Self-paced via Blackboard- Ongoing 

Instructors, Tom Cantu, Anna Donohoe, Michele Knight  

Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning is designed to help educators effectively use Blackboard, a widely used Learning Management System. Through this course, teachers will gain practical skills for remote teaching, including how to communicate, design lessons, and assess students online.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to design a digital course site in Blackboard that: 

• Utilizes specific Blackboard tools to establish an active digital instructor presence.
• Integrates traditional and/or alternative assessment techniques for comprehensive student evaluation. 
• Incorporates video conferencing software to optimize student engagement during synchronous sessions. 
• Features multimedia images and videos to enrich the digital learning experience and align with best practices for the respective discipline. 

Series Elements 

The “Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning” course takes faculty approximately four weeks and consists of four key modules: 

• Essentials of Blackboard.
• Communicating with students on Blackboard. 
• Evaluating student performance on Blackboard.
• Using multimedia tools within Blackboard. 

Required Capstone Project: By the end of the course, participants will have built a functional Blackboard teaching site, emphasizing their online presence and multimedia content for engaging students and incorporating lessons learned from the entire course. 

For each module, you will complete a predictable rhythm of tasks which consist of you:

• Reading (or watching videos) that show you how to complete the steps in Blackboard to build your course.
• Reviewing or completing quizzes in Blackboard to ensure you know specific terms used in the software to create materials.
• Building or creating specific materials in your Blackboard course for face-to-face or remote instruction that we covered during the module.
• Refining or checking the material you have built in the building phase against the criteria we will use to evaluate your site at the end of the module.

Please be advised that this course is required for all full and part-time instructors at MC. Registration for this course is ongoing, and course admission is on a rolling basis.