Distance Education

In conjunction with the new Staff Dev Moodle server coming online shortly, a program is being designed to assist instructors in learning how to use and integrate Moodle into their course curriculum.  Preliminary features include online user manuals for both student and instructor, interactive tutorials, and assembling a group of Moodle “experts” to provide efficient training within the various SCE programs.  More details forthcoming.

A new Moodle server is being planned to house staff development activities to help reduce the difficulty in planning training sessions for staff and faculty.  Initially, the new Moodle server will be used to train on Moodle functionality and instructional uses.  Eventually, the Moodle server can serve as another option for SCE programs to utilize for staff development purposes.  The availability of the new Moodle server has not been determined.  An announcement will be made here when the server is up and running for SCE use.

Presently, Moodle has been customized to generate courses and populate with enrolled students at SCE.  The next step is to address requests by programs requiring certain content be initially present at the start of the school term.  In some cases, the course content may be required to be taught in a sequential manner.

The current solution to address this request is to collaborate with program instructors to build a model course suitable for import (or restoring) to an official SCE course for immediate use.  The model course will contain pre-populated course information, resources, and activities.  A document will also be provided to help instructors to further customize the course and additional teaching information.  A pilot run for this solution will be done soon, with the results posted here.

1/16/09 - Initial LDAP testing between MyGateway and Moodle (test version) appears to be successful. The test involves a successful login into MyGateway and immediate authentication to the test Moodle system without any additional information provided by the user. Development is ongoing.

1/14/09 - An SCE program has been selected to take part in a pilot training plan to educate staff and instructors on how to use Moodle for creating, uploading, and customizing content. A section for staff/instructor training will also be set up within Moodle, as well as a “sandbox” course for users to train and experiment.