Best Moodle Innovation for 2020 -- Nominations

The P-CHAT plugin is a formative assessment tool designed to promote second language speaking fluency. The plugin is centered around a group oral assessment task, and guides students through a series of steps that include 1) preparing (selecting partners, choosing a conversation topic, inputing target vocabulary, etc.), 2) recording (recording and uploading the user’s individual voice as they converse in face-to-face groups), 3) transcribing (listening to and transcribing students’ own contributions to the conversation, turn by turn), and 4) reflecting (reviewing automatically-generated information about their spoken production such as total words spoken, average turn length, and accuracy percentage, and answering teacher-generated reflective prompts). 

The tool is designed to be used routinely in a semester-long communicative course, and features reporting pages for students to track their progress over time. This versatile plugin also features a variety of assessment schemes including customizable rubric grading, as well as individual and class reporting for teachers. Supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K13309, the tool also functions as a data-collection instrument and allows researchers to access large quantities of quantitative and qualitative data including audio recordings, student and machine-generated transcriptions, and calculated metrics of spoken production.