Mountainmoot 2026 Sessions

2026 Sessions!

We have over 32 sessions from some of the top presenters all over the US and abroad, not to mention your choice of 8 amazing workshops on Wednesday as well. During each breakout session we have a variety of different options to choose from, so you will find something that interests you.

There is a pre-workshop welcome informal gathering on Tuesday evening that will be from 4:00 - 6:30pm at a location that we are still working on. It will feature free light appetizers and drinks and maybe live music. This social event is open to all attendees and sponsors.

Wednesday Morning Pre-Moot Workshops: 9:00 a.m. – Noon

WORKSHOP 1 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	Noodle - Moodle for Beginners Sheri Coughenour Everything you need to get up and running as a teacher with Moodle. This will cover the basics of course management, activity creation, and user management. We will also discuss how to set up and use a variety of Moodle core features such as assignment, forum, book, quiz, and lesson. Time permitting, we will explore some easy to create, but highly effective H5P content types. This session is perfect for beginners!
WORKSHOP 2 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	The Good, the Bad, and the Broken: Surviving Moodle Question Banks Claire Kruse Managing Moodle question banks over time can be surprisingly complex, especially as courses are copied forward, question type plugins are no longer supported, and legacy data accumulates. This interactive workshop will recap recent changes within the product and real-world issues encountered while managing question banks, including challenges with deprecated question type plugins, cluttered categories, and inherited assessment data.
WORKSHOP 3 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	Teaching and Supporting Learning in the Age of AI: Prompting, Bias, and Designing AI-Resilient Activities Keri Zimmer Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how students approach learning and coursework. This interactive workshop explores how bias and misinformation can appear in AI-generated responses, introduces practical prompting strategies, and examines ways learning activities can be redesigned for an AI-enabled environment. Participants will analyze examples of AI output, experiment with structured prompts, and discuss strategies for supporting responsible and thoughtful use of AI in higher education.
WORKSHOP 4 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	Claude 101 Amy Tessitore & Gina Wilson Curious about AI but not sure where to start? Join Gina and Amy for Claude 101, a practical, approachable introduction to Claude by Anthropic — and to the broader world of artificial intelligence. We'll open with a grounded overview of what AI actually is (and what it isn't), cutting through the hype to give you a clear-eyed understanding of where the technology stands today. From there, we'll walk through Claude's core tools and capabilities, and dive into the art of prompt engineering — including how to iterate and refine your prompts to get consistently useful results. The session also covers tips tailored specifically for Abilene University (AU), so you can start applying Claude in ways that fit your work right away. We'll bring these concepts to life through real-world examples drawn from our own experience, including how Claude has been used to build dashboards, streamline processes, develop training programs, and create plugins. Finally, because responsible AI use matters, we'll close with practical guidance on how to identify and avoid bias in AI-generated content — and how to validate Claude's output so you can trust what you're working with. Whether you're brand new to AI or looking to use Claude more confidently and intentionally, this session will give you the foundation you need.

Wednesday Afternoon Pre-Moot Workshops: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

WORKSHOP 5 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	Approachable Interactive Learning Andy Braden Interactive Learning isn't a new idea but really has been the goal in learning all along, even before online education came along. There are loads of very sophisticated tools both inside and outside of your LMS to create Interactive Learning elements, but there are also simpler, more approachable tools and techniques available that we can use to spice things up for learners. We will focus on some Moodle specific and more universal tools and approaches to introduce interactions to more classically static elements in online learning. Expect a mix of discussion and hands on work, with a library of resources to borrow at the end of the session.
WORKSHOP 6 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	From Stock to Bespoke: Crafting Custom Educational Images with Google Gemini Jason Neiffer You’ve got a slide deck due Friday, a course module that needs a header image, and stock photos that look like they were shot in 2009. Sound familiar? This 2.5-hour, bring-your-own-project workshop is for educators, instructional designers, and course builders who need better visuals without becoming graphic designers. Bring something you’re actually working on... a slide deck, LMS page, course module, handout, or training resource... and use Google Gemini to create images that fit your real educational context. The goal is simple: what you picture in your head should look like what ends up on your slide. You’ll leave with more than a folder of graphics. You’ll leave with your own reusable image-generation prompt system, ready to use Monday morning. No design degree. No stock photo subscription. No extra hour to spare.
WORKSHOP 7 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	Emma and Amy present on AI, Moodle and other cool technologies Amy Tessitore & Emma Richardson Description to be improvised...
WORKSHOP 8 Moodle K-12 Higher Ed EdTech Gov/Business	The Wizardry of Moodle Forms: The Power That Transforms Scott Burnett This 2.5-hour hands-on workshop will introduce participants to the practical side of extending Moodle by guiding them through the process of building a simple custom form using a local plugin. The session will begin with a brief overview of how custom plugins can be used to support organizational workflows beyond standard course delivery, followed by a step-by-step guided build in which attendees will create, package, and install their own plugin that collects and stores user-submitted data within Moodle. While the first portion of the workshop will focus on explanation and setup, the majority of the session will involve actively building the plugin with guidance provided throughout. By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with a working, installable Moodle extension that can be adapted for use in their own environments to support internal requests, approvals, or other data collection processes. Participants must bring a laptop to the session and should have access to a code editor (such as Visual Studio Code) installed in advance, as this will be a fully hands-on workshop following the initial overview.

Wednesday Evening, Opening Moot Party: 5:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Lower Brewhouse Restaurant

Opening Night Party - Food, Drinks and Conversation Open to all attendees Join us right across from the Carroll campus at the lower brewhouse for the annual opening night party sponsored by OpenLMS! A great way to open the moot and meet old friends as well as make new ones. Moot bucks, free food and drinks and great conversation ... what more do you need.

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Thursday Kickoff & Information - 8:15 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.

Opening Intro and Welcome

Official Kick off to the 16th Annual Moot Dan Case & Rachel Martin Some quick opening remarks, information about the schedule, socials, moot money and more. Takes place in the Northeast corner of the library.

Breakout Session 1 (45 min)- 8:45 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

Session 1A	Managing Privacy in Moodle Andy Braden Moodle has a large number of privacy settings related to user data privacy and security in general. Most of us are not too familiar with them all, and they can be useful even if you are not using a privacy statement in the site (for example, users are coming from another web site where they already agreed to a privacy statement.) We will explore settings, work through a deployment of privacy policy and data retention rules, and share an example privacy policy.
Session 1B	From paper to pixels: How Ans provides a better way to grade exams William Hagen Exams are at the heart of higher education. Yet creating, grading, and analyzing them often consumes valuable time of educators. In this session, we will share the journey of Ans, a platform that began at TU Delft as a student assistant project and has since grown into a widely adopted exam solution around the world. Through real-world examples and a live demonstration, we will show how institutions use Ans to make their exam process more efficient.
Session 1C	Leadership Amy Tessitore & Jeff Webster Description coming soon.
Session 1D	A User and A Non-User Look At AI’s Impact on Teaching and Learning Diana Devine & Rachel Martin Case studies and conversation, reflecting on the last year of use (and non use)...

Breakout Session 2 (45 min)- 10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.

Session 2A	Communication and Relationship Building with Design in Mind Heidi Guercio Join me in discussing how we communicate as designers, how communication breaks down, and strategies for restoring communication in your day-to-day work. You'll learn to identify unknowns and work to clarify your needs. Learning Objectives: Identify communication styles and breakdowns, Discuss strategies for restoring communication
Session 2B	Value Beyond AI Ian Caltabiano The rapid proliferation of large language models has fundamentally disrupted the traditional technological moats that once safeguarded individual and corporate competitiveness. As AI commoditizes basic execution, technologists, industry leaders, and educators must radically redefine how value is created and how the next generation is prepared. Drawing on cross-industry insights, this session investigates the new mechanics of professional differentiation in a post-LLM landscape. We will explore actionable strategies for architecting resilient new moats through mindsets, paradigms, technologies, and deliverables—empowering both technologists and educators to cultivate adaptable, future-proof innovators in a world of ubiquitous AI.
Session 2C	Alternatives to AI Detection: Leveraging Transparency, Policy, and Plugins to Validate Student Authorship. Joseph Thibault The rapid rise of AI-generated text in student submissions has resulted in a technological arms race: students using AI in submissions, institutions adopting policing tools and AI detection, and students responding by using so-called ‘humanizer’ tools to circumvent detection. The result is a systemic erosion of trust for written assignments and submissions. What’s clear is that to verify and validate student writing skills, new approaches are necessary. This session details a successful, large-scale pilot at an Australian university to reimagine writing assessment. In the course, Writing for Science - BMS100, faculty assess scientific writing as an outcome. To protect integrity and verify student writing, the faculty shifted their focus from the final product to the writing journey itself using Moodle as the assessment platform. The team implemented a layered validation framework that included: in-class assessment periods, engaging students about the goals, modeling expectations for student conduct during the class time, making Moodle the assessment platform where writing occurred and leveraging the Cursive plugin for TinyMCE to capture revisions and identify/manage pasted
Session 2D	New Moodle Admin Eric Efrain Description coming soon.

Breakout Session 3 (45 min)- 11:15 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Session 3A	Research & Writing in the Age of AI Rachel Martin Perhaps you’ve seen the ads: AI-powered tools that promise to find citations supporting “what students already know” so they can do their “research” faster. Is this the next evolution of modern writing and research? Or is it the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what research is? In this breakout session, we will reframe undergraduate research as a process of discovery and exploration, not the validation of preexisting ideas. Moving beyond nostalgia for the “bad old days,” we will focus on assignment design, including a year-long faculty collaboration that attempted to keep intermediate writing students “in the loop” through video checkpoints. Along the way, we will consider how fair grading, implicit skill expectations, and timing interact with student engagement and the likelihood of AI use. We will also examine text density and the implications of students already using AI to look up, filter, and prioritize information. I will argue that we must be more explicit about our purposes in assigning research and will share scaffolding strategies and micro-assignments aligned with different learning goals.
Session 3B	The Consultant’s AI Stack: What Independent EdTech Practitioners Are Actually Using Darrel Tenter Most AI conference sessions are built for institutions — full teams, IT departments, and LMS admins. This one is for the independent consultant, the small shop, and the solo practitioner. Darrel Tenter breaks down how he actually uses AI tools day-to-day to run a consulting practice: LMS audits, client proposals, program design, onboarding, light development, and the administrative overhead that can eat independent operators alive. The session covers which tools deliver genuine ROI, how AI is reshaping the economics of independent EdTech work, and what guardrails matter when your name is on every deliverable.
Session 3C	Love at First Login: First Impressions by Design Jess Bryant & Sheri Coughenour You only get one chance to make a first impression. Even the most pedagogically sound course will frustrate learners if they get lost the moment they log in. This session bridges the gap between a built course and a ready course by combining strategic pre-launch user testing with a practical "5-Minute Audit." We will explore how treating your course launch like a software release can drastically improve user experience, accessibility, and learner engagement across any LMS.
Session 3D	When AI and Accessibility Collide: Why the “Human-in-the-Middle” is a Non-Negotiable Carli Cockrell As the use of AI content generation tools accelerate, we risk automating exclusion by overlooking accessibility. This virtual poster session explores the collision of AI and accessibility, focusing on the wins, woes, and why the Human-in-the-Middle (HITM) is essential. You will learn to act as the bridge, refining AI-generated content to ensure it meets accessibility guidelines before it ever reaches a learner’s screen.

Special Keynote - 1:15 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.

Keynote

Keynote Session with TBA Northeast corner of the library Taking place in the Northeast corner of the library, please join us for a fun and engaging short keynote session.

Breakout Session 4 (45 min)- 2:15 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Session 4A	Quick Easy Interactions in Moodle Andy Braden Interactive experiences in online learning can benefit learners in a variety of different ways; scaffolding, just in time learning support, learning modality variation, and just plain feeling more interesting and engaging. In this fast session we will explore some quick easy ideas on how to simply increase the interactivity of your Moodle course. Content examples will be provided to jumpstart your work on your courses!
Session 4B	Meet Your New Robot Buddy: Jason's Adventures in AI Agents Jason Neiffer While 2025 was billed as the "Year of the AI Agent," the actual movement remained largely theoretical until "OpenClaw" dropped this past December. Since then, Jason have been nerding around with OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude CoWork, and OpenWork to see if these digital entities can survive a standard school day. I will share the results of those experiments including the wins, the spectacular failures, and the moments that were just plain weird. We will look past the marketing gloss to examine the mechanical limits of accuracy, privacy, and necessary oversight. You will leave with a clearer sense of the current landscape and a few actionable strategies for putting your own robot intern to work.
Session 4C	Digital Stewardship: Leveraging eLearning to Launch Native Youth Wildland Firefighting Careers Heather Reichert Heather serves as a Training Specialist with the U.S. Forest Service Washington Office Fire and Aviation Management, where she supports the Federal Wildland Fire Workforce Development Program and oversees operations for the Wildland Fire Learning Portal. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in wildland fire training, and her early career on Interagency Hotshot Crews, she blends operational field expertise with a passion for effective digital learning. Today, Heather focuses on helping users confidently navigate LMS tools and championing the national adoption of the Wildland Fire Learning Portal. She holds a B.A. from Middlebury College.
Session 4D	Moodle Gradebook Essentials for Everyone Ryan Hazen Moodle Gradebook is a powerful, flexible, accurate grade management system. With its natural aggregation system, teachers can leverage sum-of-points, percentage-category, and other grading strategies independently or simultaneously. We will break down the inner workings of gradebook using arithmetic and explain how to customize its calculations to meet the needs of teachers using several common grading strategies as well as a few uncommon ones suggested by attendees.

Breakout Session 5 (45 min)- 3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.

Session 5A	Bridging the Gap: Designing Online Learning for Real Student Journeys Heather Robinson & Eric Efrain Is your learning environment designed for every learner? Online learning reaches more people than ever. But learners don’t all start with the same confidence or experience. Some know exactly what to do, while others navigate as they go, and that affects how they engage and if they succeed.
Session 5B	Before You Break It: Stress-Testing Your Training Infrastructure for Scale Darrel Tenter Scaling workforce training sounds manageable — until the cracks appear. This session draws on a live statewide expansion to walk through the operational realities of scaling training programs: how to structure your LMS for a growing, distributed workforce, what breaks under pressure, and how to maintain training quality without a large L&D team. The focus is forward-looking — identifying and addressing structural vulnerabilities before scale exposes them — rather than a post-mortem. No theory, no vendor pitch. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for stress-testing their own training infrastructure before growth does it for them.
Session 5C	From Moo“Dull” to Moo“Dayum”: Theming Your Moodle Site Corey Kalynuk In this session, we’ll explore how to transform a standard Moodle site into something that makes users say “moo-dayum.” Through real-world examples and practical techniques, we’ll show how thoughtful theming and UX improvements can dramatically elevate the learner experience, without requiring deep development work.
Session 5D	State of the Art: Demystifying Agent Detection within the LMS Joseph Thibault & Amy Tessitore OpenClaw variant "Einstein AI" raised awareness of AI's ability to access and navigate the LMS in early 2026. LMS providers and the broader education community suggested that these types of tools were "undetectable" and "appeared just as students." This session will take a fact-based approach in dispelling the mythology about AI interaction data and dive into the fingerprints and trails that Agentic AI (AI-enabled browser tools, AI bots, and AI browsers) leaves behind on the LMS as we know it. The session will close with information on how institutions can enhance log data and awareness to identify, prevent, and guide appropriate AI use by students and faculty.

Thursday Evening, Big Moot Money Bash Party: 5:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.

The Trinity Lounge and Trinity Lawn Carroll College

Food, Games, Prizes and all around good time! MountainMoot Mootineers An evening of games, food, drinks and thousands of dollars in free prizes. A local taproom will be catering this event with local brews and more. A live DJ with some "name that tune" contests and a chance to win more free moot bucks that you can use during the silent auction and the live auction. This event is always a lot of fun.

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Friday Breakout Session 6 (45 min)- 9:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.

Session 6A	From Ticket Piles to Tidy Plans: AI for Support, Research, and Rollouts Kathryn Fortin EdTech managers and support teams spend too much time on repeat work: answering the same questions, chasing details across systems, researching solutions, triaging tickets, and turning “we should implement this” into… nothing.
Session 6B	The AI Force Multiplier: A Case Study in Rapid Course Development with Limited Resources Izzy Lara Discover how a small team leveraged generative AI to build the Open LMS Academy. This case study shares reproducible workflows for drafting technical walkthroughs and H5P activities, providing a blueprint for scaling course development without sacrificing pedagogical quality in resource-constrained environments.
Session 6C	Auracast, Bluetooth LE & Accessibility Dan Case One year later come find out where we currently are, what products are available now and what you can expect in the near future with the new Bluetooth LE spec. Auracast will eventually enhance not only the hearing impaired but everyones lives.
Session 6D	AIssimilation Ryan Hazen A short talk about the algorithmic homogenization of human thought.

Friday Breakout Session 7 (45 Min) - 10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Session 7A	Failure & Feedback Loops Heidi Guercio In this talk we'll explore the connection between failing and feedback by reflecting on our failures and how feedback impacts our ability to adapt and increase resilience in learning situations.
Session 7B	Critical Thinking in the Age of AI Keri Zimmer Artificial intelligence tools can generate useful responses, but they are not always accurate. This session explores why AI sometimes produces incorrect or misleading information and how users can evaluate the reliability of AI-generated content. Participants will review examples and discuss simple strategies for using AI more thoughtfully in higher education.
Session 7C	Course Design in Moodle: A Practical Guide for Faculty Ryan Hallows & Katherine Greiner Creating a clear and engaging Moodle course page is essential to supporting student learning, reducing confusion, and fostering meaningful interaction with course materials. This session offers faculty/teachers a practical guide to designing Moodle pages that prioritize clarity, structure, and usability. Presenters will share effective strategies for organizing content, streamlining navigation, and building course spaces that help students easily locate materials, assignments, and expectations. In addition to concrete design ideas and examples, participants will be invited to reflect on their own course sites and engage in collaborative brainstorming around best practices for enhancing clarity, structure, and student engagement in Moodle. This interactive session is designed to generate practical takeaways that faculty/teachers can immediately implement in their own courses.
Session 7D	Exchanging Exam Experiences: An Interactive Workshop on the Do’s and Don’ts of Assessment William Hagen & Maisy Charles What’s working well in your assessment process? What challenges keep coming up? And what can we learn from each other? Join us for an interactive workshop where we will come together to share experiences, ideas, and practical lessons from our own institutions. Through open discussion, we’ll explore topics such as exam design, grading workflows, academic integrity, student experience, and the ongoing shift between paper-based and digital assessments. Rather than a traditional presentation, this session is designed as a conversation. We’ll facilitate the discussion, share insights and best practices we’ve gathered through our own experiences, and highlight examples from our customers at Ans. Whether you're refining an existing assessment process or exploring new approaches, this workshop offers an opportunity to exchange ideas with peers, learn from real-world experiences, and leave with practical takeaways you can apply at your own institution.

Friday Breakout Session 8 (45 Min) - 11:15 a.m. – Noon

Session 8A	Building Production Moodle Plugins Without a Net: Lessons from a Compliance-Critical Multi-Tenant Deployment Darrel Tenter Real-world Moodle plugin development rarely looks like the documentation suggests — especially when you’re building for Moodle Workplace’s multi-tenant architecture, on a managed host without direct server access, for a compliance-critical platform serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This session is a practitioner’s field report from roughly 6 months of iterative plugin development: six plugins built or in-progress, all running in production, none built with the luxury of a dev environment that mirrors production. The focus is on the constraints that forced interesting solutions — tenant-scoped capability patterns, the $USER-by-reference session bug, opcache deployment traps, PHP namespace gotchas — and the spec-first discipline that kept rework manageable. Attendees with Moodle development experience will leave with concrete patterns they can apply; those newer to plugin development will leave with an honest picture of what production Moodle development actually involves.
Session 8B	Empowering Faculty to Integrate Generative AI in Online Assessment: Perspectives from Educational Technology Support Frameworks Randy Stamm This session explores how educational technology support units (instructional designers, learning technologists, and e-learning centers) can guide and scaffold faculty in the ethical, pedagogical, and technical integration of generative AI tools (e.g., GPTs) for online assessment.
Session 8C	And The Theatre Shall Lead Us! Julia Harris & Rachel Martin Reflections on a series of public engagement programs on the topic of AI. What we learned by placing a humanities frame around technology and where the conversation might go next.
Session 8D	Using Moodle to Enhance and Engage Rollin Guyden Discover how to leverage integratable web‑based tools, Moodle’s built‑in features, and the versatility of simple HTML to create visually appealing, interactive, and student‑centered learning experiences. Because Moodle is a web‑based platform, you can elevate your course design by adding custom visual elements and embedding complementary online tools that enrich instruction. This session will highlight practical strategies for organizing and designing Moodle courses that are dynamic, engaging, and aligned with today’s digital learning expectations.