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MCC Daily Tribune

What's New in the Virtual Campus

Welcome to the Fall semester from the Virtual Campus Team!

The summer months have been a time of progress and achievement within the Virtual Campus (VC) department. I am proud to share some of the notable accomplishments that have taken place over these past few months with our dedicated team members:

Brightspace Accounts: To date, we have created over 893 faculty accounts in our Brightspace system with 711 logged in (or 79.6%). We also have 1167 staff accounts with 721 logged in (or 61.8%). We have a cumulative total of 27,910 student accounts with 17,415 logged in (or 62.4%).

Innovative Course Design: As educators, we never stop learning and growing in our practice. We need to constantly reflect on what we are doing and how to make it more efficient and more accessible to our students. We are thankful to our faculty members who have been instrumental in creating innovative and engaging online courses through our Brightspace system and leveraging other interactive technologies. I encourage you all to make small changes that can impact student success, such as better organization of the course, updating older documents using HTML templates, creating engaging announcements, revising any unclear assignment instructions, consolidation of supplemental materials, making materials more accessible, and/or considering the organization of your Brightspace gradebook. Many faculty utilized our course design support over the summer to make improvements in the operation of their courses. We recognize that migration to Brightspace was a challenge, but we are here to continue to work with you to improve your courses beyond the how-to’s of Brightspace. We continue to support SUNY’s OSCQR rubric for self-assessment of online course design. It is a great tool that can guide you to make small improvements.

Professional Development: The summer saw an impressive turnout for our online support sessions. Your eagerness to enhance your online teaching skills speaks volumes about your commitment to delivering a high-quality education, regardless of the mode of instruction. During the months of July and August, we have supported over 250 faculty in the Zoom room. We will continue to offer Zoom support hours during the semester. See our Faculty Support and Resources webpage for more information. Since we began tracking our numbers in July 2020, we have had an impressive 7500+ faculty drop-ins! In addition to our Zoom drop-in hours, we are offering 16 different virtual learning opportunities during the fall on everything from gradebook to AI. Please visit our schedule for dates and times and block time on your calendar to learn something new!  See our online schedule for Fall Virtual Campus Learning Opportunities. As a faculty member, we know you are short on time, so you can also visit our self-serve resources within our MCC VC Faculty Center Brightspace course. The most current asynchronous Brightspace training is still the SUNY Asynchronous Modules; however, we are working hard to customize our own MCC version. We also will be releasing a customized course template if you are looking to develop a new course or make improvements to an existing course.

Student Engagement Initiatives: We have been working hard to further connect with our online community of students and just launched the new Student Online Student Success Inventory (SOSSI) on 8/14/2023. This was emailed to our new fully online student populations to assess readiness before starting the semester. This is an optional exercise; however, it provides important information to our Online Concierge to make connections with students. Online students continue to have the support of our Online Concierge (Sandy Chamberlain) as their primary guide to resources across campus. If you have any resources that may directly benefit our online students, please keep Sandy in mind (vcconcierge@monroecc.edu or 585-292-3430). We continuously send onboarding letters to online students so they are aware of how to access their courses. All faculty and students have access to the MCC Online Student Orientation where you can refer your students if they need help learning the Brightspace and Zoom basics.

Technological Advancements: We continue to make small improvements to our Brightspace Digital Learning Environment. Our Virtual Campus team members are involved in numerous SUNY committees to move global changes forward with a focus on continuous improvement. We are always looking to improve efficiency. We have implemented a merge tool that gives the Brightspace administrators more local control over our merge requests. We have included a customization to the gradebook this term including the addition of M numbers that is live! We have worked with SUNY to change the default number of users in the gradebook displayed to 50 instead of 10. Additionally, the grade book default settings have been changed to “Weighted” and “drop ungraded items” in the Setup Wizard for future-created course shells. We integrated Starfish with Brightspace over the summer so that grades can properly show up in Starfish. We will be piloting the Starfish no login flags in the fall semester with our online student population. We continue to support many third-party technology solutions including Turnitin (Originality Checking), Respondus Monitor (for test monitoring), VoiceThread (interactive video discussions), Blackboard Ally (accessibility), and Digication (Eportfolios).

Future Research: Our department continues to keep the pulse on new and emerging technologies, including Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and we will continue faculty conversations during the fall semester. We will have an upcoming AI conversation on October 19th. Look for more details on our website. See our Fall Virtual Campus Learning Opportunities article and refer to the folder of resources on AI in our VC Faculty Center course in Brightspace. Our team is always learning because technology is always changing.  

After Hours Support: The Virtual Campus is committed to providing the best possible service, but we know that you may be working outside of college business hours. During business hours, you can continue to reach us at virtualcampus@monroecc.edu or by phone at 585-292-3440. We also contract with the SUNY Online Help Desk to provide support services with Brightspace for our faculty, staff, and students. For assistance, submit a SUNY Online help request or call 1-844-673-6786.

Wishing each of you a smooth and rewarding start to the semester. Let's continue to collaborate, inspire, and make this academic year one to remember!

Andrea Gilbert, Virtual Campus

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
08/30/2023