Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

New entry-level training on D2L Brightspace

Posted by Peter Seaman

If you have been using D2L Brightspace for a while, to teach online courses, then you will NOT be excited to hear that Online Learning is getting ready to roll out new training for instructors who need to learn to use D2L Brightspace.

But if you teach hybrid courses, or you use D2L to supplement your face-to-face classes, or you are an FDC or a mentor to part-time faculty, then you will obviously be excited to hear that Online Learning is getting ready to roll out new training for instructors who need to learn to use D2L Brightspace!

The training is called CUBS – short for “Competencies for Using Brightspace.”

Since we are all PCC Panthers, we couldn’t resist an acronym like “CUBS.” Think of the branding possibilities!

The CUBS course has some really exciting and innovative features:

• Available to ALL instructors at PCC, whether you are assigned to teach online or not! Any instructor who wants to learn more about using D2L Brightspace can take the CUBS course.
• The CUBS course will take place entirely in D2L: you learn in the same learning management system (LMS) that you are learning about.
• The CUBS course will be available to instructors on demand, at any time! Instructors will self-enroll via the professional development channel in MyPCC.
• The course uses a “hands-on” method: trainees will complete all of the tasks, in a “sandbox” course shell in D2L, that they are learning about. The tasks are the same ones any online instructor will need to be able to accomplish to get an online course ready to teach at a basic level.
• The course is self-paced: trainees can self-check all of their work on key D2L tasks and be able to gauge their progress in twelve important areas.

The CUBS course is designed to serve two groups simultaneously:

• Instructors who want to learn more about using D2L but haven’t yet been assigned an online class to teach; and
• Instructors who have been assigned an online class and need training to prepare them to use D2L effectively, at a basic level.

Every instructor who is assigned to teach online will continue to undergo a skills assessment prior to commencing the rest of the OIO training. Those who have no experience with D2L can use the CUBS course to prepare for the skills assessment, but anyone who completed the course independently will still get credit upon successful completion of the skills assessment.

So that’s the low-down on the CUBS course – the training that prepares instructors to use PCC’s LMS.

The other part of the training – all of the OTHER stuff you need to know about teaching online (humanizing your online course, techniques for teaching effectively and equitably, etc) – will be included in a new course that is currently in development.

We’re planning to roll out this new online-teaching course in fall term 2021. Watch this space for more details!

If you have any questions or thoughts or ideas about the new training program, please reach out to me via email. I’m happy to field any questions or steal any good ideas.

Thanks to my colleagues in Online Learning, especially Heather Guevara, Greg Kaminski, Monica Marlo M-G, and Michael Moss who have served on the training-revision team since last year, and also to the thousands of online instructors who have taken the OIO training since 2006 and taught us so much about online learning.