Center for Teaching and Learning

Instructional Technology

While the mass adoption of smartphones and online learning platforms likely has contributed to increased levels of student distraction, instructional technologies have unlocked new modalities for communication and realtime student engagement both in and beyond the classroom.

Course Websites

Moodle is the official learning management system (LMS) at Brandeis, supported by the university's IT infrastructure. Moodle sites are generated for every course in the course catalog, and by default may be edited by the instructor of record. (You may add additional editors and/or delegate editing authority to other members of the teaching staff who have an appointment in Workday.) Instructors are expected to post their syllabi and course materials on Moodle.

Polling Software

Surveying your students during class with the assistance of audience-response technologies is a great way to receive feedback about how well the class is following your lecture, or—especially if done anonymously—to find out where your students’ opinions may fall on a debatable issue before, during, and/or after a class discussion. While there are a number of audience-response platforms available (e.g. PollEverywhere), we recommend using Brandeis’ license to Echo360 to poll your students. Echo360 polling is free for Brandeis faculty, and allows you to give students credit for participating in the polls (thereby incentivizing students to attend class and to remain engaged).

Other Instructional Software

Brandeis provides access to a number of third-party applications that instructors may wish to use in their courses, including Google Apps, GIS mapping software, software for drawing molecules, etc. It is important that instructors use only applications that have been vetted and approved by the university; in the event that you wish to engage students through an as-yet unapproved application, you must submit a request to the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (ATAC).

Lecture Capture

If you are teaching a large, lecture-format course, you may wish to record some or all of your class meetings for the benefit of students who must be absent (e.g. because of illness). In general we discourage instructors from filming and posting all of their lectures by default, as we find that this may incentivize some students either to tune out during class, assuming they will be able to rewatch the lecture later, or even to skip class altogether; in either case, these students will miss out on the benefit of learning interactively in realtime. Assuming you do wish to record some or all of your lectures, you may do so relatively easily through Echo360.

In-Classroom Technology

Most Brandeis classrooms are equipped with the necessary technology to project computer screens (e.g. to show PowerPoint slides and other visuals). Many classrooms have additional A/V capabilities that lend themselves well to different kinds of in-class activities. 

  • Technology Room Guides show, at a glance, what kinds of equipment and capabilities exist in any given classroom on campus.

Workday

Workday serves as the hub for many Brandeis HR functions. In the context of teaching, it is the clearinghouse for TA/CA/IA appointments: if you are having difficulty granting your TA access to your Moodle site, for example, it may be because they have not yet been appointed as a TA in Workday.