Center for Teaching & Learning

A well-designed syllabus thoughtfully connects course goals with assignments, activities, and assessments and uses an inclusion and equity lens to frame student support. During this workshop, we’ll look at how the language and content of your own syllabus demystifies your course, welcomes students, connects them to resources, and sets you up for more effective and efficient grading. Bring a copy of your syllabus and leave with a plan for final revisions that better serve you and your students.  

During this session, we’ll share strategies that you can use in your teaching to support metacognitive development for all your students, thereby creating equitable learning environments. Many interventions are small (they may take 5 minutes of class time); other strategies may inspire you to rethink aspects of your curriculum design.

Brightspace offers a flexible, intuitive interface for organizing and delivering course content. Thus, the move to Brightspace presents an opportunity to shift how we think about course design. During this workshop, we will highlight different approaches to structuring course materials in the Content area. We will cover some Content fundamentals as well as provide tips to guide you as you think about optimal ways to structure your course materials to create a cohesive experience for your students. 

No 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 needs, beliefs, and action steps around genAI that will help you a draft policy ready for discussion with your students.

This workshop covers how to set up and manage the Grade Book in your Brightspace course. We will demonstrate the best ways to organize the Grade Book and the best ways to enter grades. Some instructors may find it beneficial to create their Grades area anew rather than editing what has been migrated from Blackboard, and this session will help you decide which option is best for your course.

This session will provide an introduction to iClicker Cloud, a classroom engagement solution designed to increase student attendance, preparedness and understanding of course material.

Learn more about teaching and connect with colleagues in a low-key environment with puzzles and podcasts! This session, we'll enjoy an episode of Tea for Teaching addressing the science of learning students’ names. Psychologist Michelle Miller discusses why it matters, why it’s hard, and how we can learn names. Early in the semester is the perfect time to get some help on this challenging and important task—especially given the benefits to your classroom atmosphere.

Brightspace offers a flexible, intuitive interface for organizing and delivering course content. Thus, the move to Brightspace presents an opportunity to shift how we think about course design. During this workshop, we will highlight different approaches to structuring course materials in the Content area. We will cover some Content fundamentals as well as provide tips to guide you as you think about optimal ways to structure your course materials to create a cohesive experience for your students.

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.”

This workshop covers the details of using the Discussion tool in Brightspace. We will demonstrate where to set up both whole class and group discussions, and how link them to your Table of Contents. We’ll look at how to clean up Discussions migrated from Blackboard and cover the differences between Forums and Topics in Brightspace.

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

During 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.

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.

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.