Fall 2025 SUNY Online Webinars
SUNY Online is excited to feature two webinars in September 2025 focused on the topic of Artificial Intelligence. Other webinar topics include creating community in online courses, professional development opportunities through SUNY OER Services, and streamlining your grading process in Brightspace. These webinars showcase the expertise of our dynamic community of online practitioners.
AI Prompting for Educators
Date: September 17, 2025
Time: 11:00AM-12:00PM EST
Presenter: Trevor Johnson-Steigelman, Associate Professor of Physics, Finger Lakes Community College
Description: AI Prompting for Educators is a presentation designed to share ways you can interact with AI to get better results. As an educator, you can use AI to help you create and improve handouts, activities, and assessments to enhance your classroom. We’ll investigate prompt structures that help you get the results you want.
AI and Academic Integrity in Online Teaching: Taking an Information Literacy Approach
Date: September 25, 2025
Time: 12:00-1:00PM EST
Presenter: Allison Hosier, Head of Information Literacy, University at Albany
Description: Generative AI has posed huge challenges to academic integrity as students have started to submit work that is partially or fully generated by AI. These challenges are especially difficult to navigate in the online environment. This presentation will explore the relationship between generative AI and academic integrity from an information literacy perspective. It will include practical suggestions for application in online teaching.
Creating Community and Communicating Care in Online Classes
Date: October 8, 2025
Presenter: Alexandra Pickett, Director of Online Teaching, SUNY Online
Description: This session will explore ways in which you can create community by building trust and encouraging online learners to express/explore their social and teaching presences, and how to communicate care by inquiring, listening, being flexible, and providing options. By adopting course design and online teaching approaches that humanize your online instruction, you support online learner success. Tools will be shared and demonstrated with a focus on interaction and engagement in support of online learner success.
Professional Development Partnerships through SUNY OER Services
Date: November 13, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM
Presenter(s): Cori Wilhelm, OER Program Manager, SUNY Office of Library and Information Services and Tony DeFranco, Director, SUNY OER Services
Description: Discover exciting professional development opportunities available in Spring 2026 through SUNY OER Services. This session will highlight partnerships with Lumen Learning (Lumen Circles) and the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) (Learning Engineering Fellowship), offering pathways for faculty to enhance teaching practice, engage in reflective learning, and support student success through open and evidence-based approaches. Join Tony DeFranco, SUNY OER Services Director of Operations and Cori Wilhelm, SUNY Libraries and OER Program Manager.
Streamline your Grading Processes in Brightspace: Tips & Tools to Simplify and Save Time while Providing Effective Feedback
Date: December 3, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Presenter: Jamie Heron, SUNY Online Program Manager and Allene Slating, SUNY Online Teaching Senior Instructional Designer
Description: Brightspace (BSP) has a wide variety of tools and efficiencies that streamline grading practices for faculty - making it easier to provide authentic, formative, and timely feedback. This workshop covers many of these tools and strategies including:
Rubrics
- Using rubrics to provide guidelines and insights for students as they work to complete assignments.
- Using rubrics to provide feedback to students.
BSP Grading tools & strategies
- Exploring the full functionality of the BSP gradebook, and trouble-shooting issues commonly encountered by students and faculty.
- Examining the Quick Eval tool in BSP to determine how it saves faculty time and effort in the grading process.
- Maximizing various tools within BSP to efficiently and effectively communicate goals & progress to students