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Guidelines for INTERACTIVE HOMEWORK by Sylvia Maciaszczyk

Warsaw School of Social Psychology Warsaw, Poland

sylvia.maciaszczyk @ swps.edu.pl

1.    INTRODUCTION

INTERACTIVE HOMEWORK is the name given to a method of adapting foreign-language coursebooks to a Moodle platform. As the name suggests, the activities on the Moodle platform are completed by students as part of their homework. They are essentially e-learning self-study modules¹. The activities are interactive, which means that students get immediate automated feedback as to the success of their homework.

The following is a set of guidelines explaining how to build INTERACTIVE HOMEWORK. They are based on:

•    INTERACTIVE HOMEWORK for Total English intermediate (Longman) written for SWPS (Warsaw School of Social Psychology) students in the summer 2006 (authors: Sylvia Maciaszczyk and Adam Maciaszczyk). The project was possible thanks to the huge and ongoing encouragement from Przemysław Stencel (from the SWPS E-leaming Centre) without whose expertise the project wouldn’t have been realised.

•    The results of questionnaires carried out with students working with Interactive Homework intermediate in the academic year 2006/2007 in SWPS.

The guidelines were originally written for authors from Higher College of Business in Bydgoszcz, who used them to build INTERACTFVE HOMEWORK for the following coursebooks: Intelligent Business Pre-intermediate, Intelligent Business Intermediate and Intelligent Business Upper-intermediate (all by Longman).

2.    REQUIREMENTS FOR AUTHORS

To write Moodle modules authors need two abilities. Firstly, they need to be able to design good ąuality ELT materials. Secondly, they need to be able to build the following Moodle Resources and Activities:

1. Resources: a Web page, a link to a file and Link to a Web site, a label.

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For the sake of clarity, the term ‘module’ will be used throughout the guidelines to mean a weekly e-learning, self-study module opened for students after a f2f meeting. Each module should take 90 minutes of students’ work time.