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

9:00am – 9:15am Welcome and Introductions

9:15am – 10:00am Wheat from the Chaff: Discovering Tips and Tricks to Manage Moodle’s Complexity
Speaker: Jason Simms, Ph.D., M.P.H., CPH, Academic Computing Manager for the Social Sciences, Wesleyan University

The open-source and collaborative nature of Moodle’s development has led to a robust and powerful LMS. At the same time, however, new administrators and users may have a challenging time learning best practices for navigating, organizing, and managing the system, given that, beyond the official documentation, insights often are distributed among blogs, forums, YouTube, newsletters, conferences, user groups, institutional help sites and knowledge bases, and, as often as not, within our own heads. This session has two goals. First, I will share my experience of taking over management of Moodle at Wesleyan University, getting a handle on testing, upgrading, and user education, and slowly discovering best practices to keep everything running. And second, throughout I will encourage active discussion and sharing of experiences from workshop attendees concerning tips, tricks, simple code hacks, and useful plugins that you consider indispensible to running Moodle, along with the workflow and sources on which you rely to keep up to date.

10:00am - 10:45am Gradebook: Managing expectations, policies, & odd behavior
Speaker: Miriam Cope, PhD, Academic Computing Manager for Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Wesleyan University

Setting up a gradebook in Moodle and testing it often times beleaguers veteran teachers and academic computing staff, let alone newcomers. This session first presents use cases collected over the course of the past semester (e.g, creating calculations, aggregation, adding items and/or categories, visible grades, etc) and the workarounds or solutions used to resolve the encountered odd behavior. This session then invites discussion of best practices and policies in managing the gradebook and asks how participants manage teacher expectations involving its use.

10:45am – 11:00am Break

11:00am – 11:45am Supporting Moodle Day to Day
Speaker: Alexandra Deschamps, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Coordinator of Faculty Support and Instructional Design

This session will present the experience of faculty and institutional Moodle support at UMass Amherst. In particular, we will discuss the most common day-to-day Moodle questions and concerns that arise, how Moodle is leveraged to meet pedagogical and collaborative goals, and the development of long-term support structures, all within the framework of the Instructional Media Lab. Best practices and “lessons learned” will be presented, and attendee participation and dialogue is encouraged throughout to facilitate an exchange of ideas.

11:45am – 12:45pm Lunch

12:45pm – 1:30pm Back to Moodle Basics
Speaker: Deb Sarlin, Digital Teaching and Learning Designer, Brandeis University

As a recipe for innovation A dive into a review of the options in activities and files, surfaces with some real possibilities for class-based, blended and online learning advances.

1:30pm – 2:15pm The Moodle Quiz Module
Speaker: Michael Jacobs, Economics teacher, Brewster Academy

This interactive session will give participants to opportunity to learn about Moodle quizzes. They will take a series of small quizzes, and use the data from those quizzes to explore how the quiz module can improve teacher and student outcomes. The session will be split into three different parts:

Part I: Getting to Know How Quizzes work from the teacher and the student perspective.
• Question types (What things are possible?)
• Quiz settings (When a setting changes, how does this affect a student's experience?)

Part II: How can the quiz module change the role of the teacher?
• Evaluating student data during the quiz, after the quiz, and year to year.
• Ways for students to cheat, and ways for teachers to catch them (The Academic Honesty Arms Race
Part III: Best Practices for Creating Quizzes
• Setting up categories
• Importing quiz questions
• Creating quiz questions
• Creating quizzes

 

http://replimat.brewsteracademy.org/moodle/login/index.php
Username: participant##
Password: brewster1

2:15pm – 3:00pm Using the Configurable Reports plugin as a Learning Analytics Tool
Speaker: Elizabeth Dalton, Learning Management System Administrator, Granite State College

We use the Configurable Reports plugin in Moodle with several SQL reports we've developed for a variety of quality control and live process monitoring and administrative purposes, including checking for course readiness, monitoring instructor presence in courses, allowing instructors to see an overview of student activity in courses, checking for at-risk students, summarizing usage and type of multiple-choice quizzes, etc. We are expanding these reports to provide predictive analytics of the learning activity processes. A particular area of concern as we expand the role of data analytics at the College is the way in which "big data" is perceived by administrators, faculty, and students. How can we make use of the power of reporting while honoring student privacy concerns (and FERPA regulations), and respecting the ways in which the best learning may not be not easily counted or tracked?

3:00pm End