Learning Design and Digital Innovation Trainings/Events (+ Past Recordings)

On this page, you can:

Register for Upcoming Trainings Offered by LDDI
Register for Upcoming Trainings Conducted by Gradescope, Panopto, Perusall, and Zoom
Watch Recorded LDDI Trainings
Watch Curated list of Trainings/Workshops

In addition, LDDI staff offer one-on-one Nexus, Learning Technology consultations and Electronic Classroom training:  Sign up with a member of our Learning Design and Digital Innovations team (i.e., Sonia Sandoval, Kesheng Yu, Kevin Barhydt) at a time convenient with your schedule. 

Register for Upcoming Trainings Offered by LDDI

Register for Upcoming Trainings Conducted by Gradescope, Panopto, Perusall & Zoom

Gradescope Training (Led by Gradescope)

There are On-Demand training videos here: https://www.gradescope.com/get_started.  There are multiple videos on Grading Course Management, and Assignment Workflow.

Panopto Training (Led by Panopto)

There is also an extensive, on demand library of "how to" videos.

Perusall Training (Led by Perusall)

None scheduled at this time. However, instructors teaching courses using Perusall can access online support documentation here.

Zoom Training (Led by Zoom)

The new Zoom learning center is constantly offering live training you can sign up for each week on a variety of topics.  Whether your new to Zoom and just want to learn the basics, to advanced topics like engaging your students on zoom, breakout rooms, and whiteboarding, sign up for the training that suits your immediate needs. You can also watch on demand recording of past sessions.  WHEN REGISTERING, MAKE SURE YOU CHANGE FROM THE PACIFIC TIME ZONE TO EASTERN TIME ZONE.

Watch Recorded LDDI Trainings

Creating Infographic Assignments

Description: Are you looking for new assignment ideas to engage your students and allow them to provide evidence of what they have learned? In this session, we looked at what is involved to require students to create infographics. We considered how to prepare students for the project and how to assess them. Union has a license to Adobe Express which makes it easy to create high impact infographics without being a graphic designer. By making the visual design easy,  students can focus on the important part—how to research a topic, identify what is most important, and then distill it in a clear, visual way. 

Led by: Stacie Cassat Green, Instructional Design Consultant, and Denise Snyder, Director of LDDI

Watch Recorded Session

Question Formulation Technique: A Well Researched, Powerful & Easy Active Learning Strategy

Description: How important is it to be able to ask a good question? Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate, says “there is no learning without having to pose a question” and yet studies have shown that teachers ask the majority of questions. In this session, you’ll learn how to facilitate an instructional strategy called the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to get your students formulating and working with better questions. This technique has decades of research and is very simple to integrate in any discipline. If you’ve been wanting to lecture less or need new ideas for getting all students to actively participate in your courses, please watch this recording!

Led by: Stacie Cassat Green, Instructional Design Consultant

Watch Recorded Session

Creating Inclusive Course Content

Description: Accessibility in course design focuses on the student’s ability to access and engage with digital content. In this workshop we will look at accessibility through the lens of inclusivity and diversity. Students come from a wide variety of experiences in regards to race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status. Disabled and non-disabled students bring their own identities and backgrounds into the classroom.

Most web accessibility guidelines focus on the technical aspects: how to properly structure, code, or design a site. But the content of the site, what it actually says, also needs to be thought of through an accessible, inclusive lens. This workshop and accompanying support guides will help you to create a classroom that is inclusive of all students.

Led by: Kevin Barhydt, Senior Inclusive and Learning Technology Analyst
Session Materials
Watch Recorded Session 

Mini-Conference on Inclusive Pedagogy: 12/3/2021

Union College hosted its first ever, virtual mini-conference, focused on inclusive pedagogies on December 3, 2021. The research shows that designing your courses to help each student feel like they belong improves student learning for everyone. Each of the six sessions spotlighted an inclusive pedagogy with concrete instructional strategies you can try in your courses.

Watch recorded sessions
Session materials 

Panopto Screen Capture and Streaming

Find out how to how to use Panopto to record presentations, import videos, link to courses and assignments, create in-video prompts and quizzes, edit and approve captions, create playlists and other features.

Watch recorded session

New Ideas and Tools for Teaching WAC

Most of us teaching WAC have not been formally trained about how to teach the writing process. To support you in your planning for the winter and spring terms, we held a workshop to offer some concrete strategies and assignments you may use in your course. These assignments have been developed with Joe Johnson, Director of Writing Programs, and Kara Doyle, Associate Professor of English, along with our consulting instructional designer, Stacie Green, to help you accomplish two goals:

-Improve your students writing
-Reduce your assessment time

In this workshop, you’ll learn about several assignments we’ve developed specifically for WAC courses that you may use, customize for your course/discipline, and easily copy to Nexus. Pick and choose among the assignments or use them all. We’ve created these assignments as forms or templates in a portfolio tool called Pebblepad that Union has purchased. While you may use any of these assignments without Pebblepad, as we’ll make the content available to you via Google Docs, we hope you will consider how the pedagogies that underpin learning portfolios could be used to improve students ability to write across the disciplines. This session was led by Stacie Cassat Green, Instructional Design Consultant + Denise Snyder, Director of Learning Technologies and Environments.

Watch recorded session

Silver Linings: Stories of Innovation at Union College

People who study creative thinking have identified that constraints actually promote creative thinking. The dark cloud of the pandemic has certainly presented us with some big constraints about how we teach and students learn this year, forcing us to adapt and innovate. Watch to gain inspiration from your colleagues as they share the “silver linings” they have found in their teaching because of the pandemic.

This session was led by Stacie Cassat Green, Instructional Design Consultant for Union College + Panel of FDI "Incubator" Alumni:

• Holli Frey, Joy Wang, Doug Klein: How team teaching, alumni speakers, group work, and Perusall worked in their Climate Change Minerva course 
  Andy Morris: new project, “Hometown environmental history” 
• Nicole Theodosiou: NSF grant simulation process
• Anouk Verheyden-Gillikin: How group work helps connect students
• Shawn Wehe: Mock exams in fluid dynamics (formative assessment)

Watch recorded session

Getting Started with Sway

Sway is an online platform for quick, beautiful, and engaging content displays. Sway formats content intelligently so the user can focus on creating the content, rather than organizing it. It allows users to quickly create an image journal, a short essay enhanced with images, YouTube videos, hyperlinks, or a brief research report. This session was led by Kesheng Yu, Senior Learning Technology Consultant

Sway Resource Link

Upgrading Your Assessment Strategies

Tired of the papers and/or exams you use to assess students? This is a good year to experiment with new ideas as there is nothing “traditional” about how we are doing education right now. In this workshop, you’ll learn about different assessment strategies you might try. Think of this workshop as a salad bar—there are many options, but you don’t have to use all of them. This session was led by Stacie Cassat Green, Instructional Design Consultant for Union College

Watch recorded session