Support Services - Faculty Portal

Any course modality - in-person, hybrid, online - at UMA regularly utilizes a set of tools. 

Brightspace is our Learning Management System, and it is essential to be proficient with its functionality. 

Kaltura is an online video hosting platform, like Youtube, providing restricted access to videos to only students in your course. The video links cannot be shared to others outside your course. 

Zoom is used not only for meetings but to conduct live distance classes.

• The Faculty Development Center facilitates a series of workshops and webinars throughout the year.  This is a format of instructional development facilitated by learning designers, faculty and staff for faculty. Workshops generally have a more hands-on, applied component to explore instructional strategies and pedagogical considerations related to the use of educational technology tools.
   
• Personalized consulting on selecting and using educational software, and instructional technologies.
   
• Are you up on all the latest technology tools available today? Of course not! With technology changing so fast and more tools becoming available all the time, it's difficult to stay up to date. Let us do the work for you! Bring us the instructional challenge, and we will help to find just the right technological solution. Are you interested in exploring a new tool you've discovered? Let us know and we will take a deep dive with you.
   
• Professional development programming and requests.
   
• Brightspace, Zoom and Kaltura help you make learning more effective in and beyond the traditional walls by breathing life into educational content. They are empowering instructors with tools to engage every learner. We are here to support beginning as well as advanced users of these tools. In addition to individualized support, we also maintain tutorials on our website on Brightspace, Kaltura and Zoom

• Are you planning a new course, teaching a course for the first time or something that needs a change? Let us help you plan your course effectively and efficiently.

• We will meet with you one or more times to help you to establish clear and measurable learning objectives, assessments to measure those outcomes, and a plan for instruction. We will help you make the best use of the learning modality you will be using, whether traditional face-to-face, web conference, Hyflex, or online synchronous or asynchronous.

As the subject matter expert, you know what needs to be taught. Do you need help figuring out how to teach or how to develop content for your course? We can help with content development such as:

• You have determined with a learning designer that you need to use Surveys in Brightspace and need support developing and setting up your Surveys.

• Test Question Conversion for Brightspace,

• Kaltura link Fixing in Brightspace,

• ITV Media Services Technician Support,

• Web Conferencing Media Services Technician Support,

• Course Video Content Development, e.g. high quality course introductions and academic program descriptions. This service can be time intensive and needs to be planned several months prior to the need,

• And more.

Per faculty individual request, we will examine your course materials in Brightspace that you provide, and complete an analysis based on evidence-based practices in teaching and learning. We do not make evaluative judgments on the quality of instruction, nor do we share the results of the analysis with anyone else, unless you ask us to do so. We will simply provide you with recommendations that we think you should keep doing, and some suggested edits for improving your course design. You are under no obligation to make the suggested changes. Ask us for a Course Design Analysis at any time for any one or more of your courses. We are also happy to focus on only one particular aspect of your class.