Instructional Technologists Collaborate to Support Faculty Moodle Use

What follows is the second post in our series of samples from our new blogs, described here. Nancy Millichap writes:

Support for the campus course management system tops the task list for many instructional technologists this fall. At NITLE participating campuses, the CMS in use may very well be the open source CMS Moodle. Some NITLE colleges have been using Moodle for several years (at Lafayette, for instance, this is the third year of implementation), while others (Vassar, Birmingham-Southern, Wheaton) are moving to Moodle this fall. And along with questions about installing, upgrading, and tweaking Moodle come the pressures of support for a key community on campus: faculty using the system to bring aspects of their classes online.

Whether new to Moodle or not, campuses participating in NITLE are interchanging Moodle knowledge in a variety of ways. Of the seven poster presentations on Moodle at NIS Camp 2009 at Smith College, four (from Adelphi, Bard, Lafayette, and Millsaps) included some aspect of support for faculty in using Moodle. Other ways of sharing:

• The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) at http://www.clamp-it.org/ is compiling a special version of Moodle just for the small residential campus; the work began at HackDocFest at Smith this past summer after NIS Camp. This project is one of the case studies profiled in a recent Academic Commons piece cataloging exemplary NITLE collaborations.
• Courtney Bentley and Jan Pontia, respectively of Lafayette College and Birmingham-Southern College, will co-present and co-lead a discussion on Moodle support for faculty on October 2 as this year’s first session of the videoconference series “Special Topics for Instructional Technologists and Their Colleagues.” Their topic is “Moving Faculty to the Moodle Big Leagues with All-Star Training.”
• Good examples and an opportunity to participate in discussion is available through the NITLE Moodle Exchange, which is in Moodle. If you’re not a member of the NITLE Moodle Exchange and would like the enrollment key, drop me a note (nancy.millichap@nitle.org).

Even as CMS support practices evolve across many of the NITLE participating campuses, a wider debate about whether the days of the CMS are numbered in the era of social networking is raging out there. For a look at some perspectives, including views from Indiana University’s Mark Notess and NITLE’s Bryan Alexander, see this article and the comments on it in ELearn Magazine, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=opinion&article=118-1.

What do you think? Is Moodle on the radar screen at your campus? What are the tips for supporting faculty with Moodle or another learning management system that you’d like to share with colleagues?