Dear Faculty,
Although winter seems determined to linger, with more than a little bluster, this cold February still offers a welcome chance to reset, regroup, and prepare for the brighter season ahead. Read on for fresh opportunities to deepen accessibility, experiment with new approaches to online engagement, and connect with colleagues across CUNY. Whether you’re exploring updates in Brightspace, rethinking multimedia strategies, or joining one of our upcoming workshops, we hope these resources inspire you to refresh your courses with clarity, creativity, and care. OFDIT is here to support your work, and we look forward to helping you cultivate meaningful, student‑centered learning throughout the season.
Level Up Accessibility in your
Online Course
Let’s level up! With new ADA Title II requirements coming into effect, SPS—along with the rest of CUNY—is ramping up efforts to strengthen accessibility in online courses. During the Spring semester, OFDIT will offer resources to help you understand expectations and meet accessibility standards, including workshops, trainings, an Accessibility Challenge and more. Look for an email next week with more details and ways to participate!
Brightspace Update:
Discussion Due Dates
You asked, and D2L listened! Brightspace now allows instructors to set a due date for students’ first discussion post directly within a Discussion topic. This update brings Discussions in line with Assignments and Quizzes, creating a more consistent experience across course activities. The due date applies only to the initial contribution, whether a new thread or a reply, and automatically syncs with any linked content modules. This enhancement offers a clearer structure for learners and simplifies course management for faculty. The OFDIT team just published an updated teaching guide with step by step instructions to add due dates to your discussions.
Open for All Workshop
The SPS OER Initiative is pleased to once again offer the Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series (Mar 6-31). This hybrid online (sync/async) workshop covers the intersection of Open Education and Inclusive Pedagogy. Participants review a course using the SPS course review rubric annotated with open and inclusive educational practices and create a proposal for incorporating inclusive pedagogical approaches.
The wider SPS community is invited to our workshop discussions on Fridays to contribute their own insights into inclusive teaching and learning at SPS.
See Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series for all the details, including workshop syllabus and registration information, and the community call for contributions to the workshop discussions. Registration is open through Monday, March 2.
We will have an info session on the DEIA annotations to the SPS Course Review Rubric that participants use in the workshop. All are welcome!
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- Tuesday, February 24 at 10:00am – Register Here
- Thursday February 26 at 4:00pm – Register Here
UDL Collaborative:
Exploring the Pedagogy of Kindness
Join us for our first UDL Collaborative meeting of Spring 2026! We’ll explore what kindness means in academic contexts and how it intersects with our teaching and working practices. How does kindness relate to UDL principles? How might we navigate kindness alongside learning outcomes, disciplinary standards, academic rigor, deadlines, and accommodations? When and how do we assert boundaries, and what are the responsibilities of instructors and students?
Optional Reading: We recommend the introductory chapter from A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024) by C.J. Denial as a conversation starter. Find the PDF on our OpenLab webpage. All are welcome!
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- Wednesday, March 4, from 1-2pm ET. Register here.
Brian Le Lay, Antonia Levy, and Amarna Williams, Facilitators, UDL Collaborative
CUNY-Wide Opportunities for SPS Faculty
CUNY CIS Accessibility Training Series
The ADA Title II updates are going into effect in April 2026, and now is the perfect time to strengthen your accessibility skills and empower your work with inclusive design! This series includes 7 webinars focused on accessibility best practices, tools, and techniques to make your content usable for everyone.
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- Accessibility Basics: Why it Matters (3/3)
- Creating Accessible Word Documents (2/23, 3/16)
- Designing Accessible PowerPoint presentations (2/25, 3/18)
- Building Accessible Excel Spreadsheets (3/3, 3/24)
- Ensuring Accessibility in Brightspace (3/5, 3/26)
- Writing Effective Alternative Text (3/9, 3/30)
- Making PDFs Accessible with Adobe Acrobat (3/11, 4/1)
View full descriptions and register here (Login required using your @login.cuny.edu account)
CUNY CIS Gen AI Training Series
Ready to harness the power of AI? The CUNY CIS team will offer several topic-specific trainings to make sure we keep on top of the latest in AI technology. Join to explore practical AI applications, prompting strategies, and productivity hacks:
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- Beginner Prompting (2/26, 3/4)
- Intermediate Prompting (3/12, 3/18)
- Advanced Prompting (3/25, 4/2)
- Meta Prompting (4/9)
- Prompting Workshop (4/15)
View full descriptions and register here (Login required using your @login.cuny.edu account)
Trauma Informed Pedagogy Presentation
Join our colleagues from Queensborough Community College for a virtual session that provides educators with strategies to help mitigate and understand student behavior, thus creating a more compassionate, flexible, and consistent learning space.
Dr. Melissa Haswell will present. Co-Hosted with Wilma Fletcher-Anthony in the QCC Counseling Center.
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- Friday February 27, at 10:00-11:30am (virtual) Learn More
Teaching for Career Readiness and Success
Join our colleagues from Hunter College ACERT as they discuss how to prepare students not only for their first job, but for a lifetime of meaningful work. In this lunchtime seminar, they’ll consider how learning experiences across disciplines can cultivate agency and long-term career success. Participants will leave with practical strategies and renewed clarity about how teaching can empower students to thrive beyond the classroom.
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- Tuesday February 24, at 12:00-1:00pm (virtual) Register Here
AI & Accessible Visual Presentations that Inspire Student Engagement and Innovation: Using Canva, Claude, Gamma AI, and More
Also from Hunter’s ACERT team: creating visually engaging presentations is essential for teaching, but ensuring those visuals are accessible to all learners is what is truly essential. This lunchtime seminar explores how tools like Canva, Gamma AI, and other emerging platforms can help instructors design presentations that are not only beautiful and memorable, but also usable by students with diverse access needs. Whether you are brand new to visual design or already a Canva expert, you’ll leave with practical techniques and templates that make your presentations more inclusive, engaging, and impactful for every student.
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- Thursday February 26, at 12:00-1:00pm (virtual) Register Here
Wikipedia as Pedagogy: Contribute to Open Knowledge and Public Scholarship
Empower students, faculty, and staff as producers of public knowledge through meaningful Wikipedia contributions. This seminar from Hunter ACERT explores strategies for integrating Wikipedia editing into your courses or writing to enhance research, writing, and digital literacy.
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- March 10, at 12:00-1:00pm (virtual) Register here
UPCEA Video Poster: Deconstructing Multimedia
At UPCEA’s 2026 Digital Teaching and Learning Conference, OFDIT’s own Matt Lewis and Fallon Saratovsky presented Deconstructing Multimedia, a video poster on designing effective instructional videos. Drawing on Mayer’s multimedia principles, they showed how clear visuals, focused narration, and reduced cognitive load strengthen multimedia learning. They also examined generative‑AI video tools, noting common issues such as unedited artifacts and mismatched tone, which underscores the need for human oversight to avoid “AI slop.” The video offers practical guidance for creating multimedia that supports engagement and active learning.
Did you know?
Video Assignments with Panopto
Video submission assignments—ranging from simple recordings to more advanced projects—foster engagement and allow students to demonstrate communication, creativity, and subject knowledge. With Panopto’s student‑submission feature in Brightspace, faculty can create video or audio assignments that let students record or upload presentations, demonstrations, and other multimedia work. These activities support graded assignments, group projects, and discussions, offering flexibility across teaching styles while encouraging active, creative participation in online courses. To receive support in setting up a video assignment, please email us at FacultySupport@sps.cuny.edu to get started!
Faculty Corner:
Add a Profile Picture to Humanize Your Course
Submitted by Curtis Izen, CUNY SPS, Online Business Program
Humanized learning makes an online course feel more “real,” which can boost student motivation to log in and stay engaged week after week. Small touches like adding a profile picture in Brightspace can go a long way toward creating a welcoming, approachable course space.. Without a picture, a generic avatar is used. A clear headshot (or simple professional photo)helps students connect your name to a person, and carries through the system in places like discussions, class lists, and messages.
Brightspace uses one profile image system‑wide and recommends a 150 × 150 pixel photo to avoid cropping, so choose a centered, recognizable image. To upload it, select your name in the Brightspace minibar, open your Profile, choose Change Picture, upload your photo, and finally Save and Close.
OFDIT Trainings Spring 2026
Looking to move beyond traditional text‑based discussions? SPS offers several tools that support richer, more authentic student interaction while reducing reliance on copy‑and‑paste responses. See below!
VoiceThread for SPS Faculty
This training will introduce VoiceThread, an asynchronous video discussion board. VoiceThread allows faculty and students to create multimedia presentations that engage a classroom community through threaded audio and video discussions. You and your students can add commentary to a presentation by means of microphone, webcam, keyboard, or phone. The ensuing conversation feels like a live classroom, but in an online environment.
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- Monday, February 23 at 4:00pm – Register Here
- Thursday, March 26 at 10:00am – Register Here
The Pedagogy of Social Annotations/Using Perusall in Brightspace
Social annotations can radically change the way your students engage with your course materials, each other, and you, combining the benefits of annotation, dialogue, accessibility, and digital accountability. In this one-hour workshop, we’ll look at the pedagogical benefits of social annotation across a range of disciplines and discuss how this practice can build students’ skills, foster community, and promote intellectual growth. In addition, we’ll look at how to use the Perusall LTI in Brightspace to build social annotation assignments in your courses.
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- Tuesday, March 24 at 10:00am – Register Here
- Thursday, March 26 at 4:00pm – Register Here
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.
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- Wednesday, February 18 at 11:00am – Register Here
- Tuesday, March 24 at 2:00pm – Register Here
And be sure to explore the full list of OFDIT Trainings for Spring 2026. You’ll find sessions on Brightspace, teaching online, ePortfolio and more!
As always, OFDIT is here to help! We are available for one-on-one support and are 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
