Resources for Teaching Online

All faculty who teach fully online at SUNY Plattsburgh must be certified. Certification is contingent upon a good understanding of the designated learning management system (LMS), from which online course content must be delivered. A sound knowledge of the LMS ensures that the faculty have the means of selecting (and using) the best tools to meet their pedagogical objectives and ensures that they will be able to establish and employ effective communication and engagement strategies with their students. Additionally, LMS competency ensures that every resource and activity in a course will result in a positive learning experience for the student and one that is untroubled by preventable technical problems and frustrations.

Plattsburgh’s Information Technology Services, through the Technology Enhanced Learning Unit (TEL), provides two alternatives for LMS training:

• Teaching with Moodle — This 2.5-day (20 hours) workshop focuses on the technical aspects of the LMS and their relation to pedagogical practices and principles.
• Teaching Online at Plattsburgh with Moodle — This immersive 5-week course (20 hours) provides faculty with the experience of being an online student. It provides access to the same technical aspects of the LMS, while putting the pedagogy and practice front and center.

Workshop attendance is required at least 10 weeks before the start of the term in which the faculty member will be teaching online in order to allow for course development. In the event that necessity dictates that this 10-week requirement cannot be met, it is highly recommended that another certified faculty member (preferably from the same discipline) be designated as a mentor.

Faculty who agree to teach in programs associated with SUNY Online (or courses in support of those programs) may be asked to attend additional training in Blackboard Ultra.

Faculty may request a waiver from the workshop requirement if the following criteria are met:

• Submit documentation indicating that the faculty member has taught online at another institution.
• Submit a complete course in the LMS certified as having been self-designed to the online learning coordinator at least 8 weeks prior to the start of the semester in which the course will run. The course will be evaluated against the OSCQR rubric (see page 6) within 10 days by TEL staff. Any indicator not marked “sufficiently present” must be addressed before the start of the semester.
  OR
• Faculty may co-teach an online course as long as the other instructor is certified, in which case, the faculty member will be certified at the completion of the course.

View the schedule and register for faculty workshops

Online course development stipends are determined by the Provost's Council and coordinated by Information Technology Services (ITS). Each year, the council makes a determination, based on institutional need, as to what courses/programs/topics will be funded.

Processes & Best Practices in Online Learning 2020 Faculty Handbook

• Navigating the Moodle Dash Board — https://youtu.be/DRZlHwy04b4
• Creating a Moodle Course Site — https://youtu.be/G4NS7kEmy6k
• Site Roster — https://youtu.be/ywZvuKyRcEE

Administration Block, Labels, & Pages

The administration block allows you to manage course attributes. In this video, you will see how to re-arrange your course items and make adjustments to your course site — https://youtu.be/QGtxGiS2pIk

Labels and pages are a good method for communicating items within a course site. In this video, you will see how to work with labels and pages — https://youtu.be/IETSfccuCjk

Forums provide a way for faculty and students can discuss course content. Think of it as your virtual classroom discussion — https://youtu.be/doeAMsK9foE

Creating and using a rubric with an assignment — https://youtu.be/lZP32iHHcPc

There are two options for working on courses in Moodle, but only one option can be delivered live to the students. These two options are the development site and the production site.

• The development site provides you with a course in a sandbox that you can practice on, manipulate, and develop material without concern for actual course delivery.
• The production site offers you the ability to create a course that is based on the Banner master schedule and that will be synced automatically with the Banner roster for that course. Any course development you undertake, either in the development site or the production site, can be exported into any other course. The advantage of the development site courses is that you need not be tied to a course that is currently in the Banner master schedule.

To create courses for online or web-enhanced teaching:

1. Go to your home page and click on “Create Courses” in the Course Creation block on the right of your page.
2. On the Moodle Course Creation page that appears, click on “Create Development Course” or “Create Production Course.”
3. If you select “Create Development Course,” you will be prompted to give a title for that course, and when you click “Create Course,” you will be informed that that course will be created for you within fifteen minutes. Close out of that page and return to your home page to view your course.
4. If you click on “Create Production Course,” you will see a notice of courses available to create. These are the courses that are in the master schedule. Check off the courses you want to create, click “Create Courses.” Now the title of those courses will appear on the right under the notice “Courses already available.” Note that it may take up to fifteen minutes for your course to be created. When it does appear on your home page, you will see that it is grayed out; that is because it is not available to students.
5. When your preparation of the course is complete and you are ready to make it available, you will click on settings in your left block, and then click on “Edit Settings” and then scroll down to the “Availability” where you will select “This course is available to students,” and then you will click “Save changes.”
6. If you need to import material created in any course to your production course, click on “settings” on the left side of your course — “import” is about a two-thirds of the way down that list. This is a very straightforward function that will prompt you to select the course from which you wish to import and what activities or resources you wish to select from that course. This is especially helpful for those of you who may want to re-use a course you have just taught in Moodle.

Cautionary notes about import:

• Anything that you have added to section header labels will not transfer, only material in the sections itself, from resources and activities to label contents. If you have put material into the section headers, we recommend you create a label for that section and copy paste into it from the section header before attempting to import.
• When importing from one course to another, make sure you have as many sections available in the course to which you are importing as you has content filled sections in the course from which you are importing; if not, you simply will not import the additional material.

If you are creating your own Moodle sites for the courses you teach, then you are a site developer. TEL maintains a Moodle Site Developer’s site, which can be found on each faculty member’s Moodle dashboard, and is populated with many useful resources.

Moodle workshop schedule for first-time online instructors

Moodle pedagogy