Activities are very important in the Moodle framework because they allow students to demonstrate competency as well as stay engaged and motivated. They also allow course designers to connect learning outcomes to overall competency frameworks that may be required by governing bodies.

Moodle's assignments and lessons enable you to create course material that students interact with. This interaction is more engaging, and usually more effective, than courses consisting of static material that the students view. While you will probably begin creating your course by adding static material, the next step should usually be to ask "How can I add interactivity to this course?"

There are many ways to build engaging assignments and Moodle provides many different activities to help you do so. You can customize your own solutions, so as you work through this unit, please take a moment to experiment. Remember, you can always delete and modify your work. So, play in the sandbox!

Lessons can take the place of many static web pages, since they consist of web pages with a question at the end of each page. A lesson enables you to present information to a student, test the student on the information, and then present either remedial information or continue to the next topic.

Feedback and Choice activities give teachers the opportunity to assess students, their attitudes, and their satisfaction with a course. Feedback is especially useful for assessing the class's attitude and experience at the beginning of the course. You can also use feedback to create surveys for people who are not even taking a course, such as an employee survey or research data.

The Choice activity is especially useful for having a structured, ongoing conversation between the students and teacher. You can create several of these, keep them hidden, and reveal them when you want to measure the students' attitude.

In the next chapter, we will see how to evaluate students using the Quiz activity.