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.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025 at 12:00 pm - Register Here

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

Monday, October 6, 2025 at 5:00pm - Register Here

Have you been hoping 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.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025 at 12:00pm - Register Here

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

Wednesday, October 8, 2025 at 9:00am - Register Here

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.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025 at 10:30am - Register Here

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.

Thursday, October 9, 2025 at 5:00 pm - Register Here

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.

Friday, October 10, 2025 at 10:00am - Register Here

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!

Friday, October 10th, 2025 at 12:00pm - Register Here

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!

Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 10:00am - Register Here

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. 

Wednesday October 15, 2025 at 11:00am - Register Here

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.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 2:00pm - Register Here

Have you been hoping 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, October 16, 2025 at 5:00pm - Register Here

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.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025 at 2:00pm - Register Here

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.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025 at 10:00am - Register Here

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


Friday, October 24, 2025 at at 12:00pm - Register Here