Technology
The Wilmette Institute offers its courses online, so instructional technology is a central concern for course developers and instructors.
The role of technology in methodology
Please refer to the Methodology page on this website to understand how to use instructional technology as an effective vehicle to achieve your educational goals.
Here is an additional resource designed to help instructors choose the best educational technology for their purposes. It is called the Pedagogy Wheel: "The idea is for the users to respond to the challenges that the wheel presents for their teaching practices, and to ask themselves the tough questions about their choices and methods. The underlying principle of the Pedagogy Wheel is that it is the pedagogy that should determine the educational use of apps."
Instructional technology options
The Wilmette Institute uses three main technological tools for its courses: Moodle, Google Docs (and other Google products), and Zoom. We will describe how to use each one below.
Moodle
Moodle is the Learning Management System used to deliver Wilmette Institute courses. In other words, it is the platform where participants interact with the content, with other participants and with the instructor. All instructors must learn to use Moodle. There are training videos, and Niki Daniels offers training sessions.
Candace Hill puts WI courses into Moodle. If the course developer gives her a Google document that includes the unit descriptions, learning objectives, a list of readings, links to web resources, discussion questions, and other activities, she can use it to set up the course on Moodle. Readings should be provided in PDF format or as a web link (we do not upload Word documents because not everyone can open them). Readings and resources should not be presented in sets, or as very large documents. Candace can also help with updated formatting for documents and pages to ensure they are accessible to learners of all abilities.
Faculty with experience editing in Moodle are welcome to edit courses within the standard Wilmette Institute format. We have training videos about the use of Moodle and can provide assistance with specific problems via telephone or Zoom.
Wilmette Institute learners log on from countries around the world and may be working with older computers, operating systems, and sometimes a dial-up connection. Properly supporting students in these situations requires flexibility and creativity on the part of faculty and staff. Sometimes, a reading might need to be emailed to a learner if that is the only way a participant can access it.
To learn which tools WI uses and how to use them, follow the links below.
The Classroom Page shows introductory material very useful for first-time learners.
Moodle FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are three video tutorials for faculty about how to use Moodle:
Video tutorial number 3
Google Docs
Wilmette Institute has its email domain on Google servers, which means that the @wilmetteinstitute.org email addresses are gmail addresses, and therefore have access to all of Google's tools for education. Beyond email, these include documents, spreadsheets, slides (Power Point), forms (surveys), sites (websites like this one), YouTube, calendar, maps among others.
Wilmette Institute courses are built on Google Docs and once finished they are put up on Moodle. From your institutional email address (or any Gmail account), anybody can use Google Docs to collaborate with others in a way that is simple and dynamic. It is hoped that all course developers will use Google Docs to build a course before it is put up on Moodle, but this should not be a barrier for course developers. Instructors can also use Google Docs to encourage collaboration among participants on assignments and to provide student feedback.
Zoom
The Wilmette Institute has several subscriptions to Zoom which faculty can use for video conferencing. We provide a training video, so you can learn to use it quickly. We would like every course to have at least one live web video session scheduled at some point in the course. However, at least one hour-long zoom video session for every unit is preferable because the time with participants gives the faculty the chance to pull together the readings and other resources and unify them into a single whole. Our experience is that not all of the participants are available at any particular time, because Wilmette Institute learners live throughout the world. We will post recordings to our YouTube channel where they can either be made public or marked “unlisted” (so that only people in the course can view them).
Other tools - There are many, many technological tools instructors can use to enhance their courses, but we will only mention two more.
Videos - Here are some guidelines for using videos in your courses.
Podcast catchers. Many WI instructors are finding that podcasts can be a great source for information and analysis. Most episodes of podcasts can be played directly from the website of the podcast. However, it is more convenient to download an episode onto one's phone to listen in the car or while walking or doing house chores. To download a podcast episode, you will need a podcatcher. We will cite only a few examples: The most popular one for Apple users used to be called iTunes and is now called Apple Podcasts. You can download it from iTunes, and then search for the podcast and specific episode to download. For Android users, there are many options. One great option is Pocket Casts which can be downloaded from the Play Store. Once downloaded, you can search for a specific podcast and episode to download. If you need further assistance with this technology, please do not hesitate to ask a WI administrator.
Revised: 04/01/2022