Teaching with Moodle

Yvonne,
This is a bright idea which will help a lot of teacher trainers who are novices to on-line course designing. It seems that you have experience in this domain. Please go ahead with your great idea. I have no doubt that a lot of people will appreciate and benefit from it.
Thanks
Godfrey

Dia's Muire dhuit, Yvonne,

Indeed an excellent idea. In fact, I think this is an area where perhaps we as Moodle Community can have more discussion and collaboration. Possibly needs another forum here on Moodle.org?

I can tell you about one of our current developments here in New Zealand. Our institution is a member of an accord of 6 polytechnics which work together and a group of eLearning Advisors in those institutions are currently jointly developing and delivering a suite of pd offerings which we have called the Technology for Learning Series.

These pd offerings are based around Moodle and how to teach & learn with Moodle, but knowledge & skills gained would serve in other environments as well. They are about 4-5 weeks long and will take staff about 2-3 hours a week. All courses are based on learning communities, encouraging staff to share experiences, and learning activities are designed to be directly applied in practice. Cohorts consist of academic staff members from the various institutions. And the facilitation duties are shared between the various eLearning Advisors. All courses are delivered online.

This allow us to

• run the courses more frequently,
• share the pd load across 6 institutions
• provide flexible access to pd for our teachers, who have heavy teaching loads and full schedules
  
• learn in larger, more sensible cohorts,
• give teachers the online student experience
• provides insurance for eLearning expertise and pd to an institution, even if eL staff leave.

Currently we have:

• Introduction to Technologies for Learning
• Online Facilitation
• Bring the Bling to your course

Starting in next 2 months:

• Designing your online/blended course
• Develop your personal learning network

Starting this year:

• Online Assessment Strategies
• Using Moodle to enhance your teaching & learning

The Online Facilitation course was developed earlier as part of a government-funded eCapability project. It is an OER and can be downloaded here: http://oer.repository.ac.nz/
I have to say though, I designed that 2 years ago, and since we've run it, we've made many improvements. Also some of the links have expired. I will check with the accord to see whether it would be all right to share the next iteration.

Cheers,
Joyce