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Moodle Course Vocabulary Support with Quizlet

Quizlet

Most learning management systems include a glossary feature. These are useful for course participants to quickly identify the meanings of acronyms, technical jargon, new words in a foreign language and unknown terms. If your target audience includes speakers of a language other than the course’s language, then your learners may benefit from additional language support. Quizlet is an online tool that allows instructors/developers to create study sets (vocabulary lists) to meet course requirements. On the Quizlet site, each study set has eight different learning events.

These include:

Learn has been updated to include adaptive learning. Learners can study and view progress as terminology to achieve mastery.
Flashcards is a direct adaptation of card stock flash card with the enhancement of audio.
Write allows students to listen to a term alone or used in context. Learners type the response and are provided instant feedback. Learners can track their progress for further studying.
Spell provides learners with a tool to practice their spelling of new terms.
Test gives learners the opportunity to predict how they would perform on an in-class test. Learners can configure test instances with different question types depending on how their teacher’s tests are formatted.
Match is a drag and drop game to match definition with terms.
Gravity is another game similar to Atari’s Asteroids except the aliens are either definitions or vocabulary items.
Quizlet Live is a collaborative game in which students team up to challenge other groups to identify vocabulary items. You can use the Instructor’s Guide to Quizlet Live to use this tool with your students.

I agree that expecting learners to use all of these is a little over the top unless it is a language learning course. Quizlet’s options allow learners to choose the best way for them to acquire vocabulary. When accessing Quizlet within Moodle, there are fewer options including Flashcard, Spell, Match, Learn and Test. On the Quizlet app on IOS or Android devices the offerings are reduced as well to Flashcard, Write, Match, Learn, Test.

Create or borrow?

There are over a million accessible study sets on the Quizlet site. Most of these can be copied and customized to the vocabulary of your courses. Borrowing is a practical option to save time. Most of us are more comfortable starting from a fresh screen and inputting out terms, definitions, images and audio clips to ensure the activity meets the needs of our learners. Just remember that inputting your own images and audio requires an upgrade. Quizlet learning opportunities are easily embedded into web pages, learning management system (LMS) courses, or blogs.

Quizlet Diagrams

Quizlet Diagrams. One of the most recent features of Quizlet is Diagrams. Diagrams are visuals that assist learners with concepts, processes, spaces and identifying parts of systems or objects. Educators can choose from the archive of existing diagrams or create their own. Use the Create a Quizlet Diagram sheet to step through this process with your own visual and word list. Each diagram arrives on the screen with the Write, Match, Learn, Test and Live Quizlet activities.

Students, Quizlet and Moodle

It is important for instructors or course developers to embed the Quizlet HTML code to initially display the intended activity. For example, if spelling of term may be an issue for course success, then the Quizlet embed code should point to the Spell activity.  To enhance Quizlet’s each with learning, instructors should show the learners how to access the other activities through the drop down menu on the bottom right hand side of the Quizlet widget.

Additional Considerations

Cost
The core features of Quizlet, including accessing a large collection of Quizlet Study Sets, are free. Extended features require a subscription to “Quizlet Plus”.
Support
Quizlet has a clear set of help links on their website (https://quizlet.com/help). A quick trip to YouTube also provides a wealth of useful tutorials on various aspects or overviews of Quizlet.
Usability
Students normally intuitively use this resource. As instructors, some guidance is required. It is nothing that a 30-minute hands-on session cannot remedy.
Fun Factor
Whether Quizlet is used as an introduction, the core, or a review activity, it provides a variation from the standard lecture or dictation vocabulary lessons with which many of us are familiar. The inclusion of multimedia such as audio, video, or images potentially increases the student engagement.
Technical Functionality
Quizlet activities can be used as standalone events or easily embedded into blogs, social media resources, class web pages, or any LMS.
Auto-define Definitions
Automatically defined definitions are a means of speeding up the development time for a study set. When instructors input a keyword, they have the option of selecting the auto-define feature. It displays previously entered definitions of the keyword. Instructors can accept one of these definitions or make a slight alteration to produce their own definition.
Study Set Customization
After the study sets are generated, instructors can customize the activities using editing features attached to each activity type. As well, images can be included to improve each definition. If instructors do not appreciate the pronunciation of the keywords or definitions, they can use the record feature to ensure that their students will understand the audio aspect of the study set.
Printing
The keywords and definitions can be printed for traditional class use in five different formats including an index card, table, and glossary. Instructors who wish to offer a customized, traditional vocabulary experience can print out the cards or worksheets for pair work, homework, or deskwork activities.

Final Thoughts

I usually use embedded Quizlet activities in Moodle as optional learning events to support students if they require it as individuals. Many students are already familiar with Quizlet and are comfortable access study sets via the Quizlet app, any browser or through the Moodle LMS.  If you have experience using Quizlet with learners and Moodle, comment below to share with this community.

John Allan
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John Allan

John is a Canadian who writes about learning object development and online facilitation from a teacher's perspective.

3 thoughts on “Moodle Course Vocabulary Support with Quizlet

  • Anonymous

    I have embed Quizlet in the Moodle platform but when my students open it to do the activity, they can also access (view this study set) and see my account and acess the questions key…. how can i embed the quiz but they cannot access the questions and answers. Marci

    Reply
  • Good thoughts. Flashcards can be very useful. In many cases though, the real power of flashcards is in the creation. I love to have students create flashcards. This is frequently where the powerful learning happens. The flashcards that students create can be shared and rated by other students too.

    Moodle provides a database activity that can create flashcards.

    Reply
    • Troy, thanks for sharing. Using Moodle’s database to create Flashcards is a great idea. I appreciate your blog posts as they open up another way of creating learning objects for instructors. I am am a huge fan of student collaborative, creative and constructivist learning events such as student generated flashcards. Flashcards are really necessary to nudge my students through modules as they are second language students. Recently, I have been generating Flashcard learning objects with H5P’s Flashcards and Dialog Cards. You might consider having a peek at these samples. https://h5p.org/dialog-cards https://h5p.org/flashcards

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