Wattle Semester 1 Pre-release Trial

25 pre-release courses and participating academics have been identified.  Thank you to all those who volunteered. These courses are listed here.

If you wish to take up Wattle this year there will be opportunities both for Winter School courses and Semester 2 courses with plenty of training and support well in advance of the beginning of Semester 2.  Those who prefer, may wait until the start of 2010 to move to Wattle.

The pre-release phase in Semester 1 2009 is intended to build a community of users who can support each other while we all learn about the Moodle platform.  This community will consist of:

Division of Information support staff

• Mostly those who currently support WebCT
• Other support groups eg DOI HelpDesk, AskANU
• Technical staff from outside and within ANU

The role of the DOI group is:

• To provide a one-stop centralized information service:  helpdesk, web pages, FAQs, guides and training materials etc
• To help out with College-based training and learning initiatives

College staff

•  A small number of academic staff who will be using Wattle in the pre-release rollout phase in Semester 1
• College educational designers
• The Colleges will need to develop training and support structures which work best for individual Colleges and Schools, building off the centralized information services wherever applicable

Pre-release academics

This is a very small group of academic staff who are willing to take part in the Semester 1 pre-release rollout of Wattle.  Group members:

1. Include some or all of those who took part in the LMS Panel in 2008
2. Have at least one representative from each of the participating Colleges
3. Be lecturers who are prepared to be at the leading-edge, who can attend the initial training, who can largely support themselves, who can cope with unforeseen issues as they arise, and who are prepared to help their colleagues a little when they start to migrate. 
4. Be people who are prepared for things to not always go smoothly and still maintain a lively sense of humour!

This group has been identified by Colleges.

Pre-release courses

Wattle courses in the pre-release phase for Semester 1 will be limited to no more than 40 courses.  The courses:

1. are relatively small (less than 100 students) to minimise the impact of potential problems
2. Represent a range of disciplines
3. Reflect the diversity of teaching and learning strategies across ANU, for example:
   
   • Some courses primarily delivered by distance education and some on campus courses
   • Courses which show different uses of some tools (eg discussion boards, multimedia objects, wikis)
   • Different assessment instruments (eg quizzes, group assessment)
4. Incorporate non-Wattle applications and tools eg DLD Digital Lecture Delivery, Camtasia, Wimba Live Classroom, ScreenFlow etc etc
5. Include some new courses and some existing courses of a variety of complexities migrated from WebCT