Training Sessions for SPS Faculty

OFDIT offers ongoing scheduled training sessions during the Fall and Spring terms. All SPS faculty are welcome to register for any session.  All sessions are 1 hour, unless otherwise noted.

Fall 2025 Trainings

We’ve divided the sessions into categories:

Brightspace Training

Brightspace: Managing Dates and Visibility of Items

In this training we will discuss due dates, start and end dates, the calendar, and the date management tool and how the visibility toggle interacts with start and end dates. (30mins)

Brightspace: Navigating and Grading Discussions

Learn to navigate the Discussions area seamlessly and to efficiently grade student participation in Discussion Boards in your course! (30 mins.)

Brightspace: Managing Groups

In this training we will discuss how to set up groups, group discussions, and group assignments in Brightspace. (30 mins.)

Brightspace: Notifications and the Pulse App

Brightspace Pulse is a mobile app that can help users stay connected with their courses in Brightspace through a quick view of announcements, grades, course calendars and content. Learn what Brightspace features are and are not available through the app, and how to enable and view Notifications to enhance the app’s functionality. (30 mins.)

Brightspace: Advanced Gradebook Topics

Setting Up the Gradebook: In this training, we will discuss setting up your gradebook for the semester, how to add items for extra credit, using grade schema for items requiring special circumstances, and more!

Brightspace: Navigating the Gradebook and Grading

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

Brightspace: Feedback

There are many options in Brightspace for giving students feedback on their work. In this short brown-bag training, we’ll go over how to give feedback on discussions, assignments, quizzes, and group assignments and show you how students access your feedback so you can guide them to all of it.
30 mins.

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: Finalizing your Gradebook

Review all the grading options that apply at the end of the semester when you are preparing final grades, and learn the steps for automatically transferring final grades from Brightspace to CUNYfirst.
30 mins.

Teaching Online

UDL Collaborative at CUNY SPS

Join us for the next meeting of the UDL Collaborative at CUNY SPS. We are a community of practice exploring best practices of Universal Design in Learning (UDL), answering your questions about accessibility and inclusion, and brainstorming solutions together. All faculty and staff are welcome!

From Open Educational Resources (OER) to Open Pedagogy

Whether you’re looking to lower course costs for your students, update or customize instructional materials to make them more relevant and engaging, or empower your students to become active contributors to your field, Open Educational Resources (OER) and open pedagogy may be just what you’re looking for. In this one-hour session, we’ll introduce the why and how of OER—materials that are free and openly licensed for you or your students to reuse, retain, revise, remix, and redistribute. We’ll also explore how student-created or student-remixed OER can fulfill the goals of open pedagogy—an approach that invites students to create knowledge rather than to merely consume it. At the end of this interactive training, we’ll share upcoming opportunities to participate in workshops geared toward using OER and open pedagogy to improve learning outcomes, to create interactive multimedia content, and to increase representation, inclusion, accessibility, and student voice and choice in online courses.

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.

The Pedagogy of Social Annotations

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 social annotations across a range of disciplines, platforms, and assignment types, and discuss how this practice can build students’ skills, foster community, and promote intellectual growth.

ePortfolio

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. (45 mins.)

Multimedia

    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.  

    VoiceThread for SPS Faculty

    This training will introduce VoiceThread, an asynchronous video discussion board.  VoiceThread allows faculty and students to create multimedia presentations that creates 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. In this session, SPS faculty will learn how to create a VoiceThread and integrate it into their Blackboard course.

    OpenLab

    OpenLab Support Hours

    OpenLab is open for business! Join the OpenLab team this semester to learn about available tools and features, including building your own site, using our awesome new single sign-on plugin, and joining the growing groups and conversations happening with other CUNY SPS community projects! Please bring your OpenLab questions and ideas for one-on-one support and collaboration. We’re looking forward to helping you bring your ideas to life!

    Past Training Sessions

    Student Engagement in Online Learning

    Join us for a discussion of best practices for generating and sustaining student engagement in the virtual classroom. This training will review approaches to enhance student engagement and instructor feedback in online courses, including different ways to present content and provide feedback, activities to promote student interaction, active learning approaches, and connecting your course content to the real world. You’ll have an opportunity to discuss challenges and successes you’ve experienced and share strategies with colleagues.

    General Brightspace Training

    Further Brightspace training is available from basic to advanced. See the LMS Transition site for details.

    Brightspace Day

    The OFDIT Team is busy preparing a day of activities to ready SPS faculty and staff for a smooth transition to our new learning management system, Brightspace, where all classes will be delivered starting Summer 2024. You can expect both in-person and virtual support sessions with interactive demonstrations, a showcase of best practices and strategies and hands-on work with your dev site or course site. It will be a good opportunity to log in, explore the environment, and ask us anything!

    Making Your Course Content Accessible with Ally

    Want to make your documents and Blackboard course content accessible but don’t know where to start? Join us for a training session to learn how! We will cover accessibility principles and provide practical tips on how to use Blackboard Ally to make your course files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and Blackboard content (such as font, headers, images, charts, graphs, hyperlinks) more accessible to all your students.

    ePortfolio for SPS Faculty: An Introduction

    If this is the first time you are using Digication’s ePortfolio in your course or you need a quick refresher, this workshop will help both new and existing faculty get acquainted with ePortfolio. We will discuss the current practice of using ePortfolio at CUNY SPS, navigate through the tool in a course site, review the responsibilities of instructors when using ePortfolio, and showcase 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.

    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!

    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.

    A Cut Above: Making Your Videos More Professional

    Learn simple steps to present yourself on video to enhance your connection with your students by looking more professional.  Nowadays, we have multiple opportunities to be on camera for synchronous virtual meetings or recording content for our classes. Having your students see and hear you builds rapport and sparks excitement for learning.  No matter if you’re trying this for the first time or have been creating media for a while, this session we’ll give you a set of guides to make your videos look more professional.

    Personalizing Your Panopto Video

    As many of us have learned, using Panopto to create a video is a simple process. But many of us have yet to unlock the powerful features inside Panopto that can transform video to maximize its impact.  In this session, participants will look inside the Panopto video editor to discover tools for trimming or cutting video, adding additional content (ex. YouTube videos), or challenging students with in-video quizzes.  Finally, we’ll review Panopto’s robust viewer analytics that tells us who has watched the video and for how long. Join us to make your next video go from good to great!

    OpenLab Information Session

    Planning your future collaborative projects? Curious about what digital tools will be available at CUNY SPS in the near future? Thinking about what open digital pedagogy tools are best to collaborate, create, and explore? In this one-hour informational session, we’ll introduce the CUNY OpenLab. We’ll explore projects on other CUNY-based OpenLabs and take an informational tour to explore the possibilities of a new, open-source platform coming soon to CUNY SPS. At the end of this interactive info session, we’ll share upcoming opportunities to participate in other workshops geared toward open digital pedagogy.