Dear Faculty,
As we head into our second summer with course delivery in Brightspace, we are proud of how well faculty have gotten on board with the new LMS, and inspired by all the navigating faculty have done to sail through the year so successfully with students and teaching! In this edition of our newsletter, you’ll find guidance to help with your Fall course prep, details about OFDIT’s summer Office Hours and Faculty Support services, and links out to the many great tips shared in our Brightspace Day Unsession. We hope you’ll get moments this summer to drop anchor and relax, and know that your OFDIT crew is here to assist throughout!
Fall Course Site Preparation Support
Prepping Dev sites or your live course section sites for Fall? Following the steps in our guides below will ensure you sail through QA and into a great semester!
Need to know the best way to add your updated syllabus or other files into your course site? In most cases, you’ll want to upload rather than link – find out how and why in:
Adding Files to BrS Course for Accessibility
Making any changes to graded items in your course?
Be sure to check the content areas against the corresponding gradebook items, verify the categories listed in your syllabus match the gradebook’s categories, and review the settings overall to ensure clarity and accuracy for students by following:
Setting Up Gradebook for New Course Sites
Are you a course lead for your program or want to make sure your own live site is ready for Course Prep and QA? See our checklist below and linked guides for each reviewed area:
Course Site Prep Checklist for SPS Faculty
Get Support Making Instructional Videos
Summer is the perfect time to refresh your course content and create engaging videos for your students! Whether you’re working on a course overview, a welcome message, or a faculty introduction, the OFDIT Media Team is here to help you shine.
Here’s how we can support your summer video projects:
- On-Campus Studio Sessions – Equipped with high-quality recording gear, our team will handle the filming, editing, captioning, and publishing—so you can focus on your message.
- Remote Production Support – Staying remote this summer? No problem! We’ll guide you through the process of creating polished videos from home. From choosing the right software to editing and captioning, we’ve got you covered.
To get started, email matthew.lewis@cuny.edu or schedule a Zoom consultation to kick off your project.
Faculty Support over the Summer
OFDIT’s open Brightspace office hours continue Tuesday evenings (6-7pm ET) and Wednesday afternoons (1-2pm ET) over the summer through August 15, when we’ll resume our fall semester schedule. We look forward to seeing you in one of the drop-in zoom sessions with your questions!
OFDIT will continue providing limited weekend faculty support throughout the summer. While our Friday through Sunday coverage will be reduced during the summer months, we’ll still be monitoring facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu for urgent issues that need immediate attention. For the quickest response to general questions and routine troubleshooting, we recommend reaching out Monday through Thursday when our full support team is available.
Did You Know?
At this year’s Brightspace Day in May, faculty shared their tips on using Brightspace efficiently in our first ever Unsession and it was a lot of fun! Tips included how to use Intelligent Agents to automatically email students who haven’t logged in for a few days, how to use mentions with the @ symbol in discussions, how to pin courses on the homepage, using quicklinks in courses, a shortcut for URLs, a guide to some of the symbols in the assignments list, and how to see what assignments a particular rubric is attached to. To check out any of these tips, see our Unsession document and the recording (26 min).
Faculty Corner: Call for Submissions
Did you discover a setting, process, or tool that made teaching in Brightspace go more smoothly, or learn something new about our new LMS by trial and error this past year? Submit a teaching tip (in 200 words or less) using our Faculty Corner Submission Form and we’ll share it out with the SPS community in our newsletter! Your hard-won knowledge and experience is valuable to everyone!
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
