I have worked this semester to ensure that the college distance education committee (DEC) once again has a home on the SCCC governance website: sunysuffolk.edu/governance/distance-ed.

A lot has been happening in the world of distance education this semester. Here’s what busy faculty need to know as we race toward the end of another semester.

DEC faculty co-chair

In the first college brief of the semester, sent on September 2, President Bonahue indicated that he had charged “the Academic Affairs division to create a faculty co-chair for the Distance Education Committee (DEC), who will provide leadership from the faculty perspective on best practices related to student learning and engagement.”

At the September 13 meeting of DEC, I was voted into this co-chair position for the first two-year term.

DEC section on governance website

Among my goals as the new faculty co-chair are instituting more faculty input into the setting of DEC’s agendas and minutes, making our committee work far more transparent and making our committee’s resources and materials more readily accessible to everyone at the college.

Even though it has only been two months, I think any of our current DEC members would agree that we have already made great strides toward all three of these goals. You can see this for yourselves, thanks to DEC voting at our November 17 meeting to approve the draft I have created for a DEC section on the SCCC governance website.

As you may know, DEC used to have a governance webpage, but that stopped being maintained when the predecessor of our current dean of distance ed was hired around 2013. In the intervening years I’ve been pushing to have that site back, but the DEC website remained only in the Blackboard then Brightspace CMSs with access limited to DEC members.

I am inordinately happy to announce, then, that DEC now has a home on the SCCC governance website: sunysuffolk.edu/governance/distance-ed. Here you can find our calendar, agenda and approved sets of minutes as well as our official seven-point charge, information about the Course Development and Course Assignment forms and, most importantly, the most recent update to the Distance Education Policies and Procedures manual.

I am very grateful to the current members of DEC, Michael Forte and Ray DiSanza as well as, in the VPAA office, Drs. Lauren Tacke-Cushing and Liesl Jones for their support in making this happen.

Bye, bye, Blackboard

Information Technology Services (ITS) reminds us that on December 15, 2022, Blackboard will be shut down at the college. As noted in a November 8 email from the Center for Innovative Pedagogy, this means

• All access to Blackboard will end, without exception, for all people at SCCC
• Everything you and your students did in Blackboard will be deleted and unrecoverable
• This date was set by contract and cannot be extended for any reason.

Before this happens, you may want to back up your Blackboard data:

• To preserve your Blackboard gradebook and student submission data, see Archiving your Blackboard Courses 
• To save your Blackboard course content or migrate it to Brightspace, see Migrating your Content to Brightspace.

If you need help extracting materials from Blackboard, you can email bbsupport@sunysuffolk.edu, but again you must do so before December 15.

Real-time online training

As DEC works toward developing and sharing advice about how to revise the eLearning Academy to better acknowledge that we currently have four DE modalities at the college—online (fully asynchronous), hybrid, Sufflex and real-time online—in the meantime the college is offering a special, four-module training for real-time online courses.

First, you should know that if you are DE certified for online or hybrid courses, you do not have to complete the real-time online training.

The Academic Affairs office recently invited over 100 faculty to participate, since beginning in spring 2023 faculty who wish to teach a real-time online course will need to have completed this training. The training program, which must be completed by January 13, 2023, includes learning the basics of Brightspace, Zoom, ADA compliance and best practices in regular and substantive interaction (RSI). There are four online modules that are explicitly designed to be completed as easily as possible at your convenience.

All faculty who are interested and would like to receive certification should reach out to Dean Camille Karlson at online@sunysuffolk.edu to get registered for this self-paced asynchronous training course.

Contact me or your DEC governance representative if you have questions about any of the above.