TLTC Support for Remote Instruction Efforts
It has certainly been “interesting times” these past few weeks as we have scrambled to transition courses to remote instruction, make new tools available, and provide workshops and other support. Hopefully the early spring break will allow us to catch our collective breath and carry on to less interesting times.
To that end, I wanted to highlight some of the support resources that we have available from the TLTC.
Our Moodle Basics and Moodle Beyond Basics help guides provide responses to many of the common questions we’ve gotten from faculty over the years about how to use the different functions of Moodle.
Don’t know where to start with your Moodle course spaces? I’ve put together a Moodle Foundations Certificate ‘course’that provides descriptions and screencasts of the typical steps that will take your empty course space and set it up so that you can manage course communications, share resources with your students, and set up basic activities. You can just browse the materials, or you can enroll in the mini-course and get feedback on your course set up through the assignment activities in the course.
Our Teaching Through Campus Closure guide describes the various tools and approaches we have available to support remote instruction, and was used as a model by a number of other SUNY campuses. We continue to update the guide as new material comes available. I plan to spend time over spring break to go through all of the discipline-focused resources that have been recommended on my listservs (performance-based classes, labs, studio, math, etc.), and add that material to the list, probably as linked page(s).
If you weren’t able to attend the workshops we’ve had this past couple of weeks, or if you would like to review a session you were at, recordings of the workshops are available on the TLTC YouTube Channel.
We will have more workshops and drop-in help sessions scheduled in the upcoming weeks. These will all be listed on the TLTC Events Page, once they are set up. You can regularly check the page for new workshops, or subscribe to the TLTC calendar feed to see our upcoming events in your calendar. Directions for how to subscribe are on our events page. If there are workshops you would like us to provide, email us at TLTC@purchase.edu.
And finally, I’m setting up a new Community Space for Faculty Teaching Remotely in our Moodle system. There will be discussion forums for the various instructional approaches and tools (Zoom, VoiceThread, online discussions, online testing, etc), along with related resources. I encourage interested faculty to join. You can ask questions there about remote instruction tools and approaches, and the answers can be shared with your colleagues, many of whom may have the same questions. (That, by the way, is modeling good practice for your online courses; set up a Class Questions forum in Moodle and direct your students to ask their questions there, so you don’t have to answer the same question multiple times through email.) In addition, these forums could also become a place where we can all share tips and observations about teaching remotely, a chance to retain a sense of faculty community as we are all working remotely.
Let us know if there are additional ways we can support you as you teach remotely for the rest of the semester. And stay safe.
Keith Landa, Director
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center