Earlier today I received an email from Larry Lippke, eXtension Campus Site Administrator.  For those of you who are interested in offering Extension educational opportunities online through eXtension on their Moodle (eXtension’s alternative to Blackboard, Canvas or Coursera), I think you would find this a great opportunity for professional development to launch those efforts.  So, I’m sharing the email with you on behalf of Larry, and with my full endorsement to consider participating!

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As someone who is involved in offering courses on eXtension’s online Campus, you may be interested in participating in iMoot 2015, which actually kicks off at 4:00 pm CDT today (Wednesday), but runs 24 hours/day until 8:00 pm on Sunday, May 31.  An iMoot is an annual event where the Moodle community, practitioners, administrators and decision makers meet to share the best practices in online learning.  And, you can participate from the comfort of your home, office, patio, beachfront condo, or wherever else you have internet access.

I encourage your going to 2015.imoot.org to see about how to register, but the full conference schedule is available at http://2015.imoot.org/local/schedule/schedulehtml.php.  If you want to participate in the conference, the registration fee is 95AUD (about $75 US).

You may wonder how one participates in a 24 hour/day conference, or why such conference is even held.  Well, Moodle is used in hundreds of countries worldwide, and the people who use it to teach are located throughout the world as well.  This is the one conference that brings together people from across the globe to share how they use this tool, what educational challenges they have encountered, what ideas they have for further development, etc.  Most presentations are repeated to accommodate people in different parts of the world; i.e., a presentation that you find on the schedule at 2:30 a.m. is likely to be found somewhere else on the program offered at a more acceptable time.

I apologize for the late notice on this conference.  But, because the sessions are mostly repeated, one can often join the conference a day or two late and still gain access to most of the presentations, not to mention access to the recordings of the sessions.

Give it a shot; I think you would enjoy hearing from educational colleagues from many other countries.  And, yes, all the presentations are in English

Larry Lippke, Campus Site Administrator