The CCA Libraries exist to enrich and empower our diverse communities through inspiring and courageous knowledge-making spaces, free and open access to materials and resources, intuitive digital tools for expanded scholarship, and information competency instruction.

The Libraries’ Instructional Services and Technology team provides critical and just-in-time pedagogical and instructional support to students and faculty. Services include leading technology workshops, facilitating events on pedagogical models and best-practices in teaching, one-on-one consultations, appropriate teaching tool selection, high-level technical support for hosted platforms, and the creation of help documentation. The Libraries and Academic Affairs collaborate to provide many teaching resources that support the pedagogical uses of online teaching and learning technologies.

The InST team may be reached via the Help Desk or the teal chat tab that reads "Questions? Ask us!" when accessing Moodle.

California College of the Arts schedules workshops, trainings, and conversations to increase faculty knowledge and skills related to teaching and learning. Workshops facilitated by the Instructional Services and Technology Team are regularly offered during Faculty Week at the beginning of each semester. Additional events run by CCA or our platform partners may be run at other times throughout the year.

Check for currently scheduled events on the Teaching Lab Calendar:

Teaching Lab Google Calendar

Don't see a workshop you want? We will schedule workshops on demand in any of the topics listed below for your faculty or divisional meeting, or for a group of 2 or more instructors.

Please find below a selection of our previously offered workshops and a link to workshop recordings.

Managing Cognitive Load: An Overview of Learning Message Design with Moodle Examples

Careful and purposeful learning message design facilitates the acquisition of learning objectives by making it less cognitively demanding for students to decode and interact with learning materials. This workshop will focus on the “whys” and “hows” of learning message design that are most relevant to teaching and learning in a digital environment. Examples of learning content organization and presentation in the context of Moodle will be highlighted.

Quality Learning Experience: Use Quality Matters Rubrics for Course Evaluation and Improvement

Built on extensive research and best practices in teaching and learning, Quality Matters (QM) Rubrics are adopted by more than 1500 colleges and universities worldwide to evaluate and improve course design. In this workshop, we will highlight the key elements of the QM Rubrics and discuss how instructors can use them to examine, evaluate, and improve their own online or hybrid course designs.

Designing Research Assignments

Research papers are a traditional way to encourage critical thinking, engage students in research, and teach them how to synthesize sources in order to develop an argument. However, many students struggle with research papers for a variety of reasons. In this presentation, we will discuss ways in which we can design engaging research assignments that foster student success.

Moodle: Getting Started

Overview of the Moodle dashboard, starter course, and navigation in Moodle. How to add files to a Moodle course like a syllabus, readings, or images. How to create an assignment, start a discussion forum, and use the Label and Page resources. Other Moodle Activities as time allows.

Gradebook: Setting up your Gradebook in Moodle

Topics covered: Setting up your gradebook properly can be tricky. Is your weighting set up to reflect your gradebook? Are you using points or scales? How does this affect the gradebook total? Can you set up a Pass/No-credit gradebook? Can you hide individual assignment grades from students until you are ready to share them? Can you show letter grades instead of percentages? How can you unhide your gradebook so that your students can see their grades? These questions and more will be walked through during this workshop. This will be a hands-on workshop, so bring your Moodle course, your syllabus, and an overall grading plan and make it a hands-on experience.

Past Workshops

In the past, we have also conducted workshops on conducting online peer critiques, planning your course layout, designing research assignments, rubrics and advanced features of the Moodle gradebook, using Mural for real-time collaboration, using Panopto for video assignments, setting up your Portal course section page, and collecting student work in VAULT.