Using debates in the classroom provide students the opportunity to work in a collaborative and cooperative group setting. By having students discuss and organize their points of view for one side of an argument they are able to discover new information and put knowledge into action. Classroom debates help students learn through friendly competition, examine controversial topics and “strengthen skills in the areas of leadership, interpersonal influence, teambuilding, group problem solving, and oral presentation”

Now, you can easily create debates in Moodle course using the new Debate Activity Moodle plugin. Debate is a Moodle activity which allows students to debate in a given topic inside Moodle.

It is a usual activity in any face-to-face class that moderators or teacher or even employees are divided into group and they are asked to give their opinion or debate on a given topic. This plugin is the approach to take that whole scenario inside Moodle.

You can download the latest version of the Debate activity plugin from the official plugins repository here. You can follow this guide to learn how to install a Moodle plugin. Once installed, you can easily start using the Debate activity in your Moodle course as a regular activity.

Debate activity allows you to create multiple teams for positive and negative side for a group of users. You will need to use the groups feature inside the course, create groups and use those groups as a part of each team.

As an educator you can control the type of responses from the users like:

• Unlimited response – users can add as many positive and negative response as they want.
• Allow one response on one side – only one response is allowed on any one side, either positive or negative.
• Allow one response on each side – allow anyone to respond either on the positive or negative side.
• Use debate teams – use teams feature instead which will control these for individual teams.

In addition, the following options are available for activity completion settings:

• User viewing the debate activity
• User submitting the required number of debate responses.

What are the other interesting Moodle activity plugins you are using? Please share with us in the comments section below.

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