Using Moodle E-learning Platform to Enhance Interactions among Learners in the Development of a Curriculum for the Undergraduate Course Consecutive Interpreting

This study was conducted to remedy the shortcomings of the curriculum that the authors had developed for the course of “Consecutive Interpreting”. The curriculum had been designed adopting a social constructivist framework and implemented for a semester to detect the imperfections. Since the main problems centered on the paucity of learner's interactions and the limitedness of the existing interactions to few learners, the face-to-face class was complemented with an online class on Moodle. The blended design was implemented for another semester to evaluate its efficiency in solving the problems. The participants of the study were all the 54 students who enrolled in the course in the intended semester. Moodle's forum was the module used for this study. Accordingly, three public forums were used for discussions over listening comprehension assignments, note-taking activities, and activities in the face-to-face class. Since Moodle is capable of recording and saving all the activities performed by users, it was used as the instrument for data collection as well. All the discussions in the forums were studied during the whole semester first to determine the extent to which interactions occurred, and second, study the interactions considering such variables as gender, age, and a semester of entrance. The study revealed that "forum" enhanced the interactions. Besides, the differences between the mean participation rate of students with different gender, age and semester of entrance turned out not to be significant, indicating that such variations in the online class had not been barriers hindering learners from getting into interaction