Open Access

Sebastian Palme, Selma Kovacevic

• The current shift in teaching and learning away from the physical classroom to blended and digital learning environments presents many challenges and opportunities for both teachers and learners. A somewhat overlooked aspect of this transition concerns the issue of student collaboration in blended learning situations. Students teaming up to improve their learning process, exchange ideas and achieve learning goals has been an integral part of the higher education experience for many, while also strengthening students social skills. With the physical distancing and accompanying shift to increased online learning settings of the past few years, establishing this collaboration between students has become more and more difficult. Well-conceived digital social learning spaces and opportunities might be a way to compensate for these missed out traditional learning situations with peers in or after class. Going beyond typical group work activities teachers often utilize in their classes, Moodle offers a wide variety of opportunities for teachers to design these digital learning spaces tailored to the specific needs and objectives of their classes and students. Following a student-centred learning paradigm and a conception of the teacher as a designer and enabler of learning opportunities, we want to present a few use cases of Moodle activities, plugins and integrated tools suitable for designing these social spaces online. Among others we would like to showcase possible scenarios for peer assessments, open video conferencing rooms for students with BigBlueButton, collaborative test preparation with StudentQuiz, and connecting learners through a creative usage of the database activity. Picking up these different resources, we hope to motivate and inspire educators to design and roll out collaborative online spaces for their students to enable better teamwork and achieve deeper learning.