OFDIT Newsletter October 2024

Dear Faculty,

We’re excited to share many opportunities for professional learning and growth as the semester gets underway! This newsletter issue highlights new features and support resources for some of our Brightspace tools, announces extended registration for our funded Open UDL workshop, and welcomes SPS’s new and returning Faculty Advisory Board members. You’ll also find links to register for many CUNY-wide trainings and discussions on generative AI, Credit for Prior Learning, and online instruction, as well as for the CUNY IT Conference on December 5-6th. Lastly, proposals are due for the CUNY 2025 Teaching and Learning Conference on November 15th – don’t miss your chance to share your considerable and hard-won expertise in online pedagogy, accessible content creation, and approaches to assessment and student engagement with other CUNY faculty!

Brightspace Updates and Notes

Brightspace Highlight: New Demo Student Tool

A CUNY-built tool now allows you to participate as a test student in your course!

As you may know, you can switch to View as Learner in a course in order to see how course content appears for a student, and to test submission of an assignment or quiz. However, in order to test grading and feedback, it was necessary for CUNY to build a custom tool. The new Demo Student tool allows instructors to create a temporary Demo Student in a course. Instructors can impersonate the Demo Student, submit course work, switch back to Instructor to grade, and then impersonate the Demo Student again to view grades and feedback from the student point of view. Please visit this guide for details on how to use the Demo Student tool.

VoiceThread Troubleshooting

With a full semester launch under our belt, we’re pleased with the integration of VoiceThread (VT) in our new Brightspace home. While most users have no issues to report, occasionally they do arise. For troubleshooting, check out the VoiceThread for SPS Students page on the Faculty Hub. We’ve collected solutions for the most common VT errors, usually related to browser settings. In rare cases, students affiliated with another CUNY campus that are now working in VT in an SPS course may run into an issue with access. So far only three students have reported this issue, which we have discovered can be quickly remedied; however, the vendor must be contacted to resolve. For situations like these, please reach out to FacultySupport@sps.cuny.edu for assistance.

UDL at SPS

Open UDL Workshop: Registration extended to Oct. 17th! UDL Workshop Registration Closes Oct. 14

OFDIT and the CUNY SPS OER Initiative are pleased to invite all faculty to participate in the Open UDL Workshop: Making Your Courses Accessible to All (October 21 to November 4, 2024).

This fifteen-day, asynchronous online workshop provides an in-depth introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and to the intersection of UDL and Open Educational Practices (OEP), which include OER and Open Pedagogy.

Eligible faculty participants will be compensated with 7 NTA hours upon successful completion of the workshop. Registration is extended to Thursday, October 17! For more details, please see our Advanced Workshops page on the SPS Faculty Community Site.

Join our new Accessibility & Inclusion Community of Practice

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Accessibility & Inclusion Community of Practice for faculty and staff at CUNY SPS, which is part of the broader Universal Design for Learning (UDL) initiative by the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion.

Join us for our inaugural meeting on October 30th at 12pm ET via Zoom, featuring quick, actionable tips for creating accessible documents and an open forum for your questions and ideas. Register here.

This meeting marks the beginning of a monthly series offered for faculty and staff to learn about accessibility and Universal Design in Learning (UDL) principles, share implementation ideas and challenges, and learn about best practices.

Welcome to the new
OFDIT Faculty Advisory Board members!

A warm welcome to new members of the OFDIT Faculty Advisory Board (FAB), and an appreciative welcome back to our returning advisors! The advisory board kicked off for the academic year last week and are looking forward to working on projects including hosting faculty discussions (both in-person and facilitated on OpenLab) on AI in the classroom, advising on best practice recommendations for instruction in Brightspace, and serving on the selection committee for the Teaching Excellence Award in the spring!

Members of the Board:
Mark Friedman (2024-26) – Disability Studies
Lilly Mathew (2023-25) – Nursing
Hannah Miller (2024-26) – General Education
Faime Moussavi (2023-25) – Business
José Roldan Rivera (2024-26) – HRL / ILAW / Sociology
Norlene Thomas (2024-26) – HIM / HSA
Chris Kchao (ex officio) – Office of Student Disability Services
Mahdu Mammen (ex officio) – Information Technology

ePortfolio: A Journey of Reflection

The ePortfolio Team invites you to our inaugural event of the 2024-2025 academic year. We’re welcoming the CUNY SPS community to learn from students who are building their portfolios this semester. Whether in their first semester, at the final term of a degree, or somewhere in between, this event will capture and showcase students’ work at distinct junctures and discuss the role of reflection along the way.

We need your help!
If your course is using ePortfolio this semester, please fill out this form and help us showcase your students’ portfolios!

Register for event here!

CUNY Opportunities for SPS Faculty

CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy workshops

Teaching Matters series on generative AI is back for the 24-25 academic year.

Participants will be introduced to ideas for how to use generative AI tools in their classroom to enhance student motivation and learning.

Friday, 10/25, 11:00am-12:00pm – Student Motivation and Engagement: AI and Non-AI Assignments to Enhance Learning

This fall, CITA, is also hosting a series of workshops on Credit for Prior Learning (CPL).

In this showcase, presenters from Lehman College and CUNY SPS, who were recognized with CAEL-WICHE Equity Awards, will share examples of innovative Credit for Prior Learning practices that are leveraging faculty expertise and improving student success.

Friday, 10/25, 2:00pm-3:00pm – Showcase: Lessons from CAEL-WICHE Equity Award Winners

Dr. Wendy Kilgore, Senior Director of Research at AACRAO, will share key insights from Enhancing Accessibility and Inclusion: The 2024 Landscape of Credit for Prior Learning in US and Canadian Higher Education, a report of AACRAO’s recent survey of 399 colleges and universities about the relevance and impact of CPL as a mechanism for enhancing student success and accessibility and equity.

Friday, 11/15, 11:30am-12:30pm – The Importance of CPL in Today’s Higher Ed Landscape

CUNY Online Webinar Series –
Creating a Positive Student Experience in Your Online Course

Maximize Student Growth: Effective Feedback Strategies for Online Courses

Learn how to turn feedback into a catalyst for student success. This session will explore techniques to provide meaningful feedback that enhances student engagement and fosters academic growth in your online courses.

Tuesday, 10/22, 3:00pm – Registration Link

Engage and Inspire: Creating Impactful Short Videos for Online Courses

Say goodbye to monotonous presentations! Discover how to create short, dynamic videos that capture attention, boost engagement, and improve knowledge retention in your online courses.

Thursday, 11/21 at 3:00pm – Registration Link

Also available is the recording of the 9/26 webinar Engaging Your Students in Online Courses.

CITA Book Club

Interested in “emerging and powerful research on the seismic changes AI is already creating in schools and the workplace” and how that might affect your instructional design and practice? Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson will be the focus of CITA’s next book club meeting! 

Friday, 11/8, 11:00 am-12:00 pm – CITA Book Club

CUNY IT Conference 2024

Registration is now open for the 23rd Annual CUNY IT Conference, December 5-6 at John Jay College. This year’s theme is “Advancing CUNY: Intentional Connections and Smart Collaborations,” with speakers including Aleks Berditchevskaia, Principal Researcher at Nesta’s Center for Collective Intelligence Design.

CUNY 2025 Teaching and Learning Conference 

Share your pedagogy! Proposal submissions for the CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy (CITA) CUNY 2025 Teaching and Learning Conference (April 4 and 5, 2025) are due 11/15! 

Click this link to submit a proposal by Friday, 11/15

Faculty Corner

Faculty corner image
From Business faculty Curtis Izen 

“Here’s a Brightspace tip I’ve found quite useful.  There may be times when you would like to contact students who have not submitted a particular assignment.  In just 3 clicks, Brightspace will pull together an email with only those students in need of a reminder.  You can type your message, add an attachment and hit send.  I’ve written a teaching guide showing you how here: Contacting Students with Missing Assignments.”

If you have a pedagogical tip from your new experiences in Brightspace (in 200 words or less!) that you think might help others, we would love to hear from you and add your submission to our next Faculty Newsletter! You can use our Faculty Corner Submission Form to submit.

OFDIT Fall 2024 Trainings 

OFDIT’s fall trainings can help you teach, assess, and engage your students in high-impact, accessible, and efficient ways. We look forward to seeing you at some of our upcoming sessions! Refer to our trainings page on the SPS Faculty Community Hub site or click links below to register.

Anthology Ally: An Introduction

Learn how Anthology Ally can increase access and improve the overall learning experience in your course by providing choice and flexibility for how students consume content and access media. We will cover both alternative file formats and the accessibility gauge features that are now available to all in your courses and the support Ally provides in addressing any areas where accessibility can be improved, often very quickly!

Brightspace: Managing Groups

In this training we will discuss how to set up groups, group discussions, and group assignments in Brightspace. 

Brightspace: Navigating the Gradebook and Grading 

In this training we will discuss how to navigate the gradebook and the options for grading in Brightspace.

Using ePortfolio in your Course 

In this session, you will explore the structure of ePortfolio and learn how to use the platform from the instructor view. You will learn how to navigate the Digication in Brightspace, review your students’ signature assignment submissions, and share the various support resources available for both students and instructors. There will also be time to answer any questions you might have about ePortfolios at CUNY SPS.

Using Video in Brightspace (Panopto/Video Notes)

Creating video content for your course can be a little overwhelming with the number of options available.  Join this session to learn which tools work best for creating a reusable welcome message or lecture, a weekly update or one-time recordings, like giving feedback to students. In this session participants will be introduced to Panopto, the SPS video platform integrated into Brightspace, which streamlines video production.  Participants will learn how to access Panopto and its features through Brightspace, focusing on a workflow to create, organize, and publish video content.  The Brightspace platform itself has video tools too.  We’ll highlight when it’s beneficial to use one over the other.

Advanced Panopto for SPS Faculty

As many of us have learned, Panopto is a handy tool to create video in Brightspace. But many of us have yet to unlock the powerful features inside it.  In this session, participants will learn how to access the robust analytics showing us who watched a video and for how long.  They will see how faculty can leverage the power of a low-stakes quiz with the in-video quiz tool.  A video quiz can be automatically graded and mapped to your grade book. Finally, we’ll demonstrate how a regular assignment can be turned into a video assignment with students as the media creators.  It’s all part of the Panopto platform built into Brightspace.  

Humanize Your Online Course with VoiceThread 

Creating engaging online courses is not easy. In many text discussion-board based courses, students feel isolated and disconnected from their instructors and classmates. VoiceThread bridges the gaps in social presence typically found in online courses. In this workshop, educators will learn how to establish a social presence and connect with their students using VoiceThread to improve course satisfaction and student learning. We will cover all of the basic VoiceThread features, demonstrate how everything works in D2L Brightspace, showcase a variety of examples from actual courses, and have an open Q&A throughout the training.

As always, OFDIT is here to help! We are available for one-on-one support and are also happy to schedule a Zoom call to discuss any questions you may have. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu.

All the best, 
Your OFDIT Team