Workshops & Offerings

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Click a date and time to register for sessions!

Blackboard Preparation for Canvas
This one-hour session will guide faculty on saving and migrating Blackboard course site data and content in preparation for the move to Canvas. Instructional Development will demonstrate the following:

  1. Exporting Blackboard Course Sites – Export packages include course content and materials for later import into Canvas. Essential for courses before Summer 2024.
  2. Archiving Blackboard Course Sites & Downloading the Grade Center – Archive packages create a permanent record of the course, including content and user interactions. Important for educational records, incompletes, and grade appeals.
  3. Importing Blackboard Course Packages into Canvas – Blackboard export/archive packages can be imported into Canvas development or term section course sites.
  4. Copying Course Content in Canvas – Using Import Existing Content to copy content between Canvas course sites.
  5. Organizing Course Sites – Renaming Canvas Course Cards for easier navigation. (DEMO)

Instructional Technology Training Options:

Adobe InDesign
InDesign is a sophisticated page layout and graphic design tool for print publication.

  • TBD

Canvas Q&A with Instructional Development:
Mark your calendars and register below! We’re hosting several Q&A sessions over the summer via Zoom. This is your chance to ask questions, explore new features, and possibly exchange discipline-specific tricks you’ve discovered in our new LMS. Sessions are informal and will not be recorded. Please feel free to attend any or all sessions that fit best with your schedule. Whether you have Canvas features and/or new instructional tech questions or enjoy great conversation, we’d love to see you there!

Growing with Canvas
A professional development course designed to help educators and other users effectively utilize the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). It’s a self-paced training that provides tools and strategies for creating engaging and effective learning experiences.

Harmonize Discussions
We’re excited to share that instructors at UMass Dartmouth can use Harmonize, a discussion & collaboration tool that integrates with Canvas, to improve student engagement in your online discussions while saving you time in grading and managing your class!

Free recorded training for advanced topics!
Upcoming events hosted by Harmonize.
Visit our Harmonize webpage to learn more.

Kahoot! Game-based Learning
Kahoot! is a game-based learning platform that allows you to create, share, and play learning games or trivia quizzes in minutes. Unleash the fun in face-to-face classrooms and online courses! Kahoot! functions as an interactive technology to engage students in the learning environment through Games, Interactive synchronous and asynchronous lessons, Polls, Quizzes, and Interactive lectures. Join us for a training and demonstration offered by a Kahoot! education specialist.

Kaltura – Creating Online Lectures
A lecture capture and personal recording solution is built into Blackboard and Canvas. Kaltura can record content on your computer screen, audio narration, and webcam video. After recording, your video is automatically processed and stored in your personal Kaltura media space. This workshop will walk participants through initiating Kaltura, recording, and embedding videos into a Blackboard or Canvas site.

More Sessions are available at Kaltura Training Services

Qualtrics – Getting Started
UMass Dartmouth has selected Qualtrics as our Internet survey tool. All Faculty and Staff have access to create and publish their surveys. Students may also use Qualtrics under the direction of a Faculty or Staff member. This workshop covers the authoring and administration of surveys, as well as data collection. Question types are covered in detail. No previous survey experience is necessary.

  • TBD

Qualtrics – Branching
An intermediate Qualtrics workshop that explores different means of skipping or repeating questions in a survey. Topics covered include skip logic, display logic, blocks, block branching, and loop and merge. Previous survey experience equivalent to the Getting Started with Qualtrics workshop is required.

  • TBD

Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a program in the Office 365 suite typically used to store, sort, and manipulate data. Although Excel is not a database, it is often used in data analytics and finance careers to assess large amounts of information and create visualizations.

  • TBD

TurnItIn Plagiarism Detection
TurnItIn is a web-based service that checks for plagiarism and originality in student writing. It compares submitted work to a large database of student work, articles, books, and websites. Turnitin generates an Originality Report for both faculty and students that highlights and categorizes any matching text to detect plagiarism and inaccurate citation references while striving to maintain academic integrity.

  • Live sessions returning in Fall ’25
Unlocking Canvas: Mastering Weighted Grading
Unlock the potential of Canvas Gradebook! Join us for a crash-course training session designed to empower faculty with the skills needed to set up and manage weighted grading in Canvas effectively. This session will provide a comprehensive overview of the Canvas Gradebook and Assignments, ensuring you can accurately reflect student performance in Canvas. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance the accuracy of your GradeBook! Register now to secure your spot and take your Canvas skills to the next level. Highlights include:
  1. Introduction to Canvas GradeBook/Assignments: 
    Differentiate between Blackboard’s GradeCenter and Canvas’s GradeBook.
  2. Step-by-Step Guide to Weighted Grading:
    Use Assignment Groups to organize assignments and assign weighting.
    Test Canvas’s grade calculations using Test Student.
  3. Additional Considerations and Tips:
    Create additional GradeBook columns for non-submission assignments.
    Align Canvas’s letter grade scale with the one in your syllabus.

Vendor-led Vault
A collection of Canvas and instructional technology vendor-led training demonstrations. The previously recorded webinars and supplement resources throughout this site are self-paced and should follow the successful completion of the Growing with Canvas course.

YuJa Panorama for Accessibility
We’re excited to announce that YuJa will host a series of webinars designed specifically for faculty and staff. These sessions are a great opportunity to refresh your knowledge of our tools and ask any questions directly to our experts. Did you know YuJa Panorama allows instructors and students to locate, assess, and fix accessibility issues and access content directly within Canvas? Users can see a file-by-file accessibility gauge, view the severity of the problems with color-coded icons, replace files, select from 110+ languages, and extract math equations from documents without leaving Canvas.

  • Live sessions returning in Fall ’25

Online and Blended Teaching Training Options:

Online Teaching and Learning Strategies
A rigorous four-week, fully online, asynchronous course introduces faculty to the current research and best practices for online teaching and learning. Using their discipline-specific course materials for activities, faculty will work independently and collaboratively with peers from across campus and instructional designers to design and build one unit of online instruction on a Canvas site. This unit will meet the Quality Online Course Review Rubric criteria and be a model that faculty can reference and replicate as they continue to develop their upcoming fully online course(s). *Pre-requisite: Growing with Canvas

Visit Teaching Online for more information.

Blended Teaching: Designing Meaningful Content Connections
An engaging two-week, fully online course introduces faculty to current research and best practices for blended teaching and learning. Using their discipline-specific course materials for activities, faculty will work independently and collaboratively with peers from across campus, and with Instructional Designers to design and build one unit of blended instruction that can be incorporated into their course(s) to enhance student engagement and meaningful content connections. This instruction unit will meet the Quality Blended Course Review Rubric criteria and be a model that faculty can reference and replicate as they continue to develop their upcoming blended course(s) on a Blackboard site.