Im looking at the heavy hitters on my site....

Not the users or even the courses, but the activities.  After all, the activities are what make moodle great.  The activities are what make moodle more than a content holder or a simple repository or a big filling cabinet.  Heck, we have lots of storage, holders of things and repositories, what we don't have lots of is really good engaging content that makes the user think, participate, contribute etc.!

Want your users/learners/people of the sphere to engage what you are doing?  Want them to take ownership of what they are doing?  Want them to walk away from your content with something that will stay with them?  Want to push your students beyond the realm of "memorize this, its on the test!".

Ok, you get the point.  This is where moodle is really strong.  In the activities.  Moodle has a bunch of them and on our site, where we use/have purchased professional course ware, there are a few heavy hitters.

When you think how a student might be engaged by a course, what does your brain conjure?  Think about it.... still thinking?  How about, forums, chats, assignments, quizzes, workshops, glossaries, wikis, databases...these are all activities where the student is engaged.  Building knowledge!  Yes, that is sort of the moodle tagline "constructionist" or something like that.  The idea is that the students are building as much knowledge as is being offered by the teacher or course material.  The students are placed in the course and a teacher, in our case, is there to facilitate the actions in the course. 

I get that, I know I am an adult, and a lot of the high school students don't really understand this co-constructionist model, they will actually sit there passively until they are given a black and white directive to do something, but that can't stop us from thinking and pushing the model anyway.

To my point.  Here is a snapshot of the number of times certain activities appear in our moodle instance. 

The big hitters are Assignments, forums, quizzes, URLs (that's simply links to page content), files (lots of content is packaged in PDFs, and images.

Sadly there are only a small number of Wiki, chat, glossary and database activities as these are less black and white and really do push the notion of co-constructionist, where the learners are creating as much of the intelligence in the course as the teacher.  I suspect these activities to work better with a motivated group of students.  Motivated is probably not the right term either, but the right type of learner, those that excel is a less structured model. 

Finally, I think about wikis, glossaries, workshops, even forums where student can be the moderators.  The activities that allow the students to create content or intelligence in the course.  The activities that are not drill and practice, memorization, but rather are creative and non-linear.  Activities where the students can contribute their own unique thoughts or ideas a little more abstractly.  Less of the choose from a list or fill in the blank, and more of what do you think?  Find something like this, define it, put it in some context.

Well, its easier to write about abstractly, and much harder to put into play and actually see students engaging how you imagined, oh well, it good to dream.  A man without a vision is, well, a vision less man.