Faculty are welcome to self-enroll in these CTL courses:
Modules for Teaching Online and Learning Brightspace from the Student Perspective.
Events Calendar
Improve Brightspace Course Accessibility with Ally
Microsoft TeamsDuring this workshop, you will learn how to use Ally to evaluate the accessibility of your course materials. You will also learn how to use Ally’s step-by-step instructions to improve the accessibility of course documents. Finally, you will learn about the alternate formats Ally makes available to students for all your course materials.
When is it Okay to Use AI?
Microsoft Teamso During this interactive session, participants will anonymously submit brief teacher and/or student generative AI use scenarios that will be pulled at random for discussion. For each one, we’ll survey attendees regarding their comfort level with the scenario described, weigh in on what we see as the advantages, downsides, and ethical issues of the scenario, and then vote once more. This session should be a fun way to learn about how your colleagues feel about genAI use and to help you clarify your own beliefs and expectations.
Brightspace Tools & Workflows for Grading & Feedback
Microsoft TeamsThis 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.”
Neurodivergent Learners: Building a Supportive Classroom and Community
303 Howe, CTL ClassroomExplore how to create an inclusive classroom culture that recognizes the strengths of neurodiverse learners. This session focuses on understanding individual and collaborative group needs, celebrating diverse ways of thinking and contributing, and establishing a learning environment where all students feel supported and valued.
Brightspace Course Design with Equity in Mind
Microsoft TeamsThis 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
Collecting Mid-term Feedback From Students
Microsoft TeamsThis 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.
Developing Your AI Policy
Microsoft TeamsNo matter our stance on the role of generative AI in our discipline, each of us has a responsibility to develop course and assignment AI policies that can be clearly communicated to students. Given the rapidly changing technology, it can be hard to figure out how to shape useful policies, but by thinking about where you stand and the needs of your discipline, you can begin to describe the values you want to relay. In this workshop, we’ll explore heuristics for identifying values, beliefs, and action steps around genAI that will help you a draft policy ready for discussion with your students.
Brightspace Assignments
Microsoft TeamsIn 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
Coaching Students to be Better Peer Reviewers
Microsoft Teamso Do you assign peer reviews on essay drafts and feel disappointed in the results? Peer-to-peer interaction can be a powerful motivator for student learning, but it's also a troublesome pedagogy. Students and faculty alike sometimes report that it seems like wasted time that takes away from the professor's input on priorities -- yet research says otherwise! What causes this disjunction? A lack of coaching and practice. This workshop will introduce several rationales for peer responses, provide strategies for how to prepare students to do effective reviews, and offer participants the chance to try peer review themselves.
Collecting Mid-term Feedback From Students
Microsoft TeamsThis 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.
Coaching Students to be Better Peer Reviewers
Microsoft Teamso Do you assign peer reviews on essay drafts and feel disappointed in the results? Peer-to-peer interaction can be a powerful motivator for student learning, but it's also a troublesome pedagogy. Students and faculty alike sometimes report that it seems like wasted time that takes away from the professor's input on priorities -- yet research says otherwise! What causes this disjunction? A lack of coaching and practice. This workshop will introduce several rationales for peer responses, provide strategies for how to prepare students to do effective reviews, and offer participants the chance to try peer review themselves.
Brightspace: Customize Your Course with Release Conditions and Intelligent Agents
Microsoft TeamsDuring 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.
Explore Notebook LM With Us!
302 Howe Memorial 302 Howe Memorial Libraryo Join us in-person to explore Notebook LM, a research summarizing and chat-based text generation tool that utilizes only the sources you share with it. We’ll open with a brief presentation about the interfaces, possible uses, and ethical considerations, but most of your time will be spent using the Notebook LM. Please bring your laptop so you can take time to work with the tool, stopping periodically for the group to check in about what we’re noticing and thinking. Whether you’re considering using this tool in your teaching or curious what your students may be doing with it, this exploration will help you to become more familiar with their possibilities and shortcomings.
Brightspace Course Design with Equity in Mind
Microsoft TeamsThis 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
Rigor, Standards, and Supporting Students as Writers
Microsoft TeamsThis workshop invites participants to define what rigor in writing means to them—and then juxtapose that with how a pedagogy of compassion or kindness intersects with notions of rigor. High expectations don’t need to conflict with a people-centered classroom that values the experience of both teachers and students.
Student Panel on Neurodiversity
303 Howe, CTL ClassroomHear directly from neurodivergent students as they share their experiences, insights, and successes in higher education. This session provides valuable perspectives on practices that have supported their growth and offers opportunities for reflection and future planning.
Rigor, Standards, and Supporting Students as Writers
Microsoft TeamsThis workshop invites participants to define what rigor in writing means to them—and then juxtapose that with how a pedagogy of compassion or kindness intersects with notions of rigor. High expectations don’t need to conflict with a people-centered classroom that values the experience of both teachers and students.
New Self-Paced Course Open – Introduction to Course Design: Applying the Backward Design Framework
OnlineIn this course, you will apply the foundational principles of the “backward design” framework to design courses that foster student success. Courses designed with this framework communicate clearly to students what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how they will know if they’ve mastered the material. You learn how to align your course objectives, activities, and feedback to create a clear, cohesive learning experience that supports student progress toward achieving their goals.
Brightspace Tools & Workflows for Grading & Feedback
Microsoft TeamsThis 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.”
Resisting AI in Teaching
Microsoft TeamsThis workshop explores the ways some educators are refusing or resisting the calls to incorporate genAI into our writing and teaching. Using “Refusing GenAI”(a disciplinary-based argument) and Marc Watkins’ “AI is Unavoidable Not Inevitable” as our foundation, we’ll have a structured conversation about how paying attention to AI in our fields and in our world does not mean committing to teaching with it.