20 Minute Mentor - Online Faculty Professional Development - Spring 2022 Schedule

The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI) offers faculty a professional development series from Magna Publications, called the 20 Minute Mentor. The goal of the 20 Minute Mentor series is to offer faculty practical professional development opportunities in twenty minute snippets that can be accessed from anywhere and at any time during the given week. Session topics cover the areas of student engagement, teaching and learning, teaching online, assessment and learning goals, and classroom management.

Information on how to access the 20 Minute Mentor sessions is available each week in the Bulletin and the iDevelop e-newsletter.

New video presentations (with supplementary materials) go live at 10:00am each Monday morning and are only accessible through Sunday. 

The following sessions are on the schedule for spring 2022. For session descriptions, objectives, and mentor bios, click on the titles below. 

• January 17 - How Can I Build an Antiracist Syllabus?
• January 24 - How Can I Plan (or Revise) My Courses More Efficiently?
• January 31 - How Do I Structure Virtual Office Hours to Promote Student Use?
• February 7 - How Do I Create a Class That Support First-Year Students?
• February 14 - What’s Different About Teaching Online, and How Do I Change So My Students Succeed?
• February 21 - How Can Disruptive Innovation Impact STEM Education?
• February 28 - How Can I Assess Students in my Online Classes through Student-created Videos?
• March 7 - What Are Practical Solutions for Managing My Online Teaching Workload?
• March 14 - How Can I Write Better Exam Questions to Measure Student Performance and Learning?
• March 21 - What Are Active Strategies for Structuring a Synchronous Class?
• March 28 - What Are Three Proven Ways to Manage My Online Discussion Board and Actively Engage Students?
• April 4 - How Can I Use Microactivities to Engage Students and Improve Learning and Retention?
• April 11 - How Can Online Instructors Make Themselves More Visible to Students?
• April 18 - How Can I Be a More Productive and Effective Teacher?
• April 25 - How Can I Redesign a Classroom Assignment for Online Teaching?
• May 2 - What Culturally Responsive Teaching Techniques Can I Use to Improve Learning?

We would love to hear your feedback on the usefulness of these sessions. Please send your input to ctli@northshore.edu. 

Preparing for Spring 2022 Courses in Blackboard Learn

As you start to think about your spring courses, we wanted to share with you the following important information that will help you prepare your course site in Blackboard Learn.

Copying a Course
If you had us increase your course content collection quota in the course you are copying forward, please make sure to reach out to us before starting the course copy. We will need to increase the course content collection quota in the new course first.

To copy a previous course site into a new one in Blackboard Learn:

1. Go into the course site that has the content to copy. In the Control Panel, expand the "Packages and Utilities" section and click Course Copy.On the next screen, in the “Select Copy Type” section, make sure Copy Course Materials into Existing Course is selected in the drop down menu.
2. Now, in the “Select Copy Options” section, next to the Destination Course ID field, click Browse. Then, find and select the Course ID for the new course (the one you want to put the content into). Click Submit.
3. Select the Course Materials that you want to copy over to the new course. Usually, Select All is the best choice, although you might not want to copy announcements.
1. If Select All is not used, make sure to include Grade Center Columns and Settings if Assignments and/or Tests are being copied.
2. Also, under Discussion Board, select Include only the forums, with no starter posts if threads are not created by the instructor for students to respond to. If not, all student threads will copy over as anonymous and they will need to be deleted.
4. In the “File Attachments” section, keep the default settings.
5. Click Submit.

Please note: When a previous course site is copied over into a new course site, any new or changed content areas will be added to the bottom of the course menu.

Make Your Course Available
All Blackboard Learn course sites are unavailable to students by default. Here are the directions for making the course site available to your students. If you are in your course site, you should see a lock icon up at the top of your course site (to the left of Edit Mode). If you click that lock icon, it will make the course available to students. 

If you do not see the lock icon, here are the directions for making it available to your students.

To open your course:

1. Go into the course site.
2. On the Control Panel, expand the "Customization" section and click Properties.
3. On the next screen, in the "Set Availability" section, select Yes to make the course available.
4. Click Submit.

Preparing a Blackboard Learn Course Site for a New Semester
Please check out this handy reference at http://goo.gl/pZbUZ8 to help you prepare a  Blackboard Learn course site for a new semester.

Blackboard Learn Pre-Semester Course Checklist
Once your course has been copied over, please review this checklist at https://goo.gl/18q3r5 to help you make sure your course site in Blackboard Learn is ready to go for the upcoming semester. 

Blackboard Learn How-To Guide for Faculty

If you have any questions about using some of the features of Blackboard Learn, we encourage you to check out our Blackboard Learn How-To Guide for Faculty at https://sites.google.com/northshore.edu/blackboard-faculty/home. Here we have step-by-step guides to learn how to use the top ten Blackboard Learn features as well as links to some recorded workshops and additional resources for faculty and students.  

Please do not hesitate to contact the Blackboard Learn Helpdesk at bbhelp@northshore.edu if there are any issues with Blackboard Learn.