 Hi everyone. Thank you for coming to our session. Those of you that stuck around I know Emma is presenting She's the only other session this round and she is amazing So I'm I'm glad that we kept some of you here to listen to our presentation. So I'm Jessica This is my carried cawley a carry. I'm sorry We are Former high school teachers. I was science. She is math and we both kind of just fell into this moodle role And are just loving it. It's very exciting. So a little bit of background I realized that we did not at all put any pictures of our site or the name of our moodle on here So we manage what's called the teacher learning hub. We are a team of two and a half people and Our moodle serves K-12 educators in the whole state of Montana offering them professional development units online So we are going to get started with just a quick introduction about our context I think our context drives a lot of what we do. So First just a show of hands anyone been to Montana. Oh Okay, good more people than I expected. So just a few stats about Montana The state has 147,000 square miles and it is large enough to fit the smallest 10 US states inside of it We have 1 million people averaging 6.8 people per square mile. So think about that compared to Texas, which I think Has about 110 people per square mile and then thinking about it in terms of New Jersey, which has about 1200 people per square mile And so as I introduced you these Stats to for you to think about what types of obstacles or issues might that cause in terms of educating teachers So think to yourself just for 30 seconds before I tell you the answer to that question How might these things create some problems for people to do things like collaborate? so in 2013 we created the teacher learning hub primarily to address The issues that arose from some of these Statistics that I just talked about so we wanted to address the challenges of distance time and equity of access to professional development For Montana educators when there's only 6.86 people per square mile You don't always have another teacher in your same content area to collaborate with Sometimes it's really hard to get other people to come to your school and do presentation So you can learn because it's so far to travel and I don't know about you But we get a ton of snow in Montana and so sometimes in those winter months. You can't really get from place to place very easily We wanted to make sure and the last the last Presentation kind of said great nicely, but we wanted to we want to make sure that we provide active learning high quality content and accessible material free for teachers across the state we know that schools have limited access to money and Professional development free professional development is a great way to help them with that and then lastly Through the renewal units or credits that teachers learn through our courses. They can put those towards initial licensure and Licensure renewal and I think kind of an unspoken one here is to in our office the office of public education A lot of our funding got slashed this last year So many people that would provide PD to the schools that had a travel budget no longer have a travel budget or very limited So this allows them to still reach out to the schools. They can't meet face-to-face And so as we've mentioned Previously our audience is Montana teachers Administrators paraprofessionals counselors and substitute teachers and notice that it says Montana and beyond and that is because we've reached far beyond the State of Montana not necessarily intentionally, but we are excited that we have that reach And then also educators who are transitioning into Montana So here you can see a map of our Montana reach and just to kind of give you Even a bigger picture. We have 10,000 users who use our teacher learning hub about 8,000 of them are within the state of Montana about 50 of them are actually outside the United States And we have all 50 states represented with the exception of four So it's really exciting to think about our reach and and just a snippet of our reach in Montana there You can see the cities that have over a hundred users And then the smaller ones and what we love about this map is is that we've really reached the whole entire state even the most rural Schools who have maybe three or four teachers So this is the part I'm most excited for us to talk about is our Moodle structure Like I said, we both kind of fell into this job and we're told like here's this Moodle thing Can you figure out how to run this for us? And our strong belief in the active learning like was in the h5p session. I think really has helped to drive a lot of that So right now we have three types of courses self-paced, which is our most popular We have 65 of those courses range and length And this is really handy for teachers. I think why it's so popular they can take it anytime they want teachers are very busy So they they really want they can do it on their lunch break They can do it on the weekend in their pajamas whatever really works best for them Then we also have the slightly more college style courses facilitated three to six weeks They get much more renewal units for these courses and they have those graded assignments and then this last one group is a Category we really want to see take off it kind of blends that power of face to face that even as Moodle Or is we still really believe in you need peer collaboration But that's where you gather a group of teachers such as this you pull the course up on a projector And it guides you through discussions and activities So you still have that group collaboration, but you don't have to pay someone to come into your classroom to lead some of those sessions And we have nine of those group ones and about 30 facilitated courses. We rotate through And this is really where we come to our first lesson learned we used to have four categories one was a professional learning community We had five or six of those where we tried to get Those single teachers that worked in those small school districts where there was one science teacher So they didn't have any others to collaborate with so we had once a month They would meet online at a certain time to discuss and collaborate but the amount of time and work we put into it and The kind of the data was showing that we weren't getting much out of it So we had to really rely on that data to make the decision to cut those courses All right so that brings us to our design process and requirements and I think this is one one of the things that we are really really proud of and One thing that we put a lot of time and energy into and so as Just and I both mentioned we are really Adiment that we have active learning and high quality content in all of our courses and so all of our systems sort of Drive our purpose Wait backwards all of our purpose really drives all of our systems and so the first Big thing that we have is our introduction to course design course And so if you were here two sessions to go for the Smithsonian course You heard something similar to this but we have a course that's required for anyone who is going to design courses for the teacher learning Hub keep in mind that a lot of these courses are designed by Montana teachers content experts who don't necessarily have a background in instructional design And so we have created our introduction to course design course And it's about eight hours and they go through and it really helps them to learn and explore Moodle and it also talks a lot about Instructional design we also have developed our division of responsibilities and continuous support So that as our designers go through the process of creating Moodle courses We can make sure that they know exactly what they do exactly what we do and that they know exactly how to get the support They need if they're struggling This is where our next lesson learn comes in when this project first started It was just me before I was lucky enough to have Carrie join the team We've basically been through five iterations of training designers at first I was like begging for content and people to start using Moodle And I was like oh, I can just train everybody face-to-face. I totally have time for that And that quickly changed also a lot of people would say oh, yeah, I've used Moodle before I know how to do this and then their course would come out as a a PowerPoint or seven hours worth of video. Okay, maybe we need to revisit this a little bit So then I started doing a mini moot style after attending the mountain moot in Helena that you referenced earlier Where it was half online and then I did half in person But then people were like oh, you know, I'm really busy. Can I just take everything online or vice versa? I only want to be taught face-to-face and not take anything online and so that kind of worked and that kind of melded into our first designer course, which was pretty short and That didn't last very long. I quickly revamped after learning some issues in there So then our 1.0 version I call it is actually phasing out this week And we will launch a 2.0 version which is very similar to what Mia talked about at the Smithsonian earlier That we're very very excited about and we're happy to share that for anybody who wants it has a lot of Helped specific things in it about our specific review process, which Kerry will talk about in a moment But could be easily customized All right So along with our courses and our course all of our courses go through a review process And we think that this is really important to make sure that they are consistently high quality And they have that active learning that we really want so the first review is a Designer review so we asked designers to use our checklist that we've created to go through their own course and double check that It meets our expectations Then a project lead review so someone on our team or maybe one of us who actually leads the content area So for example mathematics courses are going to go with through our Mathematical instructional coordinator and she's going to do a review of the course to make sure the content is right And then also to double check that it has that active learning etc Then it goes through accessibility and copyright review. This is huge for us We are not an educational institution and so copyright is a beast sometimes We have to make sure we follow really Strict guidelines bound around what we can use and then obviously accessibility It is super important for us to make sure that all of our courses are completely accessible to all of our learners across the state And then lastly or maybe second to lastly sort of it comes to Jess and I and we do a full review of all the settings And make sure that it's 100% good to go and to open and launch And then we sort of just added this As of this year we go through an annual review process with each course So once a course is launched and it is open for a year We come back to it again with another checklist that we've developed and we double check to make sure the content is still relevant Make sure that the links are still working. Make sure accessibility is still there etc. Etc. And so this comes to our next lesson learned and that is that In order to make sure that you are efficient It is really important to have this standard process and to make sure that every single course goes through it in a really iterative way so that you're not wasting time having to go back and Fix different areas of courses that maybe didn't meet the standard initially So for this we use the Reich project management software We kind of developed our own workflow and phasing that people can check off when they're done and send it to us Versus seeing him in the hallway say hey my course is ready And then two weeks later we realized we forgot about it and need to get in there So that project management software has been huge and helping us move forward Carrie mentioned this a minute ago excessive accessibility and copyright two different unique challenges accessibility as Teachers we were kind of trained a little bit about this and knew you couldn't use crazy text had to have closed captioning But then our agency was hit not the learning hub But the agency that were housed under was hit with a complaint from the Office of Civil Rights And so we really dived into accessibility. There's a group of University of Montana who is amazing with accessibility I learned a lot from them did a lot of research So we've had to do a ton of improvements to our courses But we've had people who are blind and use screen readers take our courses and been able to get through we've had lots of tests We actually have a full one-hour course that people all designers have to take now on Accessibility before they can get their own shell and create their own course, which we're happy to share if you're interested in that And then copyright kind of came by accident But again, we are a government agency not an education institution So we have to be very careful with documenting that copyright I think our designers might mumble under their breath at us a little bit for both of these Because they are tough, but it makes for a very good product in the end So I'm gonna have to cruise through our data and success stories When I took over this project in 2015 I expected it to take three to four years for it to really take off Let's talk about a year before it exploded on me And then we had to get approving approval for funding for Kerry so we could keep going and it's been really great since over 10,000 users People spent about 22,000 hours taking courses on the hub last year So far this year about through our first quarter at 5,000 hours Our goal really is to impact as many of the schools in Montana as we can so last fiscal year We hit about 69% of our schools 70% of our reservation schools And 68% of our high needs and high needs we based on if any of you work with school data the free and reduced lunch population And then our rural areas, which are really our school districts with less than 300 students We want to focus on them because those are the teachers that tend to have less access to professional development One of our big success stories We have a course introduction for Indian education for all that is now an administrative rule in Montana That all teachers have to take this course before they can get their license or if they're transferring from out of state They have to take this course. So it's a really good look into Our Native American population and culture in Montana and introduces the importance of including their culture in education This is one of the quotes from those courses And I'm down to 10 seconds. So very quickly these are mental health courses Montana has a very high suicide rate. So it's important to us to make sure we we have a lot of courses to help support teachers in that Quote there, but I'm gonna have to jump ahead. I'm happy to share this with anyone later So get to our Yeah, so I know we just we put a lot out there, but any questions right off the top of your head You mentioned a project management software, what was the name of that right? That's W. R. I. K. E. And you're the quick questions before we all had to lunch I have one last thing if you know of anybody in your state who has something similar for educators We would love to collaborate when share with them. We're working with Rhode Island right now They're starting up their own Moodle to do the same with teachers, but if you could connect us with anyone in your state So I would love that So you can grab Jessica and Kori after this presentation. Maybe you have after lunch, but let's just thank them for their great work