New Faculty Self-paced Resources
Image: Super bloom of Spring 2017, Carrizo Plains National Monument, Santa Margarita, SLO County
Also See the New Faculty Campus Partners Resources Directory
and the New Faculty Foundations Event Homepage.
We invite you to explore the resources below at your own pace, in your own way. The resources, specially curated for you as new faculty, have a variety of different materials: some pre-recorded information sessions, documents, guides, self-paced workshops, and more.
Resources for New Faculty
- Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning
As a new instructor, it's important to make sure your course materials are accessible for students with disabilities. Additionally, incorporating the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) optimizes learning for all students. Creating course content with accessibility and UDL in mind ensures a more inclusive learning experience for all of your students. With this in mind, we've created a variety of resources to support you in these efforts. - Equitable and Inclusive Teaching at Cal Poly
The purpose of these resources is to support your efforts in incorporating inclusive teaching strategies into your courses. There are a number of small changes that you can make in your teaching that can have an impact on students' sense of belonging in your classroom and therefore on their ability to learn and perform well. These pages provide you with strategies you may want to incorporate at the beginning of the quarter or in the future. - Using Canvas
These resources provide a quick view of what our Canvas support site has to offer as well as all other pages, trainings, and consultation links we provide to instructional personnel. - Preparing a More Effective Syllabus
These resources provide ideas and inspiration for revisions to your syllabus that will help you launch your courses on a strong and positive note. - Open Educational Resources for Teaching
The Open Educational Resources initiative is designed to help faculty reduce students’ course materials expenses and maintaining course quality by expanding the use of high-quality open education resources (OER). OER includes open licensed textbooks and materials as well as web-based resources (texts, multimedia, interactive) that reside in the public domain. - Assessments in Classroom and Online Environments
The resources on this page provide guidance for assessing student learning in classroom and virtual learning environments. We invite you to peruse these resources to gather ideas for how you will assess student learning in your courses. - Engaging in Writing
As a complex linguistic and cognitive task, writing well requires rhetorical and disciplinary knowledge, logical reasoning, and a facility with standard written conventions. These resources provide ways for you to help students develop these abilities in your courses. Research on the teaching of writing strongly shows that writing is best learned when it is integrated and taught across the entire academic community. - Teaching with Technology
We in the CTLT believe that proper, pedagogically-advised technology use can increase teaching effectiveness and student learning. These resources provide support for using some of the most common classroom technology tools. - COVID-19 Faculty Resources
The Cal Poly Coronavirus Information Page is the central source of Cal Poly-relevant information about COVID-19 and is updated regularly.
Self-paced Online Course
If you want a self-paced option to learn everything you need to know about creating courses in Canvas, and applying best practices in teaching and learning, you can self-enroll in the courses below NOTE: In order to enroll you will need to have current Cal Poly credentials giving you access to the Cal Poly Portal.
- Cal Poly Canvas Orientation
This self-paced workshop will introduce you to Cal Poly's Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). Once you have completed this Cal Poly Canvas Orientation, and have perused some of the resources on the "Using Canvas" webpage, the following workshops will help you design your courses in Canvas. - Launching a Course Online with Canvas
This self-paced, online workshop provides you with resources and suggestions to make your first week of class as successful as possible. In this workshop, you will: create a welcome letter for your incoming students, establish a welcoming presence, share some course policies specific to the online environment, engage students in an active online community, and perform important housekeeping tasks at the start of your course. - Creating Effective Learning Objectives
This self-paced module is designed to assist faculty in writing effective and measurable learning objectives for their courses. - Open Educational Resources (OER): Faculty Roadmap
This self-paced online module is designed to help California faculty explore, create, optimize, and maintain Open Educational Resources for their courses, campus, and beyond. - Creating Accessible Canvas Content
This self-paced, online workshop provides guidance to help you create an accessible Canvas content page. You will also learn how to check your course content for accessibility. - Creating Accessible Documents
This self-paced, online workshop provides guidance to help you create an accessible Word document and convert to an accessible PDF. - Creating Accessible PowerPoint
This self-paced, online workshop provides guidance to help you create an accessible PowerPoint presentation and convert to an accessible PDF. - Creating Accessible Video
This self-paced, online workshop provides guidance to help you create a short instructional video with captions. You will also learn how to find help for captioning videos that you did not create.
For all self-paced, online workshops in which you enroll, we recommend that you revisit them as needed over the course of the year.
Also See the New Faculty Campus Partners Resources Directory
