TEACHING BUSINESS ENGLISH ONLINE. ASSIGNMENT ACTIVITIES AND TESTS IN MOODLE

Abstract

In many universities around the world, the current pandemic situation confined the academic process to online interactions alone, with no physical presence in a class, the ‘face-to-face’ classes being held by means of applications or programs that provide video conferences facilities. Besides these tools for live communication, most universities – among which ours, as well – have started to make extensive use of the e-learning Moodle platform. Especially designed for the distance learning form of education, the Moodle platform has previously been used in our university mostly by the teachers involved in the distance learning form, particularly for the purpose of providing the distance learning students with study materials and other resources of interest for the subject – through the resources uploaded on the pages of the discipline -, for communication – by means of forums and chat rooms -, and for enabling a few tests and assignments along the semester. Now, with everything going online, the vast range of facilities this application offers has come to be discovered by all academics involved in the instruction process. In both synchronous and asynchronous activities organised by means of the platform, the user will find useful a series of facilities offered by the platform. Among these, the current study will refer to several diverse possibilities of using the activities of Assignment and Test for the classes of English for Business, with a series of examples of exercises that were created by means of these Moodle tools. The regular file upload assignment in which the student were instructed what to prepare, compose or solve, and upload at the specific button has now, with experience, ‘grown’ obsolete, more interesting online text types of assignment being preferred, such as video or audio records, texts written directly online in the applications or others types following templates and using materials posted. As for the tests, besides the basic types – more straightforward and easy to create – such as: multiple choice drills, matching, true / false, short answers, or drag and drop, there will be exemplifications of the embedded answers (cloze) type, which requires audacity and willingness from the teacher to put in more effort to prepare and self-instruct on how to use and enter special codes in order to create complex exercises. Needs teach us and eventually the results prove indeed rewarding and worth the effort.