Center for Teaching & Learning

This one-hour workshop explores how faculty can use Brightspace to support an equitable learning environment. The workshop offers course design recommendations and connects Brightspace tools to these four equity-minded principles: 

Fostering Student Sense of Belonging  
Creating Course Structure  
Supporting Student Executive Functioning 
Building Relationships 

Please join us for a 1 hour refresher to learn more about how Yellowdig is designed to motivate your learners to increase engagement and keep them talking about your course concepts. The session will also cover how to optimize your role as an instructor in a Yellowdig community, as well as the data available to inform your teaching. 

During this workshop, we’ll explore how you can use Release Conditions to create a custom learning path for your course materials in Brightspace. We’ll introduce Intelligent Agents, which can automatically send emails to students who meet course criteria you specify. Finally, we’ll share examples of how you can use Release Conditions and Intelligent Agents together to further customize learning paths and enable timely student communication.   

Exploring how research can improve your teaching and your students’ learning? This introductory workshop on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) will show you how to start using research to answer questions about your teaching practices and student outcomes. Whether you're new to SoTL or looking to begin classroom-based research, this session will provide a straightforward guide to getting started.

This workshop provides an overview of strategies for grading student work and providing feedback. We’ll demonstrate tools to provide students feedback (inline grading, audio/video, rubrics),  different grading workflows, including Quick Eval, and a snapshot of Brightspace’s automated feedback tool – Intelligent Agents. We’ll also show how students can find their grades and feedback. Please note, if you are interested in learning how to set up your Grade Book, please view “Brightspace Grades.”

In this session we’ll focus on:

Creating and previewing Assignment (individual and group)
Settings and connecting Assignments to Grades
Editing and reordering Assignments
Evaluating student submissions (including annotations and rubrics)
Using the Submission Log for tracking student work

Join us for a book group to read The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching together. This guide is a hands-on exploration of the empirical research around creating equitable educational outcomes and examples of small and large teaching practices that can occur in classes of all shapes and sizes.  If you’re curious about inclusive or equity-minded teaching and wondering where to start, this book is for you!  Co-authored by a team with varied disciplinary and teaching experience, it has something for everyone.   Our first of three meetings will be on October 9 at noon.  

In Brightspace, the Quiz tool is used for both quizzes and tests.  In this session we’ll show the workflow for creating quizzes, including:

Creating questions and question types
Creating a question library
Building a Quiz
Grading a Quiz
Quiz statistics and logs

This workshop will discuss how to collect mid-semester student feedback and why you might want to do so. We'll provide an overview of the process - considerations for determining the types of questions you ask, methods for collecting feedback, communicating with your students, and suggestions for reflecting on the feedback you receive.  

We'll also share sample feedback surveys and introduce new CTL services to support your feedback collection. 

Curious about teaching, and looking for a low-key way to connect with colleagues? Join us for puzzles and podcasts! Today's podcast will be “Unraveling Faculty Burnout” an episode of Teaching in Higher Education that will focus on tackling the stigma surrounding burnout and how to show yourself compassion during difficult times.

Navigating literature in the field of education can be tricky. Educational terms shift quickly (e.g., “standards-based assessment” instead of “proficiency-based assessment”) and are often used interchangeably to describe similar phenomena. Without knowledge of common educational terminology, it can be difficult to find what you are looking for in the literature. This session will provide tips and strategies for navigating educational literature in preparation for a SoTL study. This session will be led by Dr. Dan DeSanto, Library Assistant Professor, who will provide an introduction to common educational research databases (e.g., ERIC) and tools to facilitate searching. Participants will be afforded time to search these databases for resources related to their topics of interest and identify appropriate terminology with the assistance of experts in the field.

This workshop will discuss how to collect mid-semester student feedback and why you might want to do so. We'll provide an overview of the process - considerations for determining the types of questions you ask, methods for collecting feedback, communicating with your students, and suggestions for reflecting on the feedback you receive.  

We'll also share sample feedback surveys and introduce new CTL services to support your feedback collection. 

Ally assists instructors in building a more inclusive learning environment and improving the overall student experience by assessing the level of accessibility of all instructor-uploaded content in Brightspace. Ally also provides guidance and tips for lasting improvements to content accessibility. In addition, Ally generates alternate formats to Brightspace course documents to meet different learner needs, abilities, and preferences. 

During this workshop, we’ll explore how you can use Release Conditions to create a custom learning path for your course materials in Brightspace. We’ll introduce Intelligent Agents, which can automatically send emails to students who meet course criteria you specify. Finally, we’ll share examples of how you can use Release Conditions and Intelligent Agents together to further customize learning paths and enable timely student communication.

This one-hour workshop explores how faculty can use Brightspace to support an equitable learning environment. The workshop offers course design recommendations and connects Brightspace tools to these four equity-minded principles: 

Fostering Student Sense of Belonging  
Creating Course Structure  
Supporting Student Executive Functioning 
Building Relationships