Event Schedule:
7:30am - 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 10:00am Engaging Ideas: How Writing in Digital Environments Can Promote Critical Discussions in the Classroom
Speaker: Matthew Schultz; Writing Center Director; Vassar College

A structured discussion about the theory and practice of writing as preparation for classroom discussion both about course content and rhetorical strategies. Also, a demonstration of digital writing assignments that effectively link class meetings, synchronous courses, and a series of courses.

10:00am - 10:10am Break

10-10am – 11:10am Using Moodle Forums for Guided Discussion and Peer Review in a Web-Enhanced Social Science Course
Speakers:
Angelika Festa, Visiting Lecturer: Tufts University Experimental College, Adjunct Instructor: Freshman Writing, Freshman Seminars, and Social Sciences, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Hubert Hohn, Director, Technology for Teaching and Learning, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

We will share examples of the effective use of online guided discussion and peer review in Moodle for several courses at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Angelika Festa explored the use of Moodle Forums for student peer review of essay drafts in her student-centered Social Science course, “Free Speech, Free Art, and Law.” Instructor guidance in the online environment was essential. Many students provided very thoughtful critiques, and commented that having their own work critiqued by several other students, and reading each other’s drafts and critiques helped them to enrich their own self-critique prior to writing a final draft. Other instructors have used Angelika’s example to initiate guided discussion and review very successfully in other writing and literature courses. Angelika will be exploring peer review using the Sakai environment at Tufts for a course there in the spring term.

11:10am – 12:30pm Faculty Mentoring Faculty: Instructional Technology that Flips the Classroom
Speakers:
Liz Hartmann, Ph. D, Assistant Professor; Department of Education, Lasell College
Ye Liu, Coordinator of Instructional Technology, Teaching and Learning Center, Lasell College
Lori Rosenthal, Ph. D, Associate Professor; Chair, Department of Social Sciences, Lasell College
Cathy Zeek, ED. D, Associate Professor; Chair, Department of Education; Director, Teaching and Learning Center, Lasell College

In this presentation, Lasell College will share how the Faculty Mentoring Program provides faculty the opportunity to mentor and to learn from other faculty who use instructional technology including the learning management system, Moodle, as teaching and learning tools to engage students in the learning process. We will highlight our faculty’s creative approaches to flip the classroom and encourage student-centered learning experiences with Moodle, Web 2.0, OER, and Mobile Technology such as iPads.

12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm – 2:00pm Merging Moodle and Mahara
Speaker: Mary Morrisard-Larkin, Director, Educational Technology, College of the Holy Cross

The College of the Holy Cross has been using Moodle since 2008 and Mahara since 2010. With our recent upgrade to Moodle 2.2, we are now ready to integrate the two systems and experiment with how student work can be shared. The pilot group includes approximately 200 first-year students who will be using Mahara to create a writing portfolio that will be used as part of an institutional assessment.

2:00pm - 2:30pm Guiding Faculty Through (Inevitable) Technological Change
Speaker: Fred Zinn, Manager, Faculty Support Academic Computing, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This session will be a mix of presentation and table discussion. We will present a short case study on our recent transition to Moodle from a system that had been fundamentally unchanged since its humble beginnings under a desk in 1998. Participants will then work together to share and collect best practices related to helping faculty through major and ongoing changes that involve the technologies they use to teach.

2:30pm - 3:00pm Small Group Breakouts Discussion
Provisioning, enrollment, documentation and training, versioning and customization management, influencing Moodle Core

3:00pm End