Academic Continuity

Teaching in Intersession 2021

Intersession 2021 offers students a great opportunity to continue learning throughout our extended Winter break. And as always, ITS is available to help with your questions about any element of technology and teaching.

However, when scheduling time to work on your Intersession course, it will be important to remember that campus will be closed from December 17th through January 4th (the first day of Intersession). For that reason, we recommend reaching out early with your requests and questions.

As a good rule, we recommend contacting the Help Desk (helpdesk@clarku.edu) with your request, and we can direct it to the correct and next available professional staff member for the quickest response.

Resources

Moodle

Enable your Course

The first thing to do in order to start working on your Intersession course is to enable your course.

Moodle Template

When you first enable your Moodle course, it’s a blank slate. While some of us thrive on blank pages, others like a little structure. To that end, we’ve created a Moodle template for Intersession courses.

Note that if you’ve already taught this course in Moodle, and plan on both requesting the template and using Moodle’s import feature to copy content from a previous semester, some ‘tidy up’ will be required.

Using Moodle’s Import Feature

If you’ve already taught this course at Clark in Moodle, you can use Moodle’s import feature to copy content from a previous semester.

More Moodle Support

Check out our Moodle Quickstart Playlist or contact the Help Desk for more support.

Online Synchronous Classes & Zoom

Zoom is our recommended technology for synchronous class sessions. All Clark community members have fully licensed accounts (previously called Pro accounts), which allow meetings for up to 24 hours, with up to 300 participants. Click here for more information including how to log in with your Clark account, best practice recommendations, and how to access support.

Recorded Presentations & Panopto

If you’re planning on pre-recording your lectures, or having your students record presentations, we recommend considering Panopto, which is Clark’s internal video streaming service. It allows you or your students to upload or record videos or voice-over Powerpoints.

Student Access to Software

With most of the campus being closed for student use over Intersession, it may be useful to point students towards software resources for virtual access and download.

If students need access to Microsoft Office (including Word, Powerpoint, and Excel), they can download it to personal devices by visiting: https://portal.office.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx

If your students require access to specialist software (ArcGIS, Microsoft Access, SPSS, etc.), they may have access to download it to their personal device, or access it via our Virtual Lab (https://www.clarku.edu/offices/its/a-z-service-catalog/vlabs/). To ensure that your students have timely access to these software, please email the Help Desk as soon as possible.

Teaching Support

In Summer 2020, Clark University presented a course – Teaching in Different Modalities – for faculty to plan and address the challenges presented by teaching online or hybrid. A non-facilitated version of that course is available as a resource for all faculty. Click here to learn more about this resources.

Over Intersession, ATS in collaboration with CETL, will offer a 3 week, mostly asynchronous, ‘unconference’-inspired professional development opportunity – “Next Steps in Teaching in Different Modalities”. Running from January 18th to February 7th, each week will present 3-4 topics based on suggestions and feedback from faculty. Each week, faculty can choose which topic(s) they would like to engage with, and offer to co-facilitate topics based on their interest and experience. Click here for more information on Next Steps.

Need even more great support? Clark University’s CETL provides a multitude of resources for teaching face-to-face, online and hybrid. Click here to log into Moodle and visit their Resource site. 

Web-Cameras, Microphones or Other Technology

ITS can provide faculty with long-term loans of Web-Cameras and Headsets (with Microphones) on request. Just email helpdesk@clarku.edu to schedule a pick-up time.`

ITS also holds a stock of other technology for short and long-term loans where appropriate, including video cameras, personal amplification microphones, document cameras and drawing tablets. Please email the Help Desk for more information.