Thank you for visiting the Center for Teaching Excellence virtual page, where you can find helpful resources related to Brightspace, instructional best practices, assessment design, grading guidance, instructor professional development opportunities, and more.
Have a question, need help, or have feedback for CTE? Reach out to us at ycccCTEsupport@mainecc.edu or come visit us in Room 203.
JJ Dufort
Director of Learning
jdufort@mainecc.edu
207.216.4383
We are currently working on migrating content from the old yccc.edu domain to the new mainecc.edu domain. If you are not able to open links/access content on this site, please try accessing it through your 'other' school email. Thank you for your patience!
As part of the MCCS Brightspace package, we get three D2L trainings per year. You're encouraged to attend any of the following workshops on Zoom. If we are able to record them we will post them here. No registration is needed, the links listed below are the direct links for the Zoom session.
Learn more about what CopyLeaks is and how you can use it to check the originality of student work in this Zoom workshop.
Attend this Open Q&A session with D2L to learn more about Brightspace.
Attend this Open Q&A session with D2L to learn more about Brightspace.
Attend this live webinar to get basic instructor Brightspace training directly from experts at D2L!
Meet the CTE Team
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JJ Dufort, Ed.D Director of Learning JJ has been an educator for 24 years. She has served in the K-12 space in Maine as a teacher and as a curriculum leader, and has been a member of the YC community as an instructor for over 18 years. She earned her Ed.D in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of South Carolina and is excited to leverage her experience and education to support the YC community. As the Director of Learning, she is your go-to contact for assessment expertise, instructional strategies, and curriculum initiatives. She is well-versed in online, in-person, and hybrid instructional strategies. In her free time, JJ enjoys road tripping, reading, and hiking. |
Chris Watkinson Workforce Instructional Designer Chris is an instructional designer, educator, and creator. He has spent his career in Maine working in higher education and in workforce development. He received his degree in History from USM and a pending certificate in Online Learning and Instruction from Duke University. Chris is experienced in traditional classroom instruction, multimodal educational technology, and applying learning strategies to create meaningful learning experiences for students of all ages and backgrounds. As the Workforce Instructional Designer at YCCC Chris is responsible for helping develop program goals, designing the student learning experience, and is the Brightspace LMS administrator for Workforce development, trainings, and apprenticeship programs. When he's not in the office, Chris loves hiking, camping, and kayaking with his family. |
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Joe Anistranski, Ph.D. Instructional Designer Joe has four years of experience as an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Davis, where he focused on active learning experiences for undergraduates. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Madison Area Technical College, working with more than 3,700 college students in his career. Most recently, Joe joined YCCC after spending more than two years on the professional learning team at NWEA, a national leader in K-12 education research and student assessment. Joe has experience in preschool, out-of-school time, summer programming, and adult education, and he has helped run a ski and snowboard school. Joe leverages his eclectic experiences and a Ph.D. in educational psychology to build responsive higher education environments geared to the 21st century. |
Technology is constantly changing, and sometimes that means you may experience some technical difficulties in your courses. Here you'll find a list of current known updates and outages alongside action needed or suggested remedies.
UPDATES: LTI 1.1 links will no longer be available in Brightspace, impacting the use of external learning tools such as McGraw Hill Connect, Cengage Mindtap, Labster, and similar third-party tools as of Friday, May 10th, 2024. Instructors should instead be using LTI 1.3 links, which can be inserted using "Existing Activities" in a Brightspace module. Resources and tutorials will be available soon. Summer instructors who are seeing "Broken Topic" items in their courses can reach out to ycccCTESupport@mainecc.edu for assistance.
Brightspace Updates and Releases
The following videos provide quick overviews of Brightspace updates. Note that some updates are not relevant to YC and videos are snipped as possible to skip the non-YC material.
