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

9:00am – 9:45am Student Moodle Makers
Speaker: Kevin Wiliarty, Senior Web Programmer, Hampshire College

Community contributions have been an important engine of Moodle development from the project's earliest days. Although students are obviously an important part of the Moodle user community, and although many students are interested in programming, college IT departments have not always found it easy to incorporate consequential and sustainable student contributions. In order to write usable Moodle code, a student developer needs access to files on a working server, students and staff need a way to collaborate easily on projects with multiple revisions, and staff need a way to confirm independently that the student code functions as intended and without adverse side effects. Enter Vagrant, git, and Behat. In this presentation I'll describe how we used those three tools at Hampshire College to get a student programmer up and running in short order, and how within a single semester we were able to integrate his code into our production Moodle where it now benefits the entire campus.

9:50am – 10:35am Moodle Gradebook Outreach Tactics from Mount Holyoke College
Speaker: Sarah Oelker, Science Librarian, Mount Holyoke College

The Research and Instructional Support team at Mount Holyoke has reached out to faculty about best practices for the Moodle gradebook, in an attempt to encourage instructors to set up their gradebooks well from the start. In our outreach materials, we share information on what the gradebook is best at, what it’s not so great at, and whether it's the right fit for a particular instructor’s course and assignments. We have also begun to reach out to those who have had difficult gradebook questions or problems in the past, in an attempt to help them earlier, when their problems may be less urgent. This session will include samples of our workshop agendas and outreach messages to faculty on gradebook and other issues, as well as example cases of faculty with unusual grading needs. Through discussion, attendees will be encouraged to share their own best practices for outreach and management of faculty expectations.

10:35am - 10:45am Break

10:45am – 11:30am Where are my courses? - Managing Content Among Multiple Moodle Instances
Speaker: Jason Simms, Academic Computing Manager for the Social Sciences, Wesleyan University

Perennial problems for schools that have Moodle content across multiple instances include locating needed material quickly, managing backup and restore operations, and developing archival policies. This presentation discusses the development of a “Moodle Ecosystem” at Wesleyan University that simplifies all these issues. Using a combination of plugins and leveraging Moodle’s web API, we are working towards a simplified entry point to Moodle content that both simplifies management and increases end user satisfaction.

11:30am – 12:30pm Lunch

12:30pm – 1:15pm Supporting the Moodle Gradebook: How to talk about it, how to teach it, and how to deal with changes
Speaker: Alexandra Deschamps, Instructional Design & Faculty Support Coordinator, University of Massachusetts – Amherst

In this presentation we’ll discuss how UMass Amherst handles over 2500 courses each semester and how the Instructional Media Lab supports grading in Moodle. We will look at the process by which we communicate changes, assist instructors when functionality shifts, and ensure that both qualitative and quantitative grading is made possible.

1:20pm – 2:05pm Learning Analytics in Moodle: Tools and Principles
Speaker: Elizabeth Dalton, Learning Management System Administrator, Granite State College

"Learning Analytics" has become a hot topic in the Moodle community. We will examine several tools that can be used to provide real-time information about the learning process, then look at the current specification to include Learning Analytics features in Moodle Core. We will also review the theoretical and practical basis of using Learning Analytics in educational program management.

2:10pm – 2:55pm Q&A - Round Table Discussions

3:00pm End