Category: Uncategorized

February 14, 2024

OFDIT Newsletter February 2024

Dear Faculty,

We hope you’ve had a good start to the semester, and we are excited to share several updates and opportunities coming this spring! Thank you in advance for providing your feedback on some of our Brightspace LMS menu and homepage proposals, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at some of the Brightspace demo sessions OFDIT and CUNY will be offering over the next few weeks (links below!).

This Thursday, you can get new pedagogy perspectives by attending the SPS Student Roundtable session or a CEID workshop delivered by SPS faculty from our Business program. Other professional opportunities we want to share include application deadlines for a new CUNY faculty fellowship and an NEA publishing institute opportunity at the end of the month. Last, please find details and registration information about SPS’s Open Spring workshop in March, the upcoming SUNY Online Summit, the D2L Connection one-day event, and the 2024 CUNY-wide Teaching and Learning Conference. We hope this round-up of offerings helps you spring forward into new skills, connections, and inspiration!

Brightspace Update

We are in the exciting phase of customizing our Brightspace environment for the SPS community. As part of this project, we are sharing some mockups of the home pages and navigation menus (or navbars) for SPS and SPS courses. This first pilot attempt will be followed by iterative development as needed in the future.

- We welcome feedback on the Brightspace landing page for SPS students, faculty and staff (College homepage and College navbar)
- We also welcome feedback on the home page for SPS courses (Course homepage and Course navbar)
- The home pages and navbars we decide on will become the default for SPS. Navigational consistency within our LMS is very important to our students. However, faculty are able to make adjustments to meet learning needs.
- Programs may also decide to customize their own versions going forward to better match the needs of their courses.

Please view mockups of the pilot homepages and navbars on this website. If you would like to share any feedback, please follow the survey links on the webpage and complete the Brightspace Environment Feedback form by Monday, February 19. We’ll keep the form open over the long weekend to allow for the maximum time for input. Your thoughtful consideration is much appreciated!

Training also continues this month with the addition of Brightspace demos for SPS faculty and staff (see below). Other options include facilitated CUNY workshops and the self-paced SPS Brightspace Essentials. Please visit our Brightspace training page for all current offerings

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at brightspace@sps.cuny.edu.

SPS Spring 2024 Events

Brightspace Demos for SPS Faculty

Join us over Zoom for a live demonstration of the new Brightspace learning environment. Led by our very own OFDIT team, this 1-hour session will demo the most common features for those new to the platform. Starting with how to access Brightspace, the session will go on to demonstrate accessibility features, basic navigation, the student experience, and the instructor experience.

- Tues. Feb. 20 at 3:00pm Register Here
- Thurs. Feb 22 at 1:00pm Register Here
- Tues. Feb. 27 at 5:00pm Register Here
- Weds. Feb. 28 at 6:00pm Register Here
- Mon. March 4 at 10:00am Register Here
- Thurs. March 7 at 6:00pm Register Here
- Thurs. March 14 at 1:00pm Register Here

Let’s Talk AI: SPS Student Roundtable

Join our panel discussion about SPS students’ experiences with generative AI tools in their learning. Learn about some ways students might leverage generative AI, and their motivations and concerns. Understand student perspectives on the support and resources necessary for an optimal learning experience that acknowledges the presence of generative AI.

Open to students, faculty, and staff

- Thursday, February 15, 6:00 pm – Register here

CIED Workshop

The Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity (CIED) is pleased to offer a workshop on “Pedagogy Grounded in Reality: Incorporating Chattel Slavery’s Contribution to Higher Education.”

Presenters: Dr. Tara Barca and Dr. Linda L. Ridley

About the workshop:
Traditionally, the fundamentals of management teaching have been aligned with the belief that conventional management theories were developed separate and apart from the institution of chattel slavery and the management of race (Aufhauser, 1973; Blackmon, 2008; Cooke, 2003; Roediger & Esch, 2012). This workshop will incorporate the results of a qualitative study that examined the exclusion of chattel slavery in the teaching of the history of American business (Baptist, 2014; Katznelson, 2005). Participants will be encouraged to enhance their research knowledge and reshape their pedagogy to include the true origins of educational concepts and theories, and through workshop activities and guided discussion, gain cutting-edge tools to facilitate inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible pedagogy.

Open to all CUNY SPS students, faculty and staff.

- Thursday, February 15 from 12:00 – 1:30 PM – Register here

March is Open Spring at CUNY SPS!

The OER Initiative is sponsoring the Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series (March 1-28), a hybrid online (sync/async) workshop on best practices at the intersection of Open Education and Inclusive Pedagogy. Synchronous online discussions on the themes of representation, accessibility and inclusion, and student agency will take place Fridays at lunchtime and are open to the whole SPS community!

- We are seeking proposals for participation in the discussion from students, faculty, and staff by Feb. 21. Please share this invitation with your students!
- Registration for the workshop is open to faculty and staff through Feb. 26.

For more information about the workshop or the discussions, please see bit.ly/OpAll or come to our info session Friday, February 16, 12-1 pm, in which we will discuss the DEIA Annotations to the SPS Course Review Rubric that we created as a tool for reflecting on how to build inclusivity and belonging into online courses.

Engagement Events for SPS Faculty

Call for Applications: CUNY Strategic Innovation Faculty Fellowship

New Faculty Fellowship Opportunity! From Summer 2024 – Fall 2024, CUNY Strategic Innovation Fellows help to advance the development, delivery, and governance of university-wide solutions in a number of areas that will strengthen the academic enterprise and outcomes for CUNY students. Strategic Innovation Fellows work in a variety of Offices within the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) at CUNY Central, informing policies and initiative while earning valuable professional development and exposure.

Depending on the Fellows’ host office, sample responsibilities include: creating a fellowship focused on supporting high school students enrolled in College Now courses; integrating career connections into degree pathways; informing educational technology deployments; developing experiential learning opportunities in healthcare sectors; and participating in other projects as determined by Office leadership.

Application deadline: February 29, 2024 at 5pm EST – Click here for more information about the Strategic Innovation Fellowship and a link to the application portal

SUNY Online Summit

Attend for a fee in-person at the SUNY Global Center (116 East 55th Street), or for free online with live-streamed sessions about online program administration, instructional design, pedagogy and student support. Links to recordings will also be provided to registrants. Open to all!

February 28 and 29, 2024 – Click here to register

D2L Conference

D2L, parent company of our new LMS, Brightspace, is having a free one-day, in-person event at the SUNY Global Center on March 1. Held in conjunction with the SUNY Online Summit, this event is an opportunity to learn more about accessibility, inclusive learning, student engagement, ways to establish instructor presence, and other tips and tricks.

March 1, 2024 from 8:45am- 2:20pm – Click here to submit a proposal or to register to attend

National Endowment for the Arts Open Education Publishing Institute:
Collaborative Knowledge and Social Justice

Interested in giving your students transferable skills in writing, research, and publishing while disrupting the canon and centering diverse voices? The Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities will support faculty in creating Open Educational Resources, designing classroom assignments, or developing publications from June 2024 – May 2025.

Proposals due March 1, 2024 – Apply here

CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy – Generative AI Series

This series is a monthly, free, one-hour summit of CUNY faculty and staff devoted to sharing innovative teaching strategies and student-centered learning methods. Save the dates below, more details to come:

- Session 1: Teaching and Learning ABOUT and WITH AI: Discipline-Specific Ideas | Friday, February 16, 2024, 11 AM – 12 PM ET – event registration full, but keep an eye out on the CUNY Innovation Teaching Academy website for session recording.
- Session 2: Using AI Collaboratively with Students: UDL, Open Pedagogy, and Student Motivation | Friday, March 8, 2024, 11 AM – 12 PM ET – Register here
- Session 3: What AI Cannot Do: Equipping Students with Humanistic Skills in the Age of AI | Friday, April 12, 2024, 11 AM – 12 PM ET – Registration will open March 14th on the CUNY Innovation Teaching Academy website

Save the Date: March 22 is the CUNY-wide 2024
Teaching and Learning Conference

Want to share or learn more about outstanding teaching practices, exchange innovative ideas, strategies, and research findings? The CUNY Teaching and Learning conference is a great chance to present your research, facilitate connections, and network across the system. Event is free, open to all, and will be held in–person at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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

January 16, 2024

OFDIT Newsletter January 2024

Dear Faculty,

We are happy to welcome you to the new year and hope it brings you health and much fulfillment. In this newsletter edition, we have an announcement about our SPS Faculty Community Site, updates about the LMS transition, and some guidance for preparing your course sites for the spring semester. We’d also like to invite you to upcoming workshops examining generative AI in the classroom, reflecting on the impact of a critical analysis of chattel slavery in the teaching of business, and the Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series. We are looking forward to 2024 and are excited to support your teaching and professional learning in the months to come.

SPS Faculty Community Site
Now a Communication Hub on OpenLab

For more than 10 years, OFDIT has cultivated and shared online teaching resources via the SPS Faculty Community site on CUNY’s Academic Commons, and we are pleased to announce this valuable resource just got even better! We’ve moved it to the CUNY SPS OpenLab, a powerful open-source digital platform for the SPS community to connect and collaborate through blogging, publishing, and social networking. The new SPS Faculty Community Hub is live! You’ll find all the previous teaching and learning content from the Commons, but enhanced with the power of the OpenLab. SPS now has a space where faculty and students can work together, experiment, and innovate. Please update your bookmarks, and come visit the new SPS Faculty Community Hub!

Launch the Hub

Brightspace Update

As we head into the Spring semester, training for faculty and staff in our new LMS is ramping up!

Brightspace Essentials, a self-paced and bite-sized learning experience for SPS faculty and Staff, has launched! This series of self-paced mini-lessons have been crafted to equip you with the fundamental skills for using the Brightspace Learning Management System (LMS).

The first few lessons will help you:

Get familiar with the fundamental navigation and functions of Brightspace
Create course content modules
Learn about the great features in the Brightspace Editor
Become familiar with communication tools
Manage discussion

Dive into these 15-minute lessons as a launching point for your Brightspace explorations.

You can also sign up for a Brightspace Demo offered by the CUNY Central team that introduces basic navigation, course structure, the student experience, and accessibility. Register here for 1-hr webinars on Jan 18 at 1:00pm or Jan 23 at 11:00am. Prefer to watch a recorded session right away? View the Brightspace Demo recorded on Nov. 29, 2023.

Finally, the CUNY Central team has also announced their Spring Workshop schedule, with sessions on:

Getting Started in Brightspace: overview of key features and tools, course management – class list, groups/sections, communicating with students, adding content basics, assignment basics, quiz basics, adaptive release, key terms and resources for instructors.
ABCs of Content: overview and table of contents, modules; adding content to courses (from existing course content, building it from scratch), creating activities for learners, instructor settings for assignments, discussions and quizzes.
Engaging Learners: brief UDL overview and overview of accessibility in Brightspace, tools and features for communication (announcements, activity feed, discussions and virtual classroom), tools and features for engagement (calendar, progress)
Assessing Learning: assignments, quizzes, evaluating learners via quick eval and submissions, rubrics, gradebook basics.

February and March sessions are open for registration, with further workshops continuing through June.

Preparing Course Sites for Spring

Our Course Site Checklist for Faculty can be helpful when prepping your online course for the new semester.

You will find useful SPS quick guides from the OFDIT team and links to Blackboard Help pages, as well as a checklist of all the elements that need to be updated in a live course site for an upcoming semester, including:

Welcome announcement
Instructor card
Syllabus/Course Schedule
Due Dates

Ensuring that all dates for your course are accurate for the new semester is especially important; this includes dates mentioned in text items as well as assignment and folder availability.

Though you will need to manually update any dates mentioned in any text, Blackboard availability and due dates can be reviewed and updated via Blackboard’s Date Management tool, either individually, as a group of items, or all of the dates at once. This is a great option if you are using content from a previous semester and would like to adjust your dates for the new semester. To learn more about how to use this tool, please see our quick guide, or contact our team for assistance.

Teaching with Intelligence:
Generative AI in the Classroom

An early alert about a series of events exploring generative AI in higher education in February:

Decoding Generative AI: Navigating the Fundamentals

What is AI, and how is it impacting the classroom? What are some current approaches and latest updates in this rapidly-growing area?

Friday, February 2, 12 pm
Thursday, February 8, 6 pm
Open to faculty, staff, and students

Using ChatGPT and other AI tools as a brainstorming tool to enhance course learning outcomes and student success with experiential learning opportunities.

A CUNY Career Success Fellows event, presented by Drs. Joseph Foy (Business) and Isabelle Elisha (Psychology)

Monday, February 5, 12 pm
Open to faculty and staff

Let’s Talk AI: Student Roundtable.

What do CUNY SPS students think about generative AI and their learning? What are advantages and issues regarding the use of these tools? What more would be helpful?

Thursday, February 15, 6 pm
Open to students, faculty, staff

Hold the date and keep an eye out for an announcement and registration links in the next few weeks!

CIED Workshop

Presenters: Dr. Tara Barca and Dr. Linda L. Ridley

This workshop will incorporate the results of a qualitative study that examined the exclusion of chattel slavery in the teaching of the history of American business (Baptist, 2014; Katznelson, 2005).

Participants will be encouraged to enhance their research knowledge and reshape their pedagogy to include the true origins of educational concepts and theories, and through workshop activities and guided discussion, gain cutting-edge tools to facilitate inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible pedagogy.

This event is open to all CUNY SPS students, faculty and staff. Please register here.

Open Spring

For Open Spring at CUNY SPS 2024, the SPS OER Initiative is pleased to once again offer the Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series (March 1-28). The hybrid online (sync/async) workshop covers the intersection of Open Education and Inclusive Pedagogy. Participants review a course using a course review rubric annotated with open and inclusive educational practices and create a proposal for incorporating new inclusive pedagogy approaches. Registration is open through February 26, 2024.

During the workshop, synchronous online discussions featuring the themes of representation, accessibility and inclusion, and student agency will take place Fridays at lunchtime and are open to the whole SPS community! The call for proposals for the community discussions is open through February 21, 2024. For more information, the workshop registration form, and the call for participation in the community discussions, see Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series.

All the Best,
Your OFDIT Team

December 13, 2023

OFDIT Newsletter December 2023

Dear Faculty,

We hope the end of the semester is wrapping up smoothly! We wanted to present you with registration links for our upcoming Open and Active Video workshop (NTA hours available!) and Brightspace trainings happening in January, news about LMS and Screencast-O-Matic transitions, and some options for calculating final grades in your courses. It’s a gift to work with such committed faculty, and we hope the upcoming break is a good one for you all!

Open & Active Video Workshop

Interested in boosting student engagement? Consider interactive videos!

The Open & Active Video Workshop (January 8-22, 2024) is a 2-week asynchronous online workshop on how to source and create openly-licensed content for an educational video, how to film and edit the video, how to add interactive components by incorporating questions right into the Panopto player or by embedding the video in a VoiceThread, and how to openly license and share the video. Faculty who complete the workshop are eligible for compensation of 7 NTA hours and are invited to produce a second video for an additional 4 NTA hours. Registration is open through January 2, 2024!

LMS Transition News

January is a time to explore Brightspace!

You may want to take advantage of the break between semesters to explore the following opportunities:

Brightspace Demos for Faculty

Basic navigation, course navigation, the student experience, a look at a sample course and accessibility in Brightspace. Staff are welcome to attend.

You can register here to attend on January 10th, 18th, or 23rd

Explore Migrated Courses

Access Brightspace using your CUNYlogin (Firstname.Lastname##@login.cuny.edu) and explore how your Summer 2023 and other past courses look in Brightspace.

Create a Practice Course

Create a practice site using the widget found on the dashboard after logging in. There are two limitations: practice sites may not include SPS-specific tools like VoiceThread, Digication, and Panopto, and faculty cannot currently enroll students despite the default text in the widget.

Upcoming Brightspace Essentials Workshop

Brightspace Essentials, a self-paced, asynchronous workshop organized in bite-sized chunks of micro-learning units, will be available to SPS faculty and staff by January.

Keep an eye on the new training page of the SPS LMS Transition site for regularly updated resources and event details.

Migration of Dev Sites

The migration of SPS dev sites (also known as master sites or parent sites) will take part in two phases:

3/4/7/10-week dev sites: migration begins January 15 and finishes by February 15
15-week dev sites: migration begins March 15 and finishes by April 15

CUNY Faculty will continue to have access to Blackboard and Blackboard content through the end of 2025.

Have other questions about the LMS transition? Please visit our Brightspace Transition site or reach out to us at brightspace@sps.cuny.edu.

Screencast-O-Matic is Now ScreenPal!

Screencast-O-Matic (SCOM), is available to SPS Faculty. The tool is a powerful video recorder with a robust editor that can be used to create video lectures, tutorials, demos, and more!

ScreenPal can record and capture your entire screen or specific areas of your screen, as well as add audio and/or webcam video narration to the video. The software can be used with various operating systems, including Windows, Mac, or Chromebook.

Please contact FacultySupport@sps.cuny.edu for more information and access to ScreenPal.

Calculating Final Grades Using Total Points/Weighted Total

As you prepare to wrap up the Fall semester, a reminder that Blackboard allows you to use Total Points or Weighted Total to calculate your final grades.

The Total Points column is created by default in Blackboard. The Total Points column will calculate final grades by simply adding up all the points a student earned. If you have selected “Calculate as Running Total” and percentage as the Primary Display for the column, the total points the student has earned is divided by the total points possible for their graded work, displaying the student’s average grade on the work they have submitted. If a student has missed an assignment submission, this average won’t be affected unless you enter a manual grade for them in that column.

The Weighted Total column calculates a final grade based on the respective percentages assigned to categories or individual columns. The final grade is calculated independently of the points assigned to each graded item. It is important to note that the Weighted Total column is created by default in Blackboard, but it is empty unless you set it up.

Please keep in mind that you can change the format in which grades are displayed in both the Total and Weighted Total columns. When you change the Primary Display, this is the format that appears in the Grade Center and My Grades area for students. When you change the Secondary Display, this is only visible to you as the instructor in the Grade Center; students do not see the secondary display. We recommend changing your Secondary Display to either SPS Undergrad Letter or SPS Grad Letter, whichever is appropriate, as this converts the final grade into the appropriate letter grade which you’ll have to enter into CUNYfirst.

Please visit our quick guides for further Grade Center help, or contact us for any questions!

All the Best,
Your OFDIT Team

November 15, 2023

OFDIT Newsletter November 2023

Dear Faculty,

Fall ahead with OFDIT as we give updates about our OER initiative and our LMS transition and share registration links for an info session on DEI in the SPS Course Review Rubric, the November CUNY IT Conference, and two Disability and Accessibility series events. We want to announce an RFP for the CITA Teaching and Learning Conference and invite your participation in a brief survey about our faculty onboarding programs. Finally, you’ll find both OFDIT’s new captioning request form and a tip about creating accessible hyperlinks in your course materials. We wish you a great month, and we are always thankful for SPS faculty’s demonstrated commitment to student learning needs and preferences!

OER Initiative Update

The SPS OER Initiative is excited to share that Zero-Textbook-Cost and OER courses have now saved SPS students over $3 million! SPS currently offers three undergraduate Z-degrees, allowing students to graduate without any textbook costs at all, and we have a fourth Z-degree in the works.

Check out our new Z-Degree badge designed by OFDIT’s Sharon Jorrin! This badge will appear on the program pages for our Z-degree programs.

The research on OER and open education, such as this recent talk at OpenEd23, consistently demonstrates that ZTC is associated with higher student retention, higher student persistence, and higher overall grades, so we appreciate you, SPS faculty, for your work in support of our OER Initiative. OFDIT is here to help you reduce textbook costs and develop open pedagogical practices–just reach out at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu.

Upcoming OER Initiative Workshops

Mark your calendars! For Open Spring at CUNY SPS 2024, we’ll once again be presenting the Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series (March 1-28). This hybrid workshop covers the intersection of Open Education and Inclusive Pedagogy. Live online discussions featuring the themes of representation, accessibility and inclusion, and student agency will take place Fridays at lunchtime and are open to the whole SPS community. Over the course of this 5-week workshop, faculty participants review their own courses with the help of a course review rubric annotated with suggested DEIA educational practices, culminating with a proposal for increasing inclusivity and student belonging in their course design and instruction. The discussion series portion will be open to our whole community of SPS faculty, staff and students.

Interested in boosting student engagement? Consider interactive videos!

In January, we’ll be running the Open & Active Video Workshop (January 8-22, 2024). This 2-week workshop covers how to source and create openly-licensed content for an educational video, how to film and edit the video, how to add interactive components to the video by incorporating questions right into the Panopto player or by incorporating the video into an interactive VoiceThread, and how to openly license and share the video. Faculty who complete the workshop are eligible for compensation of 7 NTA hours and are invited to produce a second video for an additional 4 NTA hours. Registration is open now!

LMS Transition News

The core staff managing the transition at SPS have been working with D2L and CUNY CIS to set up our SPS Brightspace organization within the CUNY-wide platform. We have been exploring how to manage courses and users, and have been testing the third-party applications we use at SPS (Panopto, VoiceThread, Digication, etc.).

The CUNY LMS Transition team is making progress on providing access for faculty and staff to explore the Brightspace platform. Once you have access, you will be able to work in practice course sites so that you can get some hands-on experience with Brightspace. The course migration test from Blackboard to Brightspace is also in process. The university plan is to migrate past course content, and SPS has also requested migration of our course development sites.

In the meantime, the OFDIT team is preparing training resources tailored to SPS, while the CUNY team still has a few more sessions of the CUNY Brightspace Demo and Q&A workshops scheduled:

Brightspace Demo for Faculty: Register Here

Nov. 29 at 11:00am

Brightspace Q&A: Register Here

Nov. 16 at 11:00am
Nov. 30 at 1:00pm

Finally, we share with you the following message from the CUNY University Faculty Senate.

Dear Colleagues,

As part of its responsibilities for this academic year, the University Faculty Senate’s Library and Information Technology Committee (UFS-LIT) is charged with tracking the transition to the new Learning Management System (LMS), Brightspace. In preparation for our December 5th UFS Plenary meeting, where we will be meeting with the LMS transition team at CUNY, we are trying to gather feedback from the faculty regarding the transition to Brightspace. Please complete this short form to share any questions or concerns you have about the LMS transition by Friday, November 17th.

Sincerely,
UFS-LIT Committee

Have more questions about the LMS transition? Please visit our Brightspace Transition site or reach out to us at brightspace@sps.cuny.edu.

Your Input Requested!
OFDIT’s Faculty Onboarding Programs Survey

As you know, CUNY will be transitioning to the Brightspace Learning Management System (LMS) over the next two years, and SPS will be delivering courses on Brightspace starting Summer 2024. This presents OFDIT with an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of our faculty onboarding programs, including the Blackboard Basics self-paced course, the Preparation for Teaching Online Workshop, and our Faculty Peer Mentoring Program. We will use your input as we review these programs and redesign them for your future colleagues.

When you have a few minutes, please fill out this 5-10 minute survey. Your insights are invaluable and will directly impact how we revise these programs over the coming months. The survey will close November 30, 2023.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
in the SPS Course Review Rubric

Friday, December 8, 12-1 pm Register here

Join Professor Kenya Harris (Nursing), OFDIT’s Sarah Kresh, and faculty participants in the March 2023 Open for All Workshop for an info session describing the DEI and Open Pedagogy annotations to the SPS Course Review Rubric that were created for the workshop. The SPS Course Review Rubric determines the standards and criteria by which SPS courses are created, revised, and launched, thus faculty input on how it can be used to create greater inclusion, access, representation, and authentic learning experiences for SPS students is important! Please join this discussion to make your voices heard in an ongoing consultative process to improve the student experience and student learning outcomes at SPS.

Upcoming CUNY Conferences and CFP

CUNY IT Conference

The 22nd Annual CUNY IT Conference, “Us and It. CUNY in the Age of Generative AI,” will be held from November 30-Dec 1 at the John Jay campus. Hear about generative AI from speaker David Birss, learn effective ChatGPT prompt management from SPS faculty Joe Foy, and explore sessions about the impact of AI on bias, assessment, and student engagement!

CUNY-wide Teaching and Learning Conference

CITA, the CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy, has put out a request for proposals for the upcoming CUNY-wide Teaching and Learning Conference, which will be held March 22, 2024 at the CUNY Graduate Center. Read more about the conference goals from the link above, and submit your proposals to CITA for talks, panel sessions, workshops, or poster presentations on topics like educational technology, pedagogical approaches to AI, student engagement, or any other topics related to teaching and learning by December 11, 2023 for consideration. All CUNY faculty and students can benefit when you share your expertise!

Engagement Events for SPS Faculty
Growth Mindset: Using Stewardship as a Model to Develop a Sustainable Learning Environment

This workshop is an immersive experience on how growth mindsets can be used to improve student performance. The workshop will focus on the social nature of a classroom and how to integrate strategies to strengthen the student’s skills when meeting new students, working inside a team to develop critical thinking skills. Stewardship will be used as a model to develop a sustainable learning environment.

Presented by Professor Sue Brandt, Entertainment Technology @ City Tech
Nov 17, 2023 @ 12:00 pm
Virtual workshop — Register Here

Special Series for CUNY Faculty:
Disability & Accessibility

In Spring 2023, CUNY entered into a Voluntary Compliance Agreement (VCA) with the U.S. Department of Justice. The CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives and Disability Programs is sponsoring virtual events this fall, open to all faculty and staff. The final session on teaching best practices may be of particular interest.

Offered on Fridays from 2-3 PM on Zoom.

Friday, November 17: New York State IT Accessibility Policy and Your Class
Friday, December 8: Best Practices for Teaching Students with Disabilities

Get Video Captioned – We Welcome Your Requests!

This may not be a big surprise to the SPS faculty community, but captioning a video benefits everyone. Studies have documented improvements in “comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video” when captions are present (NIH Policy Insight, 2015). At SPS we use a professional captioning service, 3Play Media, to caption video used in our courses. No matter where your video is hosted or if it is owned by a third party, we welcome your video requests for captioning. Check out our Caption Request page to get started!

Descriptive Hyperlinks Makes Documents More Accessible

By Curtis Itzen, SPS Online Business Program

Try using a descriptive hyperlink, rather than copy-pasting a URL, to help your readers better navigate your document. Ideally, descriptive links provide clear information about where the link is pointing. The MS Office Suite and most applications use a common workflow to add descriptive links. For example, in a Word document to add descriptive text for links, you’ll use the “Insert Hyperlink” dialog box. You can open this dialog box in one of two ways:

Use a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-k on a PC or Cmd-k on a Mac, or
Use the Toolbar Ribbon: Click the Insert menu tab, and then click on “Link”

In either case, the insert hyperlink dialogue box opens allowing you to add descriptive text, instead of a long string of characters. For details on adding descriptive text as hyperlinks you can review my guide: Adding Descriptive Hyperlinks. Try it in Outlook, Google Docs, Teams, or PowerPoint. It makes adding accessible links a breeze!

OFDIT Fall 2023 Trainings

November trainings from OFDIT include opportunities to learn more about Panopto and how to create and adapt OER materials for your courses!

You can consult our Faculty Commons Site for a full description of our trainings.

Introducing CUNY Pressbooks

Have you been meaning to adopt, adapt, or create OER for your courses? Do you wish that an OER you use were more inclusive, accessible, or customized for your students? Do you dream of having self-check questions or social annotation built into course readings? CUNY’s Pressbooks Network might be the right tool for you.

The CUNY Pressbooks Network is an elegant publishing platform that offers the opportunity to find, adapt, or create openly licensed course materials. With pedagogical features ranging from glossaries and built-in social annotations to interactive questions and LMS grading functionality, CUNY Pressbooks is a great option for presenting customized course readings. In this hands-on, one-hour training, we’ll preview some of these features, see them in action in resources just waiting to be adopted, and then dive in to get familiar with the platform and its robust tools.

Thursday, Nov. 16 at 5:30pm Register Here

Panopto for SPS Faculty

Creating video content just got a whole lot easier! Whether you need to record a welcome message, a lecture, or a recorded announcement for your class, Panopto, the SPS video platform integrated into Blackboard, can make it happen in a few clicks. Participants will learn how to access Panopto and its features through Blackboard, focusing on a workflow to create, organize, and publish your video content. Special attention will be paid to viewing permissions, sharing content between courses, and captioning. Join us to boost your video skills!

Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 4:00pm Register Here

All the Best,
Your OFDIT Team

October 16, 2023

OFDIT Newsletter October 2023

Dear Faculty,

We hope the fall semester is going well for you and your students! Thanks to those who have volunteered to serve on school LMS transition committees to support all aspects of the move to Brightspace for our campus. In this edition of the newsletter, you’ll find registration information about a funded opportunity to attend a UDL workshop, information about CUNY’s fall professional learning opportunities for faculty and our upcoming OFDIT technical and pedagogical training sessions, along with a tip and OLC membership benefits to support your teaching practice.

Open UDL Workshop starts
Monday, Oct. 23

Registration is extended through Wednesday, October 18, for this 15-day asynchronous workshop that covers best accessibility practices and the intersection of Open Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning.

Eligible faculty participants will be compensated with 7 NTA hours upon successful completion of the workshop. For more details, please see our Advanced Workshops page. All faculty are welcome!

OLC Membership Benefits for all
SPS Faculty

CUNY SPS faculty can take advantage of our school’s membership in the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), one of the leading organizations for online educators.

OLC’s Quick Start for New Members:

Create your own OLC User Account/Profile – ensures member benefits are available to you
Sign up to receive OLC Today (weekly newsletter) – this is our best means of communicating what’s new in the world of online learning and education.
Explore our Home Page and check out free resources available to you (download from our Tools Faculty Playbook or Communities of Practice in Higher Education playbook, sign up to watch OLC Webinars (live or recordings), explore the OLC Research Center.
Rejuvenate: Take time to refuel – commit to a higher level of learning and involvement. Explore OLC Online Teaching Certificate Programs to advance your career.

For Active OLC Members:
OLC is here to support you with resources to help with your online teaching and learning goals and objectives.

LMS Transition News

Progress is underway in our transition to Brightspace: core staff training began and the implementation committees have started to organize their work. In September, OFDIT staff attended train-the-trainer and LMS admin workshops. More advanced training continues, along with development of resources for faculty and student training. We are looking forward to getting access to our own SPS “node” within the CUNY system, so that we can explore course and user management.

We’re also pleased to share that the four implementation committees – Communications, Technical, Training & Support, and Pedagogy & Practice– have kicked off and started to organize their work. It’s not too late to get involved and join a committee.

Please visit the Brightspace Transition site or reach out to us at brightspace@sps.cuny.edu for more information.

Engagement Opportunities for
SPS Faculty

CUNY’s Innovative Teaching Academy will be offering the Learning Disruption and Recovery series to provide an opportunity for all CUNY community members to deepen our understanding of learning disruption, and explore ways to proactively support students in and out of the classroom.

Topics include:

How learning disruption is manifested
Academic support: Best practices from campuses
Mental health and other non-academic support for students

Registration is available through the link above.

Special Series for CUNY Faculty: Disability & Accessibility

In Spring 2023, CUNY entered into a Voluntary Compliance Agreement (VCA) with the U.S. Department of Justice. As part of its commitment to the VCA, the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives and Disability Programs is sponsoring a 3-part series of virtual events this fall, open to all faculty and staff. December’s workshop on best practices might be of particular interest for teaching faculty!

Offered on Fridays from 2-3 PM on Zoom.

Friday, October 27: Disability Rights in Education
Friday, November 17: New York State IT Accessibility Policy and Your Class
Friday, December 8: Best Practices for Teaching Students with Disabilities

Generative AI

OFDIT would like to hear from you! Please take a few minutes to give us your input on how we can support shared knowledge and practices around AI in the SPS classroom.

The CUNY Teaching Matters Generative AI Series workshops are at capacity, but recordings and slides for the first and subsequent events can be found on the Teaching Matters events page.

Friday, September 29: What is AI and What Can it Do? (recording available)
Friday, October 27 (11-12pm): AI in the Classroom
Friday November 17 (11-12pm): Bias, Accuracy and Ethical Issues of AI

This year’s CUNY IT Conference theme is “Us and It. CUNY in the Age of Generative AI.” Registration is open for this event, which takes place November 30 – December 1, 2023.

Hmpc1br?

Or “How Many Passwords Can One Brain Remember?”

This month’s tip comes from the CUNY Graduate Center Digital Fellows. Discover useful ways to create secure and memorable passwords here.

OFDIT Fall 2023 Trainings

If you haven’t gotten the opportunity already to attend any of OFDIT’s trainings so far this semester, check out our upcoming series of offerings below.

You can consult our Faculty Commons Site for a full description of our trainings.