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Faculty Development Workshops

During the Fall and Spring terms, the CTE will schedule a variety of pedagogically focused workshops, with topics selected from current educational trends, department/university needs, suggestions from Chairs and Faculty, and survey results.
You may periodically be asked to fill out a survey from the CTE regarding your interest level on a variety of pedagogical topics. These surveys will help to focus the workshop planning to ensure we are providing information that is the most useful and relevant to the University of Scranton community.
Additionally, if there is a topic of interest that is specific to your department, we can design and facilitate a workshop on a departmental basis. We can work with your schedule, with sessions conducted during faculty meetings, or other times that faculty are available to participate.

 To Sign up to attend Brightspace Workshops, follow these steps:

    • Log into the UofS Portal
    • Click on the 3 line icon in the upper left corner
    • Choose All Cards
    • Search Workshop
    • Choose CTE Event Registration
    • Select the type of event you'd like to register for
    • Click Register

Please bring your laptop to workshops.

Calendar of Workshops

 

 

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Descriptions of Workshops

Making Your Brightspace Course Accessible

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make instructional content in Brightspace more accessible to a wider range of students with disabilities and will also make your website content more user friendly. In this workshop we will discuss methods for both.

Brightspace Basics

This workshop will cover the following:

Highlight the features of Brightspace, introduce the basic modules of Brightspace, as well as the policies and procedures for the system. You will learn how to get started using Brightspace, which will include navigation, course design, uploading your syllabus and course materials and creating dropboxes.

Suggestion: Review some of the basic Brightspace tasks in the following link: http://www.scranton.edu/academics/lms/d2l_scratch.shtml.

Brightspace Quizzes (Tests, Exams, etc.)

Quizzes can be used to help build engaging online learning environments, reinforce lessons, and evaluate student work. This workshop will cover the creation of quizzes within Brightspace. Instructors will learn how to create/edit a quiz, create question sets and pools, add question types from within Brightspace as well as from other sources, and how to regrade a question. 

Prerequisite: Brightspace Basics

Brightspace Gradebook

The Gradebook interface in Brightspace allows instructors to track and display grades for Brightspace content items (quizzes, drop boxes, discussion forums and surveys) and for assignments handed-in outside of the Brightspace environment. In this workshop, instructors will learn how to view grades; enter grades and comments; configure gradebook preferences and import/export grades; manually create and edit gradebook categories, assignments, and grading scale; and weigh categories to compute an overall grade for each student.

Prerequisite: Brightspace Basics

Brightspace Discussion Forums

This workshop will cover the setup of discussion forums for your entire class, groups and/or individual Journals. The Brightspace discussion forum has many rich features that take advantage of online communication’s ability to enrich teaching and learning. Discussion Forums provide instructors with the ability to create interactive, peer-to-peer collaborative learning communities. Iinstructors will learn how to: create Discussion Forum forums that stimulate effective discussion; moderate discussion forums; grade and print posts; perform advanced searches and sorts of discussion forums.

Prerequisite: Brightspace Basics

Brightspace Rubrics, Drop Boxes & TurnitIn.com

All three will be highlighted in this workshop. Dropboxes in Brightspace are full featured and enhance instructors' ability to assess students. TurnitIn.com is another great tool for instructors and can deter plagiarism while at the same time reinforce proper paraphrasing techniques.  Grading rubrics provide instructors and other assessment evaluators with an efficient method of consistently grading subjective learner submissions for drop boxes, discussion forums, blogs, etc. and manually-graded assessment questions. Students also benefit from the use of grading rubrics in that they can see, in advance, the criteria against which their assignment will be evaluated. Grading discussion forums and assignments will both be covered in this workshop. Rubrics will also be the base of the pyramid for mapping instructional/course objectives, outcomes and competencies. That workshop is coming soon!

Prerequisite: Brightspace Basics

Brightspace Exam Security

With exam security being a more prominent concern in recent years, learn how to "tighten up" your Brightspace exams and minimize cheating. In this workshop, we will look at the quiz tool's question delivery, date restriction, feedback, password option and the Respondus Lockdown Browser features used in a combined approach to make exams more secure.

Brightspace New Features

For Fall of 2024 we have some new features in Brightspace. We will look at the new QuickEval tool, and new enhancements to the quiz tool, the gradebook and Respondus Lockdown Browser.

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