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CTL and AIT Workshop Schedule

Unless otherwise noted, workshops take place in the CTL, 2420 Boylan Hall. Check back for updates to the schedule.

Pedagogy in Practice Week

January 10–12, 2023 

This three-day intensive practicum will offer hands-on workshops designed to prepare you to teach your spring classes. Sessions will show participants how to put pedagogical ideas to practical use in areas such as syllabus development, assignment design, student engagement, building classroom community, and more. There will be dedicated time set aside for writing course material, accompanied by peer review and conversation. The sessions will employ anti-racist pedagogies throughout, allowing participants to gain an understanding of the breadth and depth of this approach. This event will take place over Zoom to maximize participation and accessibility.

Stipends of $200 are available for a limited number of participants. In order to receive a stipend, participants are required to attend all sessions over the three days and complete a short survey following each session. Preference will be given to instructors of general education and/or high enrollment courses. Anyone is welcome to drop in to selected sessions even if they do not qualify for a stipend.

Please apply by filling out this form. E-mail the CTL with any questions. 

Welcome Back Social

Tuesday, September 20, 2022
12:30–2 p.m.

A fun opportunity to mingle and catch up with colleagues from across campus, and to talk about your teaching goals for the semester. More details coming soon.

Blackboard Practical Workshops Series (August 29–December 22)

Participate in the 30–40 minutes presentations about specific Blackboard functions and a Q&A forum at the end of each session. Presentations will take place on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1 to 2 p.m. Every other Friday, from noon to 1 p.m., instructors can access our Blackboard collaborated session for a free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

Tips to Organize Your Blackboard Site for a Hybrid Learning Mode

Become familiar with the Blackboard functions that will help you to develop a hybrid course, including setting up a materials delivery structure and personalizing course navigation.

• Wednesday, September 7, 1–2 p.m.

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, September 9, noon–1 p.m.

Rebuilding Your Course Using a Blackboard Template

We will share a Blackboard template with self-explanatory resources and guidelines embedded into the course menu hyperlinks.

• Monday, September 12, 1–2 p.m.

Working With the Blackboard Interactive Tools

Learn how to use Blackboard interactive tools such as Discussion Board, Blogs, Journals, and Wikis.

• Wednesday, September 14, 1–2 p.m.

Introduction to Assignment and SafeAssign

Become familiar with the Blackboard plagiarism detection tool. Participants will learn how to create Assignments and SafeAssign for student submissions and how to view, grade, and manage them.

• Monday, September 19, 1–2 p.m.

Introduction to the Redesigned Turnitin LTI Assignment Tool (repeated session)

Learn how to create Turnitin assignments using the redesigned LTI version and how to view, grade, and manage each student submission.

• Wednesday, September 21, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, September 23, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Student Preview, Looking at the Blackboard Activities Using the Student Mode

Learn how to look at the Blackboard activities using the student mode. You can submit assignments, take tests, participate in blogs, and discussion posts, create journals and wikis entries, and view some students' tools, such as My Grades.

• Wednesday, September 28, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Online Test Week (Monday, October 3–Friday, October 7)

Want to create an automatic grading midterm test? Attend the Blackboard presentations and Q&A session. Learn the steps to create an automatic grading test and deploy it to your students. You will learn simple steps to customize the Blackboard online test for each student. Alternatively, you can schedule a meeting with Carlos A. Cruz via e-mail to work together on your online test.

Creating and Deploying an Online Test on Backboard

• Monday, October 3, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Transferring Tests Created in Word or Other Text Documents to Blackboard

• Thursday, October 6, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your questions.

• Friday, October 7, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

The Blackboard Annotate Tool

Learn how to use Blackboard Annotate for customizable comments on each student's paper. Become familiar with new features such as sidebar summary view, freehand drawing tools, various color selections, and more.

• Wednesday, October 26, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, October 28, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Creating Course Groups and Group Assignments on Blackboard

Instructors will learn how to create and manage the course's groups and how to set up group collaboration areas. We will present how to associate an assignment with your groups.

• Monday, October 31, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Tools for Monitoring Students' Participation In-Class Activities

Become familiar with the Blackboard evaluation tools and get easy access to students who need immediate attention regarding their grades, activities, and course access.

• Wednesday, November 2, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Working With the Grade Center

Become familiar with the Blackboard Grade Center. Learn how to create columns, organize, and categorize them, access different grade center views, and more.

• Monday, November 7, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Creating Rubrics and Grading Assessments With Rubrics

Become familiar with the Blackboard rubric tool, associate it with assessments and use it to grade them.

• Wednesday, November 9, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, November 11, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

The Blackboard Survey

Gather insightful and valuable information from your students and learn what is working well in a course and what might change.

• Monday, November 14, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Balancing the Blackboard Grade Center and Saving Students' Grades on Your Desktop

Learn how to balance the grade center using the Total or the Weighted Column and export the grade center results to Excel.

• Monday, November 21, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Online Test Week (Monday, November 28–Thursday, December 2)

Want to create an automatic grading final test? Participate in the presentations and the Q&A session set up for the week, or schedule a meeting with Carlos A. Cruz via e-mail to discuss the steps to create an automatic grading test and deploy it to your students. You will learn simple steps to create a Blackboard online test different for each student.

Transferring Tests Created in Word or Other Text Documents to Blackboard (repeated session)

• Monday, November 28, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Creating Blackboard an Online Test and Using the Respondus Lockdown Browser Feature

Learn how to restrict what students can access on or from their computer during online Blackboard quizzes.

• Wednesday, November 30, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, December 2, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Archiving and Recycling Your Blackboard Course Site

Learn what to do with your course site(s) at the end of each semester and how to prepare for the next semester.

• Wednesday, December 7, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Transferring Blackboard Course Content to the Next Semester

Learn how to transfer, verify, and reuse the previous semester's course content and assessments.

• Monday, December 12, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Q&A

Join us in this open, free-form session to discuss your Blackboard questions.

• Friday, December 16, noon–1 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Blackboard Grade Center Week (December 19–22)

Do not know how to balance your Grade Center or the final grade does not seem correct? Wants to save students’ grades and submissions on your desktop? Take part in our presentations and the Q&A session. Alternatively, you can schedule a meeting with Carlos A. Cruz via e-mail to discuss your concerns and possible solutions.

Balancing the Blackboard Grade Center and Saving Students’ Grades on Your Desktop (repeated session)

Learn how to balance the grade center using the Total or the Weighted Column and export the grade center results to Excel.

• Monday, December 19, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Saving Students' Grades and Submissions on your Desktop

Learn about the options available to save students' grades, papers, and online test submissions on your computer desktop.

• Tuesday, December 21, 1–2 p.m.
• Blackboard Collaborate Guest Link

Digital Privacy in Higher Education: A Practical Introduction (Frans Albarillo, Library)

Thursday, October 13, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Zoom link

The sudden shift to online teaching and remote work has highlighted how higher education institutions like CUNY generate a great deal of educational data through course management systems like Blackboard and productivity tools like Microsoft Office, Google, and Zoom. These ubiquitous platforms provide valuable user information to companies who use the data, share, or exchange the data to improve and create new products. This session will examine what educational data technology companies, library vendors, and institutions like CUNY collect. And you can learn about strategies to minimize risks to yourselves and the students whom you teach when it comes to protecting their online privacy as well as ways to avoid or opt out of invasive data collection. This session will avoid technical jargon and is open to students, staff, and faculty.

The Creative Commons-Break Out From the Bonds of Copyright (Beth Evans, Library)

Wednesday, October 19, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Zoom link

Creative Commons licensing enables creators to share their work with others with whatever limitations they choose. Copyright law restricts building on the works of others and is contrary to the natural progress of knowledge. Learn how you can make your copyrighted work available to others to benefit research and creativity, while still protecting your copyright and protecting your exclusive right to profit. Also discover where to find the creative works of others that is free to use and build upon.

How Does White Supremacy Culture Impact Our Courses? (Donna Lee Granville, Sociology)

Thursday, October 27, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Zoom link

This workshop follows up on efforts to embrace anti-racism in our pedagogy by asking how the characteristics of white supremacy culture show up in our course policies and practices as well as in the classroom community. Participants will be asked to read Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture article and to reflect on a few questions before attending the workshop. One potential output is for workshop participants to submit suggestions or questions that will lead to an additional "guide" or "rubric" for syllabi that address specific themes: student-instructor relationships; sense of belonging and classroom community; assignment structure, accessibility, and deadlines; power dynamics, grading, etc.

Communicating With Our Students (Ngoc Cindy Pham, Business Management)

Tuesday, November 1, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.

Strong communication between instructors and students has always been key to effective teaching. While the distance imposed by COVID-19 made communication more difficult in many ways, it also opened up new channels of exchange. This workshop will discuss the communicative potential of different platforms, including BlackBoard, e-mail, and social media outlets. It will show you practical ways to motivate your students and continue to ease their transition back into the classroom.

Pedagogies of Discomfort (Yana Kuchirko, Psychology)

Thursday, November 3, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.

In this workshop, Dr. Yana Kuchirko will provide hands-on tips in pedagogy of discomfort, an approach developed by Megan Boler that acknowledges both cognitive and emotional facets of teaching and learning. In many classes, students encounter information that challenges their beliefs and assumptions about the world, leading many to feel a range of uncomfortable emotions such as anger, defensiveness, and fear. Emotions have the potential to derail critical inquiry when not approached sensitively and correctly, particularly in courses that focus on racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality. This critical inquiry approach provides educators with the tools to lean into the discomfort, and help students better understand the ways their emotions define how and what they choose to know, and conversely, not to know about a particular topic. In doing so, students reflect on their values and perspectives, and see their own personal experience, values, and ways of seeing as they are shaped by larger social, cultural, and political orders. Pedagogy of discomfort is particularly useful for educators who cover topics that elicit powerful emotional responses from students.

Extended Reality–Make Your Teaching Pop (Beth Evans, Library)

Wednesday, November 16, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Zoom link

Journey with your students in an online environment that goes beyond the two-dimensional grid of Zoom boxes, and breaks out of the classroom walls. Learning in Extended Reality (XR), which includes augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR), adds a new dimension to the classroom. Students will actively encounter, engage with and contribute to knowledge. The session will explore examples of how XR is used to teach science, history, the arts and literature. It will also outline some of the common tools available to create an AR experience.

Teaching With StoryMaps (Miriam Deutch, Library)

Thursday, December 1, 2022
12:30–1:30 p.m.

StoryMaps is a multimedia platform that uses maps, text, images, and even audio to bring research to life. Digital projects such as StoryMaps showcase the possibilities of open pedagogy by allowing students to play an active role in learning, becoming not only consumers of knowledge but also producers of public scholarship. StoryMaps encourages collaborative work, improves information and digital literacies, sharpens writing for public audiences, and shows students how to effectively present critical, creative, and community-engaged scholarship.

Past Events (Summer 2022)

Transferring Blackboard Course Content From Previous Semesters

Learn how to transfer, verify, and reuse Blackboard course content and assessments from previous semesters.

Wednesday, August 31, 1–2 p.m.

Introduction to the Redesigned Turnitin LTI Assignment Tool

Learn how to create Turnitin assignments using the redesigned LTI version and how to view, grade, and manage each submission.

Monday, August 1, 1–2 p.m.

• Join this session.

This workshop will be repeated on the following dates:

• Tuesday, August 2, 1–2 p.m.
• Monday, August 8, 3–4 p.m.
• Thursday, August 11, 3–4 p.m.

Brooklyn College Teaching Portfolio Workshop: Summer Cohorts 1 and 2

In the Teaching Portfolio Workshop, faculty reflect on the methods and materials of their teaching. This intensive, week-long process gives faculty the opportunity to concretize not only their philosophy of teaching, but also their praxis in the classroom, laboratory, and studio. With the guidance of the facilitating mentor, participants take deliberate steps in considering, collecting, and comparing the processes and products of their pedagogy. While the first three days of the workshop are asynchronous (self-directed based on a series of questions), the final four and a half days (including a weekend for seeking and finding materials) culminate in the completion of a high-quality digital Teaching Portfolio that can be submitted alongside Tenure and Promotion materials, or for consideration as a candidate for a teaching award or fellowship.

• Cohort 1: June 13–22
• Cohort 2: July 18–27

Register Here*:

Teaching Portfolio Workshop Registration Form

*There is a rolling deadline until cohorts are full; 12 faculty (max) per session.

Past Events (Spring 2022)

Advisor to Advisor: Conversations on How to Support Our Students /CTL in Collaboration

We are very excited to announce a Roundtable series on Advising facilitated by Liv Yarrow (Classics) with Nicole St. Clair (CAASS – Associate Director of First College Year and Student Success) and Takiyah Lord (CAASS – Associate Director of Academic Advisement and Student Success)

Session 1: Less Red Tape, More Options

Strategies for effective advisement. How to help students build schedules and plan their degree to avoid common pitfalls and what to do when the best laid plans go awry. This workshop will cover common financial aid and degree audit issues and tools we can use to help students avoid them.

• Thursday, Mar 17, 12:30–2 p.m.
• Register Here

Session 2: The Unique Role of Faculty in Advising

Come learn how to have more impactful and transformative interactions with your students. Learn what topics CAASS advisors recommend students discuss with their program advisors and WHY! Share idea and strategies.

• Tuesday, April 26, 12:30–2 p.m.
• Register Here

Session 3: How to Recruit Students and Keep Them Engaged

Reaching more students. How to target specific students in your program and review and track progress for all declared majors and minors. Strategies for using that information to make human connections and help students before a crisis arises. Hear about what has worked well in other departments and share your own approaches.

• Tuesday, May 10, 12:30–2 p.m.
• Register Here

Open and Digital Pedagogy: Fostering Student Engagement and Student Contributions to Public Scholarship

These workshops will focus on open pedagogy, that enacts the belief that students as part of their learning, can and should be, not only consumers of knowledge but also producers of public scholarship.

Open Education Technologists will provide ongoing support for faculty who are interested in developing and assigning open pedagogy digital projects. The BC OER Initiative also provides support for innovative pedagogical assignments/projects.  Awards will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

All of these tools are freely available to all BC students and faculty.

All workshops will be approximately 90 minutes and held virtually on Zoom and a link will be sent out prior to each event.

Offered by:

• Miriam Deutch, Associate Professor, OER Director
• Emily Fairey, OER/Digital Scholarship Librarian and Wolfe Institute Digital Humanities Fellow @ the Brooklyn College Library
• Colin McDonald, OER Developer, Brooklyn College and Project Manager, Graduate Center, CUNY Academic Commons
• Amy Wolfe, OER Developer, Instructional Designer and CUNY Accessibility Librarian

Digital Discussions

• Wednesday May 4, 1–2:30 p.m.
• Zoom Link

Social reading can deepen student engagement with the text, both individually and in groups. Learn how to create assignments using Hypothes.is, and Manifold, and Slack to encourage collaborative annotation. CUNY Academic Commons and Slack provide additional ways to bring together a variety of student viewpoints and resources that give a reading new life.

Teaching with Maps

• Thursday May 5, 1–2:30 p.m.
• Zoom Link

Presentation of StoryMap assignments; and participants will learn how to create a Story Map.  Here are some guides on StoryMaps Classic and the New StoryMaps.

Audio and Video Assignments

• Wednesday, May 11, 1–2:30 p.m.
• Zoom Link

Learn the best practices for your students to complete successful assignments involving audio and/or video. Recordings give students an opportunity to creatively package and present information for a public audience.

Open Publication Platforms

• Thursday, May 12, 1–2:30 p.m.
• Zoom Link

Learn how you can use dynamic, multimedia rich platforms - Manifold, CUNY Academic Commons, and Pressbooks - to publish student research projects or present course materials. These platforms have print-on-demand features and format well on mobile devices.

Game-Based Learning

• Tuesday, May 17, 1–2:30 p.m. 
• Zoom Link

Games and simulations are powerful tools for learning when tied to specific learning goals and outcomes. This workshop will demonstrate different types of games and choosing the right game for your lesson. Check out this Game-based learning Resources Guide.