Staff Blogs
New! Pre-Built Starter Course
What is the Brightspace Starter Course? The Brightspace Starter Course is a pre-built course outline designed to give you a jump start on building your course. It contains pre-built Modules, Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes, and Gradebook. All you need to do is personalize it and add your course materials. Get the Brightspace Starter Course Check […]
Where to Find Brightspace Support
What is Changing We are transitioning the consultations to a by-request model. Instead of having a calendar with pre-set times, you now email Faculty Support at citl@maine.edu and ask for a consultation. By doing this we hope to provide more flexibility in our available consultation times and be able to support more people. Who […]
New! Grant Extra Time on Quizzes Faster
About this New Feature Up until now, when you got an accommodation request from a student for extra time, you needed to go into each of your quizzes to grant that student extra time through “Special Access”. This new feature now lets you define an accommodation through Classlist once. Granting an accommodation through Classlist will […]
Quiz Setup Quick Resources
Setting up your first quiz of the semester? Finding yourself a little lost in all the settings? Check out these tutorials! Building Question Banks In general, we recommend building your questions in the Question Library and then importing your questions into your quiz. This is because it makes using the other tools, such as […]
New Assignment Experience!
One of the biggest differences between Blackboard and Brightspace is that we are going to see occasional Brightspace updates. Don’t worry though! These updates are to designed to make it easier for you to use Birghtspace and are done gradually. The latest update brought us a new Assignment Experience! If you are not ready to […]
Are You Ready for the Spring Semester?
The Spring Semester is coming right up! Here are a few things you can do to make sure that your course is ready to go. Copy Course Do you want to use materials from a previous course? You can copy items right into your Spring course! If you don’t want to copy an entire course, […]
NEW! Only Retake Incorrect Questions on a Quiz
Do you want the ability to let your students retake quizzes and only encounter the questions they had previously gotten wrong? A new feature in Quizzes will allow you to do just that! This setting makes it easy for students to focus on the just questions they got wrong. This is especially helpful if there […]
Giving Extra Time on Quizzes
When we give a quiz or exam we usually have a few students who need accommodation. Often times that means giving a student time and a half on a timed exam. In this post, we are going to quickly walk through the steps necessary to give these students the time they deserve. If you would […]
Quizzes: All About Timing!
When do you want students to start the quiz? When do you want them to finish the quiz? How long do they have to take it? These are all important questions you’re probably already asking yourself about the quiz/exam/test you’re setting up. In this post, we are going to talk about all these different settings […]
Content Area Tips
The purpose of the Content area is to guide students through the learning materials of your course. Making sure your content is organized and easy to navigate is what makes it a learning path and not just a collection of items. If you are getting emails from confused or frustrated students or just want to […]
Checklist for Running a Smooth Exam
Are you about to run your first Exam? Do you think you’ve finished setting it up, but you’re not 100% sure? Here is a checklist to help ensure that your exam is ready to go! Not sure how to start building an Exam? Check out this tutorial that walks you step-by-step through building a quiz: […]
CITL to host Communities of Practice
What is a Community of Practice? “Groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” – Wenger-Trayner, 2015 Communities of practice were first defined in 1991 by Lave & Wenger, and have grown in their popularity and application since […]
Hacker Pedagogy
The Maker Movement of the last decade gave rise to Maker Education and, now, Maker Pedagogy. Similar to most movements and trends, one can go back in history and note an abundance of precursors, such as apprenticeships, guilds, the sixteenth-seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, the 19th Century arts and crafts movement, vocational schools, and much more. […]
Team Publisher vs. Team Open Source
According to the College Board, undergrads spend an average of about $1300 each year on books and supplies. Some textbooks can run upwards of $350 apiece, which can be prohibitively expensive for a student on a tight budget. To put it bluntly, students shouldn’t have to choose between books and food. Many schools and universities, […]
Virtual Reality: Show, Don’t Tell
You have probably seen or used a Google cardboard or another version of a virtual reality (VR) headset. Maybe you’ve gone skydiving, or taken a new look at Stranger Things, or put yourself into the space of The Displaced. In 10 Shots Across the Border, the filmmakers tell the story from two physical perspectives. In […]
Friends, Enemies, Frenemies, Lend Me Your Ears
At the beginning of March, I was lucky enough to have the chance to go to the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas. The opening keynote was by Chris Emdin, who teaches at Columbia University. In his talk, he used the latest album from A Tribe Called Quest as the basis for a discussion on issues […]
Dynamic Soundfield Systems as Tools for Wider Success in the Classroom
The Hearing Loss Association of America estimates that about 20% of Americans live with some degree of hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound. That’s 1 in 5 people. Schools often overlook mild cases of hearing loss, despite the affect they have on learners. We typically design classroom settings as single-plane or auditorium-style spaces […]
Learning, Big Data and Responding to Political Climate Change
I was excited last week when Sheridan told me about data.world. It is a social network for people who work with open datasets. This independent site and service encourages and supports individuals and groups who work with datasets to collaborate and share. Today we live, learn, and teach in a moment increasingly characterized by big, […]
CITL Has a Lightboard!
Very often showing students how to work through a problem will help them learn. Similarly, many faculty are most comfortable teaching when able to stand at a board and diagram solutions. On the other hand, each student learns at his or her own pace. In the past, this required compromise. No longer. CITL has added […]
Fonts Can Speak Louder Than Words
In an ideal world, we’d be guaranteed that academia could exist without the influence of any type of bias and that merit alone would be the basis of evaluation. It’s an unfortunate reality that bias does exist. (Articles like this one from The Chronicle have delved deeper into the debate surrounding the notion of unconscious […]
Is Drone Flying the New Penmanship?
A couple of recent news articles suggest the growing role of drones in our lives and scholarship. From the New York Times we learned that a lot of people received drones for holiday gifts–about 1.2 million in the US alone. But it seemed that a lot of dads lack any skill in flying them. The […]
Welcome to CITL
Welcome to the website for UMaine’s new Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. How did a center of innovation in teaching and learning happen at UMaine? In the fall of 2015, the Provost appointed a task force, chaired by Associate Provosts Monique LaRocque and Jeff St. John, to develop a plan to provide more […]