January 2021

Dear CUNY SPS Faculty,

Happy New Year from the OFDIT Team! We’re hoping that you had a relaxing holiday break, and — if you are teaching during the Winter — a successful start of the term.

Preparing for the Next Semester

Many of you are preparing your course for the Spring right now and might find our checklist “Getting Your Course Site Ready for a New Semester” a useful reference when making these course adjustments.

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

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. You can also use Date Management to see a list of all these dates in your course for review. 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.

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CUNY Acquires New Screen Capture Tools    

CUNY has secured licenses for TechSmith’s Snagit, a powerful screen capture software. Licenses are available for all current faculty. With Snagit, faculty will have a wide array of options to create, edit and annotate screen captures, including panoramic scrolling when the content is larger than one screen, as well as the ability to blur personal or unneeded information. In the spring semester, OFDIT will offer sessions to demonstrate SnagIt’s most common and useful functions.

Along with Snagit, CUNY has secured licenses for another TechSmith tool called Camtasia. Camtasia offers tools to create professional-looking instructional videos. It’s a powerful video editor focused on creating educational content. At SPS faculty have been using Screencast-O-Matic Pro for features covered by both SnagIt and Camtasia. The OFDIT Media Team will continue to support Screencast-O-Matic.

If you are interested in obtaining a license for Snagit or Camtasia, please contact the SPS Help Desk.

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For support on any of the above or other questions, please contact our team at: facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu. We are happy to support you via email, phone or a live Zoom session.

All best for the upcoming year,

Your OFDIT Team

 

 

October 2020

The fall semester is in full swing and we hope your classes are doing well! This newsletter by the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Design (OFDIT) contains updates on tools and resources from individual teams within OFDIT, and information on professional development events to assist with your online teaching needs.

Follow-Up from Faculty Discussion on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Thank you to all who attended the Faculty Discussion on October 2, on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. Here are the slides and the document we worked in, which includes links to all materials and a page of Mental Health and Wellness resources for students, staff and faculty.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy may be new to many of us, but its concepts and the pedagogical approaches it supports will surely be relevant going forward. Just like Universal Design for Learning supports all learners, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy is sound practice in general. If you are interested in joining or continuing the discussion of how to incorporate TIP in your courses, we have a Slack channel for faculty discussion that you are invited to join. First, join our SPS Faculty Slack Workspace, then click on Add Channel on the left menu, and join #faculty-discussion-meetup.

Designing Mobile-Friendly Course Sites

Many of our students access their courses via the Blackboard Mobile app on tablets or mobile devices — will your online courses display as well on these interfaces? For example, did you know that any content (text or images)  that is placed outside of a weekly folder or module is not visible when viewed through the mobile applications? See the screenshots below. To avoid loss of information, we suggest adding this content to the inside of the weekly folder or module instead. We’ll share more helpful tips for designing mobile-friendly courses during our upcoming Blackboard Mobile training sessions, where we’ll also review the two different BB apps for students and instructors. Please join us!

• Friday, October 30, from  3-4 pm / Registration Link
• Wednesday, November 4, from 12-1 pm / Registration Link

Or check out our Blackboard Mobile Apps page on our website.

Captioning for educational videos

This may not be a big surprise to the SPS community, but captioning a video benefits everyone. Multiple studies have documented improvements in “comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video” with captions (NIH Policy Insight, 2015). At SPS, in our online course development, we design to be accessible to all.  To that end, SPS has contracted a professional captioning service, 3Play Media, to caption video content used in academic courses.  Faculty can request captions through OFDIT by completing a brief form.

No matter the location of the video (YouTube, Ensemble, Dropbox, etc.) you may submit your academic video used in SPS courses for professional captioning. You may also submit dual language videos (Spanish/English) for captioning.  Feel free to bookmark this link for your future captioning requests.

Caption Request form 

Links/Reference:

Gernsbacher M. A. (2015). Video Captions Benefit Everyone. Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences, 2(1), 195–202.

3Play Media

Presentations at CUNY CUE Conference/OER Showcase 2020

 Three of our SPS faculty, together with OFDIT colleagues, will be presenting “Working with Faculty Working with OER” at the CUNY CUE Conference/OER Showcase 2020 on Thursday 10/29 from 1-2 PM ET: Faime Moussavi (Business), Andrew Palladino (Communication & Media), Jeanneth Sangurima-Quiles (Gen Ed), Sarah Kresh and Ruru Rusmin (both OFDIT).

In addition, Angela Francis and Hannah Miller from GenEd will be presenting “Beyond Savings: ZTC Implementation in the General Education Program” on Friday 10/30 from 1-2PM ET.

For more information and to register for this free conference, please visit the conference registration site.

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Thank you for reading! As always, please contact us at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu with any questions or support requests. To find registrations links and more information on any of the above please visit our SPS Faculty Community Site.

See you at one of our upcoming events, or for our next newsletter in November!

Your OFDIT Team

Faculty Development Day 2020 will take place virtually on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 12-3:30. We are looking forward to seeing new and familiar faces!

This event will be held via Zoom (please click on the link or check the call-in details section of this page). Here are some tips on attending a zoom event, as well as a test meeting you can join to check your connection and equipment.

Schedule

• Sip ‘n Chat: 12:00pm
• Welcome: 12:30pm
• Faculty exchange: 12:45-1:30pm
• Student panel: 1:30-2:00pm
• Faculty exchange: 2:00-2:45pm 
• Learning labs: 2:50-3:20pm
• Closing: 3:20pm
  

Sip ‘n Chat (12-12:30)

Grab your coffee, tea, or drink of choice and join us for an informal gathering in the half hour before scheduled events begin. Let’s check in and see how you’re doing, how your students are doing, how things are going.

Faculty Exchange (12:45-1:30)

Faculty share activities, course features, and other projects related to teaching or research at SPS. 

• Joseph Foy – An Experiential Learning Field Study in Accounting: Using Nonprofit and For-profit Businesses as Experiential Learning Venues
• Melanie Lorek – Helping Students to Avoid Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty
• Kate Moss – Late Work Policies:  Now and during “normal” teaching times

Student Panel: Making Knowledge Visible (1:30-2)

Join us as CUNY SPS students share their stories of transformation through ePortfolios.  In this session, panelists will show how their learning became visible through the high-impact practice of learning portfolios.  They will discuss highlights, lessons learned, and challenges in the production of their curricular (and extra-curricular) websites. Faculty, administrators, and students are welcome to attend to see how ePortfolios impact learning.

Student Panelists

• Ms. Enriqueta Au Muñoz, Bachelor of Arts in Disability Studies ePortfolio
• Ms. Jade Powell, Master of Science in Disability Services in Higher Education

Faculty Exchange (2-2:45)

Faculty share activities, course features, and other projects related to teaching or research at SPS. 

• Curtis Izen – VoiceThread: Transforming from Text to VoiceThreads and Not Looking Back
• Euny Lee – Video and Communication Tools for Student Engagement & Instruction
• Elizabeth Alsop – Teaching with Slack: Ideas for Online Instructors

Learning Labs (2:50-3:20)

Join a breakout room to learn more about and/or ask specific questions on the following applications:

• VoiceThread – Matt Lewis
• Digication – Karen Gonzalez
• Screencastomatic – Sharon Jorrin
• Blackboard / Grade Center – Sylvie Richards
• Blackboard Mobile – Michelle Gastulo
• Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning – Antonia Levy

Zoom Meeting Information

https://zoom.us/j/272610433

Meeting ID: 272 610 433

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Meeting ID: 272 610 433
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Presentation Materials

Copies of presentations are available in the Blackboard course SPS Faculty Development Day 2020, in which participants are invited to self enroll.

Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners: Incorporating Universal Design and Adult Learning Principles into our Teaching

Friday, April 24, 2015

For Faculty Development Day 2015 we have chosen to address two topics related to supporting our learners: adult learning principles and universal design in online/hybrid learning.

At SPS, we have a high percentage of adult learners. A greater awareness of adult learning principles can enable faculty to make teaching and learning more effective and stimulating for our students.

The goal of universal design in education is making learning spaces – rooms as well as online courses – foster learning for diverse learners of different capabilities, abilities, and preferences. This means that we not only try to eliminate barriers, but actually strive to find approaches that will make learning effective for all learners. For example, adding captions to a video may help a student who is blind, but it may also enhance the learning of a student who can read what is being said rather than simply watching. While accessibility issues may seem a specialized area, all faculty can benefit from knowing how universal design principles can be incorporated into course design and content preparation.

Our early morning session will focus on adult learning principles while our lunchtime panel of faculty, students and staff will introduce and then address issues of universal design in online/hybrid courses. We will again offer labs in morning and afternoon on two topics. One lab will provide a hands-on opportunity for faculty to learn how to apply universal design principles to both the design of their course sites as well as the format of course materials. The other lab will focus on the Content Collection in Blackboard, specifically on how to organize and manage your course content area folders, and how to collaborate and share content with other faculty.

Faculty Development Day will take place at 119 West 31^st St., Friday April 24^th from 9am – 3:30pm. This on-site event is open to and appropriate for all SPS faculty, whether teaching face-to-face, online or hybrid courses. Faculty are welcome to attend any or all sessions during the day, but we ask you to register and to indicate your preferred lab session and whether you are joining us for lunch, so that we are able to accommodate as many faculty as possible.

SCHEDULE

 

9 – 9.15 am	Coffee and check-in	Room 407, 4th floor
9.15 – 9.30 am	Greetings	Room 407, 4th floor
9.30 – 10.30 am	Plenary Session: “Adult Learning Principles” Discussion and hands-on activity	Room 407, 4th floor
10.30 – 10.45 am	Break
10.45 – 11.55 am Morning Labs	(1) Designing an Accessible Online Course or (2) Introduction to the Content Collection in Blackboard	Room 322, 3rd floorRoom 306, 3rd floor
12 – 2 pm	Lunch & Lunch Panel (from 12.15 – 1.45pm) “Perspectives on Universal Design and Accessibility in Online /Hybrid Courses”	Room 407, 4th floor
2 – 3.30 pm Afternoon Labs	(1) Designing an Accessible Online Course or (2) Introduction to the Content Collection in Blackboard	Room 322, 3rd floorRoom 306, 3rd floor

Questions, please contact Susan Ko: susan.ko@mail.cuny.edu

Raising the Bar: New Approaches and Tools for Teaching and Learning

March 28, 2014

Hold the date of March 28, 2014 and register below for our faculty development day workshop event organized around the theme of continuous innovation and improvement of instruction. Activities will include a morning plenary session, a lunchtime panel, a lab session to get better acquainted with some features of Blackboard Enhanced and another lab to explore various multimedia tools for your courses. You can attend as many sessions as you like at our new offices at 119 West 31st St. during the 9:00-3:30 pm schedule.

Our morning plenary session will set the stage for the day’s events as we consider the how and the why of new approaches and tools for teaching and learning. As part of our lunchtime panel, “What are students telling us about the course experience?” we will have a chance to hear some feedback on the course experience from students and those staff who engage with students in a variety of contexts, and to discuss faculty perspectives on these issues.  In the labs (each of the two is offered in morning and afternoon sessions), faculty will have an opportunity to explore some special features of Blackboard Enhanced and to become familiar with a number of multimedia and interactive tools that the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology will be supporting.

This on-site event is open to and appropriate for all SPS faculty, whether teaching face-to-face, online or hybrid courses. Faculty are welcome to attend any or all sessions during the day, but we ask you to register and to indicate your preferred lab session and whether you are joining us for lunch, so that we are able to accommodate as many faculty as possible.

Where: 119 West 31^st St, 4^th floor (registration checkin, plenary session and lunch) and 3^rd floor computer labs, t.b.a.

SCHEDULE

9:00-9:25 am	Welcome and Introduction
9:30-10:45 am	Plenary Session: “New Approaches for Student Engagement in Online Learning” Discussion and hands-on activity
10:45-10:55 am	Coffee Break
11 am-12:25 pm Morning Labs	Blackboard Enhanced: Managing your course more effectively and efficiently     OR Multimedia and Interactive Tools
12:30-1:50 pm	Lunch 12:30 Panel starts 12:45
2:00-3:30 pm Afternoon Labs	Blackboard Enhanced: Managing your course more effectively and efficiently     OR Multimedia and Interactive Tools

Questions, please contact Susan Ko: susan.ko@mail.cuny.edu