For Event dates, times, and availability, see the Faculty Development Community. All workshops are currently remote, via web meeting, unless otherwise specified.  If you see a workshop below that we don't currently have scheduled, email helpdesk@canisius.edu to request it, or a 1-1 consultation with us!

Many workshops are combined into Microcredentials.  These are a great way to achieve mastery on a particular topic, area or skillset, and are a great edition to yearly evaluations. 

Online Faculty Development Course

A five-week mini-course for Canisius College faculty, that prepares professors to teach online and hybrid courses.  This course provides many practical tips for teaching online, but more importantly, helps faculty explore new pedagogies for active learning, social presence, and community building in courses on the internet. The OFDC simulates five weeks of a 3-credit online course, so participating faculty also get the experience of the online student.

Online Teaching and Learning: Updates

Faculty who currently teach online courses learn about new methods, technologies and other possibilities that have appeared recently, and especially since they completed online teaching training years ago.  This is also a great opportunity to meet others who teach online at Canisius College, in order to build a community of colleagues who can provide support and insights for each other.

D2L Essentials

If you are a new professor at Canisius, or if you have taught at Canisius for awhile but would like to learn or review essentials of D2L, COLI offers a workshop that’s perfect for this.
In this training session professors get the very basics of teaching in D2L:

• Upload files so students can get them.

• Organize your course content.

• Set due dates so students can see them (in multiple places.)

• Build a gradebook.

Later, you’ll discover all sorts of other features useful for teaching your classes, in your particular discipline. But this session gets you started using D2L and using the internet to save time and effort teaching. Review the COLI Calendar to see times and locations for these and other training events.

D2L Grades and Feedback

Workshop for Canisius College Faculty.  Since you need to manage grades anyway, why not use D2L's tools to calculate totals and averages, and display realtime grades to students?  Plus, you can provide students feedback efficiently within D2L's dropbox and discussions tools.  In this training, Canisius faculty can discover ways to save time while providing students valuable feedback on coursework. 

D2L Discussions and Dropboxes

Learn to use D2L's powerful toolsets for online discussions and assignment collection.  These are obviously great options for online or hybrid courses, but professors teaching face-to-face classes can create more interaction between students both in and out of the classroom.  

D2L Quizzes and Exams

Online Quizzes and Exams serve a wide variety of purposes.  In this session you can learn how the D2L toolset for quizzes and tests works, and how to build them in your course.

D2L Groups

Learn to create, manage, and use student groups in D2L. Within your course, groups can allow you to efficiently make available content and activities to some students, while keeping these out of the way of other students. Plus, you can efficiently email groups, instead of the entire class.

Getting Started in Qualtrics

In this workshop, participants learn the basics of building online surveys or data collection forms using Qualtrics. Afterwards, users will be able to build, manage, operate, and distribute simple forms, and get the resulting data. They will also be ready to explore more advanced tools for enhancing their survey and data-form procedures. This workshop is useful for skilled and experienced survey researchers planning to move into Qualtrics. It is also valuable for faculty and staff who are considering online surveys or forms for the first time, and seeking an introduction to form-building and basic data collection on the web.

Smarter Forms in Qualtrics

Create smarter forms that adapt to respondents based on their early responses. Your form can skip irrelevant questions, ask them personalized questions that refer to things they entered earlier, or show them images as part of questions. Use email lists to send personalized invitations and reminders to respondents, and record their participation, whether or not their results are kept anonymous.

Zoom Basics for Teaching and Learning

Learn the basics of scheduling and operating Zoom meetings for coursework.  

Advanced Zoom

In this workshop, we will be using and talking about several advanced features of Zoom including waiting rooms, breakout rooms, polls, sharing an iPad/other mobile device, and/or using slideshows as a background. For the waiting room, you will actually be put through a waiting room before joining the actual Zoom meeting. Please make sure you join both the Zoom Meeting and the Google Meets meeting as some features are difficult to view and understand in Zoom alone (Google Meet will be the primary meeting).

Digital Video For Teaching & Learning

Video clips are now cheap and easy to produce. Professors can use simple videos for everything from simple announcements to flipping their classroom. For students, video assessments can foster video creation, analysis, and critical thinking skills critical for citizenship in communities global, local, and digital. This session introduces the basics of recording screencasts and video essay assignments, and using Google Drive or YouTube to host and share videos.

Google Drive Basics

Learn about Google Drive cloud storage, sharing, and related productivity tools.  Google Drive is a great online storage space that is easier to use, and more flexible than traditional network drives.  It's a great way to share large files, including video, with colleagues.  Since all faculty and students have Google Drives, it's great for sharing files used in group work and assignments.  Plus, Google's onboard applications (docs, sheets, slides, drawings, and forms) can make paperless coursework more efficient, too.  

Google Sites for Online Lessons

Learn to use Google Sites to build simple but interactive web-based lessons. These are great replacements for in-class lectures, freeing up class time for more social and active learning.  Online lessons can also fill gaps in published materials, and can incorporate web based content like YouTube videos or websites.

D2L Updates & Changes

Stay up-to-date on various updates and changes to D2L's tools that have come to our D2L. This session will include brief overviews of these changes and how to use them.

Panopto and D2L

Faculty who use video in their classes may want to consider using Panopto, a video content management system. Whether you are interested in learning the basics or some more advanced features, Panopto can help you easily record, edit, and share video to your students-- all from within D2L!

Hypothes.is in D2L

Hypothes.is is a toolset build right into D2L, that allows students to collaborate as they annotate documents and web-based resources they read together.  This is an excellent alternative to discussion boards or forums, and can be ideal for helping students prepare for classroom discussions.

AI and CourseWork Meetups

Generative Artificial Intelligence presents new challenges and possibilities for curriculum.  The AI and Society Initiative and the College of Arts and Sciences offer a series of meetups for faculty to discuss AI and its relationship to their courses and disciplines.  

Microsoft Teams for Virtual Meetings

In this 30 minute workshop, we will go over how to conduct virtual meetings with Microsoft Teams including starting a meeting, recording a meeting (and where to find said recording), screen sharing, and breakout rooms. If there is time, we will also go over how to share documents (that you and participants can edit live!) and Microsoft Whiteboard.

Microsoft Teams: Chats and Teams

In this 30 minute workshop, we go over how to start a Chat in Microsoft Teams. Similar to text messaging, this helps prevent the need for a flood of emails, saving our inboxes. We will also go over how to create a Teams, which is useful for offices and departments for organizing chats, securely sharing files, and more.