Faculty Orientation 2020
Brenna Clarke Gray, Coordinator, Educational Technologies
Brian Lamb, Director, Learning Technology & Innovation
About the TRU Learning Technology & Innovation team (part of Open Learning, and complements CELT, and TRU IT, et al…):
Moodle
Access: https://moodle.tru.ca
Your courses should be on your dashboard when you log in to Moodle, and your enrolled students there as participants. The course will need to be set to “Show” (rather than “Hide”) in the course settings before students can see the course. The course dates will also need to be revised for Fall term (we usually use Labour Day to Christmas Day, for convenience).
Core help resources are available on a Moodle course called Support for Alternate Modes. If you are not already added, the enrollment key is “help”. Here you will find:
Workshops: we especially want you to be aware of Moodle 911, which is targeted for new users. It runs daily August 31 – September 4. We also have archived recordings of dozens of workshops over the past few months, including our popular Summer Camp series.
Resources on all aspects of teaching with Moodle, on Learning Design, as well as pointers to pedagogical resources developed by CELT and much, much, more.
We maintain virtual drop-ins Tuesday to Thursday, 10-12, and 2-4.
You can contact us at moodlesupport@tru.ca
We have also developed a Moodle resource intended to support student learning, and we encourage you to link to it from your courses and suggest that students enroll.
Other supported learning technologies:
Videoconferencing: https://bigbluebutton.org/ is integrated with Moodle. TRU faculty, staff and students can launch sessions with their network credentials at https://bigblue1.tru.ca/b
Video platform: Kaltura is also integrated with Moodle, or can be accessed anywhere via https://media.tru.ca/
Interactive learning activities: H5P (Moodle or WordPress)
Workshops: https://h5pworkshops.trubox.ca/
- Simple Quiz – https://biol1594review.trubox.ca/slide-3-epithelial-tissues/
- Video Annotation – https://brenna.trubox.ca/video-annotation-exercise/
- Documentation Tool – https://brenna.trubox.ca/thesis-development-exercise/
- Essay Tool – https://brenna.trubox.ca/summary-assignment/
WordPress: blogging, websites, content management and almost any other crazy idea we can come up with…Is is just one of the platforms we use when we go Beyond Moodle.
We’re also known to explore and do workshops on things like podcasting. Brenna has all sorts of special projects along those lines.
See also Brenna’s Digital Detox.
Open Education at TRU:
- TRU’s Open Education Working Group – https://oewg.trubox.ca/
- OERu – https://oeru.org/
- Open Textbooks, BCcampus – https://open.bccampus.ca/
- https://pressbooks.tru.ca/ – instance of https://pressbooks.org/
The OpenETC: https://opened.ca – “a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the BC post-secondary sector.”
We support a collaborative instance of WordPress. With cloneable “starter sites” intended to offer a running start for new users.
Examples of open practice on the platform. A couple recent conference presentations.
We also support the open source app Sandstorm toolkit at https://oet.sandcats.io/.
Etherpad is a particularly useful application. We played with it during the Summer Camp Loom session.
