Month: October 2020


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October 2020

The fall semester is in full swing and we hope your classes are doing well! This newsletter by the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Design (OFDIT) contains updates on tools and resources from individual teams within OFDIT, and information on professional development events to assist with your online teaching needs.

Follow-Up from Faculty Discussion on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Thank you to all who attended the Faculty Discussion on October 2, on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. Here are the slides and the document we worked in, which includes links to all materials and a page of Mental Health and Wellness resources for students, staff and faculty.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy may be new to many of us, but its concepts and the pedagogical approaches it supports will surely be relevant going forward. Just like Universal Design for Learning supports all learners, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy is sound practice in general. If you are interested in joining or continuing the discussion of how to incorporate TIP in your courses, we have a Slack channel for faculty discussion that you are invited to join. First, join our SPS Faculty Slack Workspace, then click on Add Channel on the left menu, and join #faculty-discussion-meetup.

Designing Mobile-Friendly Course Sites

Many of our students access their courses via the Blackboard Mobile app on tablets or mobile devices — will your online courses display as well on these interfaces? For example, did you know that any content (text or images)  that is placed outside of a weekly folder or module is not visible when viewed through the mobile applications? See the screenshots below. To avoid loss of information, we suggest adding this content to the inside of the weekly folder or module instead. We’ll share more helpful tips for designing mobile-friendly courses during our upcoming Blackboard Mobile training sessions, where we’ll also review the two different BB apps for students and instructors. Please join us!

Screenshot of Blackboard on desktop and Blackboard on mobile

Or check out our Blackboard Mobile Apps page on our website.

Captioning for educational videos

This may not be a big surprise to the SPS community, but captioning a video benefits everyone. Multiple studies have documented improvements in “comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video” with captions (NIH Policy Insight, 2015). At SPS, in our online course development, we design to be accessible to all.  To that end, SPS has contracted a professional captioning service, 3Play Media, to caption video content used in academic courses.  Faculty can request captions through OFDIT by completing a brief form.

No matter the location of the video (YouTube, Ensemble, Dropbox, etc.) you may submit your academic video used in SPS courses for professional captioning. You may also submit dual language videos (Spanish/English) for captioning.  Feel free to bookmark this link for your future captioning requests.

Caption Request form 

Links/Reference:

Gernsbacher M. A. (2015). Video Captions Benefit Everyone. Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences, 2(1), 195–202.

3Play Media

Presentations at CUNY CUE Conference/OER Showcase 2020

 Three of our SPS faculty, together with OFDIT colleagues, will be presenting “Working with Faculty Working with OER” at the CUNY CUE Conference/OER Showcase 2020 on Thursday 10/29 from 1-2 PM ET: Faime Moussavi (Business), Andrew Palladino (Communication & Media), Jeanneth Sangurima-Quiles (Gen Ed), Sarah Kresh and Ruru Rusmin (both OFDIT).

In addition, Angela Francis and Hannah Miller from GenEd will be presenting “Beyond Savings: ZTC Implementation in the General Education Program” on Friday 10/30 from 1-2PM ET.

For more information and to register for this free conference, please visit the conference registration site.

Thank you for reading! As always, please contact us at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu with any questions or support requests. To find registrations links and more information on any of the above please visit our SPS Faculty Community Site.

See you at one of our upcoming events, or for our next newsletter in November!

Your OFDIT Team

Welcome to the Fall Semester! – September 2020 Faculty Newsletter

September 2020

We hope everyone is having a smooth transition into Fall semester! The Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Design (OFDIT) will be sending out a newsletter a few times each semester with updates on tools and resources from individual teams within OFDIT, and professional development events to assist with your online teaching needs.

We are pleased to present our first newsletter here!

Ensemble Video
Have you heard of Ensemble Video? If you’re using video in your SPS course, then Ensemble is something to consider. It’s features match, and in some cases, exceed those found in video hosting platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Think of Ensemble like you own SPS YouTube channel but with significant advantages for educators, like no social media interruptions, no advertisements, no suggested videos. Furthermore, it’s integrated into Blackboard and tied to the SPS captioning service. More details on our Ensemble Video SPS Faculty page.

If you’d like to learn more, please consider registering for one our information sessions coming up. In the session, we will introduce the tool’s more salient features, including student viewing data, the Blackboard integration, and streamlined professional captioning. Auto-publishing, in-video quizzes, and student video submissions will also be discussed.

Annotate Tool in Blackboard
We would like to introduce everyone to Annotate, a new integrated grading tool in Blackboard, replacing Box View. Annotate allows instructors to provide customizable feedback to students’ assignments when they are submitted as any of the supported file types (not when entered as text directly). Annotate is integrated directly in the Grade Center; i.e. submitted files will open right in your browser so you can readily use available grading tools, such as free-hand drawing and erasing, or highlighting and underlining. Another option is to use images from your computer as well as ready-made or customized stamps (e.g. “approved” stamp or “draft” stamp). Annotate also features options for both in-line commenting and written comments, which appear in a side panel. Finally, Annotate allows you to download a student’s submission with your annotations, and to search for specific text within a submission.

To learn more about Annotate, please watch this video and review the Annotate support site by Blackboard (which includes a list of accepted file types when using Annotate). Reach out to our team at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu for any questions you might have.

Important Note on Grading: CUNY Blackboard times out after 60 minutes. Be sure to save any grading comments before the 60-minute time limit or else you might lose your work.

Before you go, please remember our fall trainings and events! We are continuing our regular informal meetups on Oct. 21 and November 18. We also hope to see you at our upcoming faculty discussion on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy on October 2 from 12.45-2 EST. Please register using this link. Our fall trainings include sessions on Zoom Meeting for Student Hours, A Cut Above: Making Your Videos More Professional, VoiceThread: Humanize Your Online Course, Student Engagement in Online Learning, and more. Find more information and registration links on our SPS Faculty Community Site.

Thank you for reading! As always, please contact us at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu with any questions or support requests. See you at one of our upcoming events, or for our next newsletter in October!

Your OFDIT Team