Due to faculty demand, the Faculty Center for Professional Development has added three final cohorts to the Bb Basics and Teaching Remotely course rosters.  The NEW cohorts are as follows:

Blackboard Basics Course

This is a self-paced general overview of the basic tools and functions inside CUNY’s current installation of Blackboard. There are three remaining cohorts of the course available as follows:​​

  • COHORT 10 – Begins on July 27, starting today.
  • NEW COHORT 11 – Begins on Monday, Aug. 3, enrollment closing at 5:00pm on Sunday, Aug. 2
  • NEW COHORT 12 – Begins on Monday, Aug. 10, enrollment closing at 5:00pm on Sunday, Aug. 9

Teaching Remotely: Pedagogical Practices and Practical Skills Course:

This two-week advanced-level course has been developed as an equivalent alternative to the CUNY Online Initiative’s SPS OTE course. It has been designed to fully instruct teaching faculty, department facilitators, and course developers at CSI in the actions and preferred techniques required to effectively stage and develop fully online courses. There are three remaining cohorts of the course available as follows:​​

  • Cohort 4 – Begins Monday, July 27, begins today.
  • Cohort 5 – Begins Monday, Aug. 3, enrollment available until 5:00pm on Friday, July 31
  • NEW Cohort 6 – Begins Monday, Aug. 10, enrollment available until 5:00pm on Friday, August 7

In addition to the courses above, the Faculty Center is excited to offer a new online resource for CSI faculty: Building Remote Courses.

Building Remote Courses is a resource center created as the final component of professional support to teaching faculty in completing their Fall 2020 courses. It directly builds on the Bb Basics, SPS OTE, and CSI Teaching Remotely courses, shifting focus from the pedagogical tenets of course design to the physical tasks of building a fully online course within Blackboard. Focusing broadly on the needs of instructors throughout CSI, Building Remote Courses is designed to be a more collaborative, yet strategically guided, environment. It maintains a step-by-step, modular format that walks participants through the process of building a fully functioning Fall 2020 course from start to finish.

The Building Remote Courses Resource Center serves as an ongoing direct connection to the guidance, tools, and one-on-one assistance needed to help CSI faculty be successful in building highly effective online courses. And while it is designed to be easily navigated and utilized independently by faculty in a similar manner as the self-paced Bb Basics course, it also functions as a hub for interdisciplinary faculty engagement and collaboration. This purposeful structure allows faculty participants to receive both guidance from the Faculty Center, as well as, directly from faculty peer mentors, and water cooler-style peer feedback mechanisms throughout the build process, from course outline to deployment. This is a new, more innovative process by which faculty can create remote courses on Bb for use during the Fall 2020 semester and beyond. This new interactive online resource will be available to all teaching faculty and staff who complete the Bb Basics and SPS OTE or Teaching Remotely courses. It will contain complete access to the entire range of training and support needed to build remote courses to completion including all aspects of Blackboard LMS training and support, pedagogical materials, course construction most effective methods, and discipline-specific and library resources. It will also include a full schedule of virtual drop-in sessions and faculty-led synchronous group sessions as indicated weekly by the Faculty Center team.​

For more information, or to enroll in any of the Bb Basics or Teaching Remotely course cohorts listed above, please email Kristen Lindtvedt at kristen.lindtvedt@csi.cuny.edu.​

By Kristen Lindtvedt