7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 10:00am Teaching Naked with Moodle: Using Moodle outside the class to enhance learning inside the class
Speaker: Kevin Wiliarty, Application Administrator, Smith College

In Teaching Naked (2012), José Antonio Bowen argues that college instructors can best use technology “outside of class as a way to increase naked, nontechnological interaction with students inside the classroom.” In “Teaching Naked with Moodle” we will explore ways to implement Bowen’s pedagogical approach in Moodle. Examples will range from the simple to the complex and will rely on a variety of Moodle features. Participants should leave the session with a handful of recipes for use in their own Moodle kitchens.

Bowen, José Antonio (2012). Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning. Wiley. Kindle Edition.

10:00am – 10:30am A Beginner's Guide to Moodle Course Design
Speaker: Caleb Clark, Academic Technologist & Teaching with Tech. Program Director, Marlboro College

Marlboro College's Faculty Best Practices for their graduate school have evolved since they started providing blended and online classes in 1997. We'll go over our lessons learned, how we train new faculty, and have time for discussion. A public link to our best practices will be shared.
 

10:30am - 10:45am Break

10:45am - 12:15pm How To Design Great Moodle Classes (and convince Faculty to do it that way)
Speakers:
Michelle Barthelemy, Coordinator, Distance Learning & Instructional Technology, Greenfield Community College
Brad Turner, Coordinator of Faculty Support and Instructional Design, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Fred Zinn, Associate Director, OIT Academic Computing, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

What is the best way to structure a Moodle course site and how do you convince instructors to build their courses that way? As instructional designers and IT support staff, we see all kinds of classes, and we have experience with what works and what doesn't, but how do we convince busy instructors to put in the time to do the right thing? In this very active session, attendees will compare notes on the best (and worst) they have seen and compile a list that we can all use when helping instructors design their classes. We will also compare and compile strategies for helping instructors give their students the best possible experience in Moodle. Do you teach them to fish? or do you hand them the fish? Let's compare notes.

This session will be an active collaborative session.

12:15pm - 1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm – 1:30pm Moodle, Multimedia and the Digital Humanities
Speaker: Deb Sarlin, PhD, Instructional Design, Academic Technology Library & Technology Services, Brandeis University

We'll begin our session collaboratively describing what appears on the surface by asking, and seeking an answer to the question: what the heck is a digital humanities practice? Then we'll wade into the waters to catch the current that will carry us towards some best practices in the Digital Humanities. We'll swim through two examples of how faculty have created innovative learning hubs drawing together Moodle use (at Brandeis we refer to Moodle as our Learning and Teaching Technology Environment or LATTE) and the tool set of the digital humanist. By developing at the point in the stream where private Moodle activities and public facing creation merge, we'll look at how our streams converge enabling research and teaching to take new form.


1:30pm - 2:30pm Creating Courses in Moodle that Adhere to Universal Design Principles
Speaker: Melissa Wetherby, Lead Educational Technologist, Landmark College

In this session we will explore the ways in which you can use the features of Moodle to design interactive courses that adhere to 8 of the 9 principles of Universal Design for Instruction (UDI). Using the built in activities in Moodle, courses and learning tasks can be designed to allow learners a choice in their method of use while enhancing your course design and supporting your learning objectives.


2:30pm - 3:00pm Advanced Grading using Rubrics and Marking Guides
Speaker: Justin L'Italien, Instructional Technologist, Plymouth State University

In Version 2.2, Moodle released advanced grading methods to the standard Assignment activity. Both the Rubrics and Marking Guides methods provide transparency to student papers, presentations, or other projects. Instructors will enjoy a simplistic grading process based on pre-determined sets of criteria, while students will appreciate the clarity of knowing exactly what to focus on. Certainly, this can be a valuable addition to any Moodle course.


3:00pm End