignments, online classrooms, video assignments, chat, choice, database, external tools, feedback, forums, glossary, lessons, quiz, SCORM, survey, wiki and workshop.

Explore activities and their features

The assignment activity provides a space into which students can submit work for teachers to grade and give feedback on. This saves on paper and is more efficient than email. It can also be used to remind students of ‘real-world’ assignments they need to complete offline, such as art work, and thus not require any digital content. Learners can submit these assignments either by online text or file submissions (MS Office, PDF, image, a/v etc.).

List of features assignment activity supports:

  • Assignments can be specified with a due date and a maximum grade
  • Assignments can be viewed online, or downloaded
  • Teacher can attach feedback comments
  • Notification can be sent out by e-mail.
  • Re-submission can be granted for assignments, for re-grading
  • Learners can upload their assignments (any file format) to the server – they are date-stamped
  • Late assignments are allowed, but the amount of lateness is shown clearly to the teacher
  • For each particular assignment, the whole class can be assessed (grade and comment) on one page in one form
  • Grades for Forums, Journals, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file).

Chat module allows real-time synchronous communication by learners. This is a useful way to get a different understanding of each other and the topic being discussed – the mode of using a chat room is quite different from the asynchronous forums. The Chat module contains a number of features for managing and reviewing chat discussions.

  • Chat can scheduled for future date
  • Repeat sessions can be scheduled and you can display their timings
  • Chat sessions and repeat sessions can be saved
  • Restrict chat’s visibility based on certain conditions
  • Allow learners to read, delete, export or download chat logs.

Multiple choice activity is a form of assessment in which learners are asked to select the best possible answer(s) out of the choices from a list. You can create single-answer and multiple-answer questions, include pictures, sound or other media in the question and/or answer options (by inserting HTML) and weight individual answers.

The following types are supported:

  • Multiple-choice questions: single or multiple answers
  • Short Answer questions: words or phrases
  • True-False questions
  • Matching questions
  • Random questions
  • Numerical questions (with allowable ranges)
  • Questions allow HTML and images.

The database activity allows the teacher and/or learners to build, display and search a bank of record entries about any conceivable topic. The format and structure of these entries can be almost unlimited, including images, files, URLs, numbers and text among other things.

The Feedback module allows you to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback. Unlike the Survey tool it allows you to write your own questions, rather than choose from a list of pre-written questions and unlike the Quiz tool, you can create non-graded questions.

  • Select availability data range (start and end data)
  • Choose whether to show the names of learners who complete the feedback
  • Choose whether or not to allow users to complete the feeback more than once
  • Enable/disable notification of submissions
  • After submission, you can show analysis page, completion message, and link to next activity
  • Restrict access based on activity completion conditions
  • You can map feedback to all or selected courses.

The forum activity allows students and teachers to exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a ‘thread’. Files such as images and media maybe included in forum posts. The teacher can choose to rate forum posts and it is also possible to give students permission to rate each others’ posts.

  • Different types of forums are available, teacher-only, course news, open-to-all, one-thread-per-user
  • All postings have the authors photo attached
  • Discussions can be viewed as nested, flat, threaded, oldest or newest first
  • Every registered learner can join, or the teacher can force subscription for all
  • The teacher can choose not to allow replies.

The glossary activity allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary.

Glossary can be used in many ways. The entries can be searched or browsed in different formats. A glossary can be a collaborative activity or be restricted to entries made by the teacher. Entries can be put in categories. The auto-linking feature will highlight any word in the course which is located in the glossary.

ScholarLMS’s Online Classrooms is a web conferencing system for online learning. Online classrooms activity offers following features:

  • Multiple users can share their webcam at the same time. There is no built-in limit on the number of simultaneously active webcams.
  • Shared whiteboard that you can draw or write on
  • You can broadcast your desktop for all users to see
  • Users of Chrome and FireFox browsers will benefit from high-quality, low-latency WebRTC audio.
  • Ability to upload and switch between multiple presentations
  • A side-by-side chat section with the ability to chat with everyone and with other students one-on-one and various user friendly layouts (such as seminar, video chat, classroom etc.).
  • Presenter or the facilitator has the ability to control the students by muting them all at once, selectively un-muting them, responding to raised hands and even making a student leave the classroom!
  • Record your sessions for later playback by students.

The lesson module presents a series of HTML pages to the learner who is usually asked to make some sort of choice underneath the content area. The choice will send them to a specific page in the Lesson. In a Lesson page’s simplest form, the learner can select a continue button at the bottom of the page, which will send them to the next page in the Lesson.

  • Choose progress bar to show at the bottom of the page showing how far into the lesson the learner has got
  • Display menu when you want to show a list of the content page titles in the Lesson to the learner
  • Choose minimum grade to display menu
  • You can link media
  • Set availability from and deadline date
  • Set a time limit in seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks. Learners will see a countdown counter in a block as they work
  • Link to next activity

The Quiz activity module allows the teacher to design and build quizzes consisting of a large variety of question types, including multiple choice, true-false, short answer and drag and drop images and text. These questions are kept in the Question bank and can be re-used in different quizzes.

  • You can change quiz availability and duration for different groups or users
  • You can specify times when the quiz is accessible for people to make attempts
  • When chosen a time limit, a countdown timer is shown in the quiz navigation block
  • Learners may be allowed to have single or multiple attempts
  • Quizzes are automatically graded, and can be re-graded if questions are modified
  • At the teacher’s option, quizzes can be attempted multiple times, and can show feedback and/or correct answers
  • Quiz questions and quiz answers can be shuffled (randomised) to reduce cheating
  • Set passing grades
  • You can have page breaks for longer quizzes
  • Restrict accessibility by password
  • Questions allow HTML and images

The SCORM activity enables you (the teacher) to upload any SCORM or AICC package to include in your course.

  • Open SCORM content in the same or new window
  • Choose dimensions of the window in pixels or %
  • Several window options like allow windows to be scrolled, show directory links, show location bar, show toolbar, etc.
  • Choose to display table of contents
  • Choose to display navigation
  • Choose whether to display a summary of the student’s attempts on the entry page
  • Select availability from/deadline
  • Select grading methods
  • Defines the number of attempts permitted to users
  • Restrict access based on activity completion conditions.

The Survey activity provides a number of verified survey instruments, including COLLES (Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey) and ATTLS (Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey), which have been found useful in assessing and stimulating learning in online environments.

Teachers can use add Survey activity to gather data from their students that will help them learn about their class and reflect on their own teaching.

  • Choose type of survey from critical incidents, COLLES, and ATTLS
  • Restrict access based on activity completion conditions.

A wiki is a collection of collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki page is a web page everyone in your class can create together, right in the browser, without needing to know HTML. A wiki starts with one front page. Each author can add other pages to the wiki by simply creating a link to a page that doesn’t exist yet.

  • Add/edit/remove pages
  • Add and view comments
  • See history of changes in a page
  • Compare two versions of a page and restore selected
  • Learners can access files attached in Wiki.