What better way to shape the future of learning than to engage students in building inclusive learning communities through user experience and collaboration?
The Learning, Research, and Technology team at Smith College launched a Moodle course redesign partnership programme during the summer of 2025. The goal of the project was to foster collaboration between students and faculty and design visually appealing courses informed by the user’s experience. Student interns were paired with faculty to consult together in revamping their Moodle courses’ design. This session, presented by Smith College’s instructional technologists, will discuss the successes and challenges of the programme’s first iteration, and will exchange ideas with those interested in developing innovative course design partnerships for their learning communities.
Smith is a small liberal arts college that, like many others, adapted face-to-face classes to online instruction during the 2020 pandemic. As if shifting the format of instruction was not challenging already, the college also transitioned from Moodle 2.8 to Moodle 3.8 at the same time. These rapid changes resulted in faculty using Moodle more robustly than ever before, meaning that Moodle had primarily functioned as an organised repository of resources. Furthermore, the common dyad of ‘student-faculty’ justified the inclusion of instructional technologists to develop interactive and engaging courses.
Presently, Smith’s Moodle use varies moderately within the learning community. While an increased number of faculty established the course home base application of the platform, configuring assignments, asynchronous discussions, and the gradebook to reflect students’ progress, the majority still fell back on the “container of course links and readings” idea of the platform. Smith’s course design partnership programme addressed this by forging a two-way channel to benefit our learning communities and includes improved course design from both the perspective of the user and the teacher.