Employee Professional Development

Each semester, full-time faculty in their first, second, and third year at Montgomery College sign up for one workshop series in the Academy for Teaching Transformation. (Adjunct faculty welcome)

Visit the Academy for Teaching Transformation website new windowfor additional information.

1. Career Development Learning Pathway (not offered currently)
2. The Valuable Employee Learning Pathway (PDF, )

1. Global leadership Cohort (PDF, )
2. Fundamentals of Supervision Cohort (PDF, )
3. Leadership Development Institute (PDF, )
4. MC Management (PDF, )

1. Communication and Conflict Learning Pathway (PDF, )
2. Communicating Professionally in the Workplace Learning Pathway (PDF, )
3. Crucial Conversations and Crucial Accountability (PDF, )  
4. Customer Service Learning Pathway (PDF, )  

ELITE provides consulting services to units, departments, and groups so they may become more effective and productive. ELITE staff partner with each of our clients to customize our approach to help clients respond to current challenges and set specific goals for future direction. View Consulting Services document (PDF, ) for more information.

Employees gain new skills for teamwork, customer service and community relations. Because the College values diversity, inclusion and nondiscrimination, employees benefit from continuous learning and growth in mutual understanding.

1. Change Management: Moving to the Next Level Learning Pathway (PDF, )
2. Effective Committees Learning Pathway (PDF, )
3. Fundamentals of Supervision Cohort (PDF, )
4. Global Leader Cohort (PDF, )
5. Leadership Development Institute  (PDF, )
6. Management Learning Pathway (PDF, )
7. MC Management Cohort  (PDF, )

Whether you are a long-time user looking to fill in some gaps and update your skills or new to an application, this workshop series offers you a valuable opportunity to save time, do more to help our students, and improve your skills with Microsoft Office.

Each hands-on, small group workshop is designed specifically for the needs of Montgomery College faculty and staff and is based on the versions and features of Microsoft Office that are currently provided for free to college employees.

These fun, interactive workshops are conducted remotely. The outcomes shown in the description links are flexible and will be adjusted to participant needs based on a survey prior to the workshop.

Visit the Microsoft Office Essentials' websitenew window for additional information.

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Dive into the world of ChatGPT, OpenAI's groundbreaking text-based AI model. This workshop introduces the foundational aspects, capabilities, and limitations of ChatGPT, setting attendees up for subsequent specialized sessions.

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Discover the transformative power of AI-driven language models in education with our workshop on Using ChatGPT to help design lessons and assessments. This innovative, hands-on workshop is tailored for faculty looking to revolutionize their lesson planning and assessment strategies with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Together we will embrace the power of AI-driven language models to create engaging, personalized learning experiences and assessments for your students.

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Engage in a dynamic conversation about ChatGPT, its evolving landscape, and its potential future impact. This session is a platform for sharing experiences, concerns, insights, and innovations related to the tool.

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Unlock the potential of AI-driven language models in fostering student learning with our Using ChatGPT to Support Student Learning Workshop! This interactive, hands-on workshop will explore the integration of ChatGPT into teaching and learning practices to provide personalized assistance, feedback, and resources to students on their journey to success!

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As AI-driven language models like ChatGPT continue to reshape the digital landscape, digital literacy skills are more important than ever. This workshop emphasizes responsible and respectful deployment in various contexts, ensuring positive and safe interactions.AI detection software will also be highlighted. 

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Engage in a dynamic conversation about ChatGPT, its evolving landscape, and its potential future impact. This session is a platform for sharing experiences, concerns, insights, and innovations related to the tool.

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Dive into the world of ChatGPT, OpenAI's groundbreaking text-based AI model. This workshop introduces the foundational aspects, capabilities, and limitations of ChatGPT, setting attendees up for subsequent specialized sessions.

1. Getting Things Done  (PDF, )

A learning pathway is a series of identified classes that provide you with an in-depth exploration of a skill area.  If you choose to complete the series, a certificate of learning is awarded to acknowledge your commitment to pursue the study and practice of a specialized area of professional development. Participation is paced to provide time to reflect upon your learning and integrate concepts and skills into your life and work. Most pathways are scheduled over a two-year cycle. 

1. Change Management: Moving to the Next Level (PDF, )  
2. Communication and Conflict (PDF, )  
3. Communicating Professionally in the Workplace (PDF, )
4. Customer Service  (PDF, )
5. Management (PDF, )
6. The Valuable Employee (PDF, )  

The Online Teaching training prepares MC faculty to build and teach online or blended courses. It is open to all full and part-time MC faculty.

Online Teaching is a fully-online course that begins around the third week of each semester and runs for 7 weeks. The course will guide you through planning, building, and preparing to teach your own online or blended course. Participants will design a full course and build a course prototype consisting of a syllabus, orientation, and one learning module that is ready-to-teach. The prototype is refined until it serves as a model and a set of page templates for building the rest of the course.

To become eligible to teach online for Montgomery College, your course prototype must meet the competency demonstration criteria, which include the 23 essential standards from the current Quality Matters Rubric.

Prerequisites: 

• Completion of Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning (formerly SRT training) or Online Teaching Part 1 in Spring 2020.
• Approval from your department chair to build and teach a specific course.

Notes:

• Teaching remotely using Zoom or Collaborate is still live teaching. Because live teaching is not part of teaching fully-online, creating a fully-online or blended course requires a redesign to plan content delivery, learning activities, and student engagement in the absence of live lecturing.  
• Faculty with experience teaching fully-online using Blackboard may be eligible for an accelerated version of the training.
• Professors should not be scheduled to teach an online or blended course until they have completed the Online Teaching training.

If you have questions about the training, contact Tom Cantu at 240-567-6006 or Tom.Cantu@montgomerycollege.edu.

Collaborate is a virtual classroom/meeting room. This system enhances online instruction by offering live audio and video, breakout rooms, file sharing, a whiteboard for PowerPoint presentations, collaboration, and more.

You can sign up for the workshop if you are a faculty member who plans to use Blackboard Collaborate new windowto conduct live, online instruction as a component of an online or blended course or to supplement on-campus courses. Staff members who plan to use Blackboard Collaborate to conduct live, online meetings can also sign up.

Upon completion of this class, you will be able to:

1. Use the primary Blackboard Collaborate tools,
2. Use strategies to keep students engaged, and
3. Discuss ideas for using Blackboard Collaborate in your teaching.

Blackboard and other Learning Management Systems are important communication, information, and design tools that are used to support learning and student success.  The Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning series is a group of classes that assists those who educate students in developing the skills necessary to use Blackboard effectively in a remote teaching environment. Educators also develop skills in creating multimedia elements to add to the blackboard course to promote student engagement. 

Learning Outcomes

• Apply Blackboard tools to establish an online presence
• Adapt your course for Digital Teaching in alignment with best practices for the discipline
• Using Blackboard tools to assess student learning while considering alternative assessment techniques
• Utilize appropriate video conferencing software to promote student engagement
• Explore multimedia technology for use in the digital classroom.

Series Elements
Designed to be completed over a four week period, Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning is broken into four sections (1) Blackboard foundations (2) communicating with students using Blackboard, (3) assessing students using Blackboard, and (4) using and developing multimedia for Blackboard. Upon completion of the Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning series, you will create a working Blackboard teaching site that demonstrates many of the elements taught throughout the series.

Blackboard Foundations
The following foundational courses are essential in helping faculty learn how to demonstrate an Online course presence, which is critical in the digital teaching environment. Foundational courses include:

• Blackboard Essentials: This course will teach you how to how to navigate Blackboard, post files, and upload a syllabus, which are skills that must be mastered before starting the rest of Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning.
• Blackboard Text Editor:  This course will teach you how to create pages in Blackboard with text, links, images, and embedded videos.  Embed a video on a webpage, include student learning outcomes, and ask your students a few questions to guide their thinking as they watch the video. 
• Creating an Online Presence in Your Course (Handout):  This handout helps faculty master the skills of creating course elements with proper introductory and transitioning statements to orient students.  This helps faculty make the shift between face-to-face and remote instruction.

Note: All foundational courses must be taken before completing any other course in the series.

Communicating with Students using Blackboard
The following courses are designed to help faculty learn how to communicate effectively with their students using Blackboard. To support the outcomes associated with communicating with students using Blackboard, participants choose one of the following courses:

• Blackboard Communication tools: This course will teach you how to create and manage an Online Discussion board for your students.  If you find that there are topics that you talked about in class that students want to explore further, you might set up discussions on these topics to further engage students.
• Blackboard Collaborate/Zoom: This course will teach you how to communicate with your students in real-time using audio conferencing, presentation software, and other collaborative tools.
• Teaching and Learning Tips for Developing or Improving Online Discussions (Handout):  This handout provides tips to help faculty craft engaging discussions, maintain faculty presence on the discussion board, and develop netiquette policies to successfully manage student behavior online.

Assessing Students using Blackboard
The following courses are designed to help faculty become proficient in giving and grading tests in Blackboard.

• Blackboard Assessments: This course will teach you how to create online tests for your students that are automatically scored by Blackboard. 
• Blackboard Grade Center:  This course will teach you how to set up an Online Gradebook for your students that can be automatically updated throughout the semester as you enter grades.  This can help keep students on track with their grades throughout the semester and allows them to monitor their own progress and improve performance as the semester progresses.

Using and Developing Multimedia for Blackboard
The following courses are designed to help faculty create an engaging experience for their students by expanding their abilities to provide content beyond the typical use of Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint files. 

• Screen Casting Made Simple:  This course will teach you how to use Screencast-O-Matic to create simple videos that can be used on Blackboard to support teaching and learning.
• Using the Automatic Captions in YouTube: This course will teach you how to caption the videos you create to support accessibility for all students.

Common courses are pre-built, ready-to-teach, fully online courses. The dean and department chair should contact the Virtual Campus Dean, Dr. Shinta Hernandez, at 240-567-2374 or via email, with the names of instructors who need to complete common course training.

Common course training involves three steps:

1) Complete Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning. Sections are offered online or on-campus. Check Workday in MyMC for dates and times.

2) After completing Digital Fundamentals for Teaching and Learning, contact the Common Course Coordinator

• Nader Chaaban (COMM 108)
• Kateema Lee (ENGL 101)
• Anna Deadrick (ENGL 102)
• Tonya Seed (HLTH 100)
• Marge Turnbow (HLTH 113)

and Tom Cantu to arrange the following next steps:

• Complete additional modules to learn features of Blackboard needed to teach the common course.
• Complete the common course competency demonstration to become eligible to teach the common course.

3) Meet with the common course coordinator to review the online course and the expectations of an online instructor. Notes:

• Steps 1 and 2 above can be completed online.
• The deadline for completing the competency demonstration is usually several weeks before the start of the semester.
• This allows time to review the competency demonstrations and ask the instructor complete any needed revisions.
• If an instructor is unable to complete the competency demonstration tasks, the instructor is not eligible to teach the common course.

Professional Weeknew window offers faculty and staff a variety of professional development opportunities offered by the College and ELITE. In addition to traditional sessions and guest speakers, ELITE is excited to offer a series of 30-minute Speed Sessions throughout the day designed to provide targeted professional development on a given topic in a short and concise format. Additional information about the Speed Sessions, traditional sessions, and guest speakers is below. For easy registration, click on the registration link and you will be taken directly to the MC Learns through Workday page to enroll in the workshop. 

What are Open Educational Resources, and Why we should care?

This workshop will provide participants with an overview and a look at certain aspects of open educational resources (OER’s). The program xpLor from Blackboard will be featured. The following goal and objectives will be pursued:

Goal
To inform and demonstrate to MC faculty the concept and aspect of free educational resources they can use in their courses.

Objectives
At the end of this session participants should be able to:• Define open educational resources (OER’s);

• Characterize the types of open educational resources
• Describe the purposes of open educational resources
• Locate open educational resources
• Implement Blackboard xpLor to navigate finding, using, and developing open education resources
• Describe the role of Creative Commons and other copyright issues in open education resources

Integrating OER to Your Teaching Using Blackboard xpLor
Blackboard xpLor is an advanced learning object repository that contains shareable, reusable Open Educational Resources (OERs) within the Blackboard learning management system. Blackboard xpLor provides a place for instructors to search OERs that can be easily copied to Blackboard courses. It also allows instructors to create and store materials in xpLor, and then extend their content by sharing and making it discoverable to instructors across working groups, courses, and institutions.

In this session, we are going to learn the basic skills of how to use xpLor to search and pull OER resources into your Blackboard courses, create, protect, and share your content.

Key Outcomes:

1. Locate Blackboard xpLor tool
2. Search OERs and use the OER content in your Blackboard courses
3. Create and upload content
4. Use Creative Commons to protect your content
5. Share your content

These two learning pathways are designed specifically for faculty, instructional staff, or others interested in pursuing instructional roles.

1. Creating an Inclusive Classroom (PDF, ) (via Zoom)
2. Integrative Learning (PDF, ) (self-paced, and online via Zoom)