Dr. Alicia Wyatt, Network Director Scott Fritz, and E-Learning Specialist Vicki Dunnam attended the MoodleMoot in Oklahoma City on June 23-24, 2008. The conference was sponsored by Metrotech, and Dr. Wyatt and Mrs. Dunnam presented several sessions at the conference.

Dr. Wyatt opened the conference with a presentation anchored on student survey data collected by 4 institutions doing Moodle pilot studies. The focus was on determining what students want from a learning management system and practical ways to improve the user experience.

Vicki Dunnam presented methods for creating video tutorials with Captivate and Camtasia (first day) as well as a variety of plug-ins for enhancing moodle courses (second day). Dr. Wyatt presented Moodle portfolios used by Pre-service Teachers in the McMurry University School of Education late in the afternoon on the first day, and followed up with a session for Moodle Admins on batch creation of courses/portfolios the next day.

One of the most interesting presentations that all attended was on using Mahara, a new open-source portfolio system designed by a New Zealand team and integrated with Moodle. The system does allow for single sign-on from Moodle, and there are social networking and content production tools. We may be trying this out on a small scale during the fall semester.