 Hi everyone, I'm Mia Mussolino with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC Like everyone else with these presentations the hardest part was Getting years years of this stuff into 15 minutes. So I'm here goes Working There we go. Okay, so I won't spend too long with the background, but this is some facts about the Smithsonian The most important part of this slide is probably that we have About 6,800 employees and about that many volunteers And Here are our Moodle sites. We have two Moodle implementations one is an external Site for Moodle and that's for training the volunteers and other affiliated staff that might not have a network account with us and The one on the bottom is the internal Moodle, which is our LMS and used to train employees So background about the internal Moodle that that Moodle came about in about 2012 and The most important thing here is that about 75% of the courses in the internal LMS are really for classroom registration We do have a good number of online courses there but we have a customized version of the face-to-face plug-in and That helps us do about see About 15,000 annual classroom registration. So that's the main focus of it, but we do have some online For that Moodle, I have trained about 35 e-learning Moodle teachers and about 75 face-to-face users For the external Moodle where we train our volunteers That is a platform where we only do online courses or blended learning courses to train the volunteers and Since 2015 when we started the external Moodle implementation, I have trained about 30 Moodle teachers So when I was looking for a graphic to use for my challenges slide I thought what better to what better than Oscar the Grouch and that is a picture from the National Museum of American History and So challenges usually make Oscar the Grouch grumpy. So This is kind of how I base my presentation as far as what are the challenges that I've come across in Designing the program that I use to train the teachers and what have I done to To meet those challenges So first the diverse needs of the students Who are the teachers that I need to teach? some of them have extensive training in education or instructional design and then some are Administrative professionals with no experience teaching no experience with instructional design. So that is a big challenge There's also a wide range of experience I'm sorry. Whoops the the diverse Sorry having trouble seeing Some need only training in the face-to-face module. That's what I wanted to start with And some need training to teach a whole Moodle course So that is very Challenging there the timing No one this is this is the biggest challenge. I would say no one needs to start at the same time Everybody has a different time frame of when they need to learn Moodle And also hands-on training is needed That means they really need to get in and learn Moodle by themselves They need kind of to be alone with it is what what I tell people And it's difficult to do that if you're not going to do a classroom session and put them on a computer Limited resources. I'm only one person and I'm only about half time on Moodle time constraints of students I hear it all the time if If they can't get this done in you know weeks or days, they're probably not going to They're not going to be successful they want to learn it fast and they want to Put their knowledge to use right away Diverse subject matter they need to use Moodle to train to teach all kinds of subjects. There's such a huge range And this is a slide I put together last year for the Miami conference, and I've updated it a little bit But this is just a fraction of the subjects that people teach Using Moodle at the Smithsonian through the internal and external Moodle sites So the course that I'm going to talk about Is the course I use and I've developed it's in that it's in a second iteration I would say that I just put together this past summer and I think I have Tackled all of the challenges that I showed on the couple previous slides ago There are five modules to the course The first is getting to know Moodle second is planning and designing your course third is building your course fourth tracking student progress and then next steps Details about the course each module has at least one lesson and a quiz Some have videos and you must get a grade of 70 on the quizzes in order to move forward You can take the quizzes as many times as you want module 3 includes a practice course And that is I would say the most important part of the course and it is required to pass it Which I do review every course There are three optional polls and two optional forums and the estimated time to complete is about eight to ten hours I couldn't think of a way to present What was in the course fully other than the course completion report? So that's where you can see what everybody has to do in order to get through the course Everybody's familiar with the Moodle icon so you can kind of see their scorn lessons. There's quizzes There's a couple pages that have videos in them, and I do require the course Evaluation in order to finish This is an example of a lesson an online lesson, which are pretty straightforward Their scorn lessons some of them have videos with screencasts in them some of them are Longer than others, but they take about 10 or 15 minutes to complete and then the students will do a quiz afterwards to test their knowledge So the first challenge that I'll talk about is a wide very wide range of experience that I have in my students who are going to be Moodle teachers and For the more experienced students for the ones that are ready to go and they they have a big background in instructional design or Education I tell them make sure you make you are really serious with your practice course and make your practice course your first course What that kind of encourages them to do is be very serious about it and by the time they finish the course They pretty much have their first course done or at least Put together, you know a draft of it I also make some activities optional And I give a lot of resources for more exploration and that merely makes them feel like they're kind of building their own course And charting their own way For the less experienced students I provide opportunities for quick check-ins with polls and I encourage them to ask questions and On the screen now is just showing one of the optional polls and optional forums also with the to address the wide range of experience I I Instituted this in the new version to give myself alerts and notifications so that I can make sure each student is moving through Because it's self-paced. I don't know what they're all doing And I don't have time to check in on a regular basis So if I know that there's four or five students in there and I haven't seen a notification from That this or that student has Passed a quiz or gotten through module three or whatever I know that it's probably time to check in with them make sure that there's nothing going on that is keeping them from doing the course Or maybe they're having trouble So that has been really helpful Okay, so timing this is the I do have the completion progress block and this is showing Five test students. They're not real students and this is kind of a typical view of what's going on in the course Everybody's at a different point Nobody is synchronized in any way. So that's hard for me But like I said with the alerts and notifications that really helps but the The timing is that no there's no specific start and end dates So it's really difficult for me to keep that straight the completion progress block really helps me though I Do encourage the students to finish in 30 days because if they take too long I really see the success level drop in students in order in terms of starting to use Moodle and Being very successful right from the start So if they don't finish in 30 days and they don't have a really good reason I often will unenroll them or tell them they need to start over or that kind of thing So for the hands-on training that's needed, I do have a practice course and the practice course I estimate it takes Two or three hours They have a list of things they have to do in the course that I give them the courses It's got some blank You know it's got some starter activities and that kind of thing But there's a whole list of things that they need to do and there's a long document with very specific instructions In my first iteration of the course What would happen is people would go into the practice course and not come out and you don't want that So they would get lost not know what to do. So I've given them much more instruction Also, I've given them a lot more. I gave them a checklist of what to do in the course and a lot more Rewards kind of like how much more you have to go kind of thing at each step So also for time constraints, it's really important in the course to give a badge for each module to keep them going and moving and steadily completing the course I Give also a certificate for the end result and lots and lots of time Estimates The last thing is that I have these community courses And they're not only courses because people get enrolled after they finish my online course But what happens is they it's a community for them and I can give announcements. I can give Tips for how to use Moodle and I can really differentiate for each community of Either the internal Moodle teachers or the external Moodle teachers. So it's very helpful to me I don't have to spend a lot of time Customizing a course I can customize their community after they are done with the course and Here is an example of a how-to blog that I do for the external community and I let people Tell me what they want me to cover in that how-to blog which I send out maybe every couple of months with a new topic So diverse subject matter I don't really handle that in the course per se, but I do provide sharing opportunities with user group meetings I Really try to do it once or twice a year I have course galleries in the community courses that show people What other teachers are doing that they might want to do and then before anyone even starts using Moodle before anyone even takes my course I Meet with them and I try to discuss with them what they want to do with Moodle how they want to What kind of activities they want to use and I usually show them a few examples of what other People other teachers have done so they kind of have a direction to go So just to end the Smithsonian's mission is An establishment for the increase in diffusion of knowledge so I Have always been an enthusiastic supporter of Moodle at the Smithsonian Because I really feel that its strengths really support the Smithsonian's mission Pretty well, is anyone having any questions? Yes, looks like there are some questions. Cool. So we've got a couple of hands raised here Maybe we could go to this gentleman here who didn't get a chance to ask the question first last time I'm very interested to hear about your Implementation of using two different instances of Moodle one internal facing and one external facing can you describe a little bit if there is any Communication or interplay between them is their content sharing is they're reporting across the two instances. Thanks Content sharing, that's me. I Take one course and I put it in another Implementation there's no content sharing per se, but I do have some of the teachers are tea I didn't even cover this but some of the teachers actually are teachers in both So if they have a course they they might have the same course in both So I don't know if that answered your question The the way that they're implemented is internally we use LDAP for logging in and externally They have to register for an account Imagine a service which would allow you to share courses and resources such a thing might be Moodle net Okay, any more questions? I think there was one over here. Let's jump in again Okay, if you do have a question then just raise your hand afterwards When you get a new teacher in your program, do they how many how long does it take them to get? I mean when they go through are they just Teaching courses that have already been created or are they actually when they go through a couple of courses They're actually creating the course and teaching it They create the course and they teach it So how many courses does that take to before so they're creating a course in in the first course When they enroll they start creating their course. Is that right for the advanced students? Yes I have definitely seen the practice course that people do it turns into their real course Obviously, it's not good to go. They you know want to add to it or whatever, but but it's it's the basis for their first course Okay, and then my last question is what's the most difficult hurdle for them to get over? When they start making you know start creating their own courses Well getting if they get can get through the practice course, which really is I think it's challenging It has a lot of things that they're supposed to do If they can get through that I really feel that they Can do the course on their own so if I can get them through that in a timely way They are successful or what what element in the practice course then do they usually find the most difficult? uh Quizzes I mean it's not difficult just time-consuming because I have to make a quiz that has five to ten questions in it and We're with a variety of types and that kind of thing Perfect. Thank you Great, and we've got one more question for you. Actually over here. Okay. We could just run the mic literally be a mic runner There we go First we are super excited to talk to you later because we do something similar So let's chat later, but my question is after people create courses Do is there any sort of like review process that you go through to kind of like check to see that the courses are? You know high-quality and like what you expect or when they create it. That's just sort of what it is Yeah, I didn't go into this part because I didn't have time But I do have I have a rubric that we use and that is part of the They actually one of the steps of the practice course is running their course through the rubric on their own and Figuring out how many points are there's you know, it's silly, but there's a number of points for each Each category and whether you know that I have to I say in your practice course Tell me how many points you got in the rubric and where do you need to improve it and that kind of thing? When they go out in the real world and they start their own courses I tell them I have to review their first two courses and then they're kind of on their own Okay. Thank you very much Mia