Email Communications

Email communications to NIU faculty, teaching staff, and graduate teaching assistants from the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning

Fall 2025

Call for nominations for Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards - 9/16/2025 New

Department Chairs and School Directors:

We are pleased to announce the call for nominations for Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) Awards for the 2025-2026 academic year. You can find the details and submission guidelines at go.niu.edu/outstanding-ta-award and please forward this email to your Director of Graduate Studies.

Each academic or academic support unit that employs graduate TAs for teaching and related activities is invited to nominate two (2) outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistants, one at the master’s level and the other at the doctoral level, from its department/school for the awards.

Nominations can be submitted by the department chair/school director or designee. Nominators must complete the nomination form (Word doc) for each nominee, although you may also provide additional supporting documents.  We encourage nominations to be as descriptive as possible in supporting the nominee, and to include additional evidence such as student testimonials, course evaluations, or samples of teaching materials. 

Email the entire nomination, including any supporting documents, by Friday, October 24, 2025, to citl@niu.edu with the subject line “Nomination for 2025-2026 Outstanding TA Awards”.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Jason Rhode
Associate Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Digital Education

Reminders for starting the semester with Blackboard - 8/19/2025
Dear Department Chairs/School Directors,
Please forward this to all your faculty, instructional faculty, and TAs who are instructor of record. The tips below will help those who are new to Blackboard get started, but they also highlight some new and exciting features for everyone.
*New* Getting Started with Blackboard Tutorial for Students
The new Getting Started with Blackboard tutorial for students will help them learn the basics of using Blackboard including accessing course material (like readings or presentations), submitting assignments, taking tests, viewing grades and feedback, and tracking their progress. Feel free to add a link to the tutorial with your students or post to your Blackboard course. You can share a link to the entire Tutorial or link to a specific page.
New Features Added to Blackboard
Many new features have been added to Blackboard recently (like multi-column layouts in Ultra Documents, the ability to convert a Word, PDF, or PPT to an Ultra Document, Jumbled Sentence question type for Tests, text-based Gradebook items, an indicator for whether students have viewed grading feedback, and more!). Check out more features in our monthly update videos.
AI Design Assistant - Streamline Course Building but Remain in Control
The AI Design Assistant gives you a head start on some of the more time consuming aspects of building a course in Blackboard. Some of the tasks it can help with include building the structure of your course with Learning Modules; suggesting authentic prompts for Assignments, Discussions, and Journals; writing Test questions; creating Rubrics; generating images for Learning Modules and Ultra Documents; and improving the design of Ultra Documents.  
You are always in control with the AI Design Assistant. The AI does not use your course data or prompts for training purposes, and it does not access your course content until you use the tool (AI is not reviewing your course in the background). You must review the content and accept it before it is added to your course. Once added to your course, you can edit or delete any AI-generated material. 
Requesting a new course on Blackboard 
Your courses are not automatically listed in Blackboard; you must request your courses to be able to build them.
After logging into webcourses.niu.edu, click the Tools tab at the left of the page, followed by Blackboard Faculty Tools. Click My Courses and then follow the prompts to request your upcoming courses. (Instructions and step-by-step tutorials for requesting your course are also available.) To request a Blackboard course, you must be the "instructor of record" for the course in the MyNIU system. If you do not see a course listed to request, verify that you are listed as instructor of record in MyNIU (reach out to your department if you do not see the course in MyNIU). Note that it may take up to 24 hours after being listed as instructor of record in MyNIU to be able to request the course in Blackboard.
Those teaching multiple sections together (e.g. undergraduate/graduate courses taught together, Honors mini-sections, or cross-listed courses) may want to combine their sections into a single Blackboard course. You must be instructor of record for both sections to be able to combine the courses. The resulting Primary course will include the students from all combined sections and will be identified with "PRIM" in the course name.
Course requests are processed immediately. You may need to refresh the Courses page several times to see the course.
Accessing your courses
You can access all your courses from the current and previous semesters by clicking Courses on the left of the page. Use the search and filters to find the course you are looking for. Note that you may need to remove existing filters, such as Current Courses, because fall courses are considered Upcoming Courses until the start date. For quick and convenient access, you can favorite the courses you use most frequently by clicking the star icon. Learn more about the Courses page.
Open your course with confidence and welcome students 
We recommend making your course available to students a few days early with a welcome message, to help them anticipate the structure and expectations of the course. Your course may open automatically at the date you specified when you requested your course in Blackboard, or you can open it manually if you did not set a date. The Course Availability Settings tool, custom-built by the Division of IT, will tell you definitively whether your course is open to students and let you modify any of the availability settings, including the start date of the course.
Adding an image and name pronunciation to your profile
Did you know you can customize your profile in Blackboard to include a profile image and your name pronunciation? This easy step can help students feel more connected to you. Your profile image appears on the Course Content page and in Messages; both your image and name pronunciation appear on the Roster and in Discussions. Students can also customize their profile with an image and name pronunciation, which are visible to their classmates. 
Customizing email notifications
The most essential information from across your courses, like new materials, discussion posts or replies, assignment and test submissions, or grades will be automatically emailed to you daily as a digest each night. You will only receive the daily digest email if there was activity in at least one of your courses. You can modify your notification settings to determine what you see in the daily digest emails from your profile or by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of the Activity Stream. Uncheck any notification you do not wish to receive; uncheck all the items on the email tab to stop receiving the Daily Digest emails. Learn more about Notifications.
Learn more about Blackboard
The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning regularly hosts workshops on using Blackboard for teaching purposes. Faculty, Instructors, and Teaching Assistants receive the program schedule via email each month, or you can view the list of upcoming programs on our website. 
For those who cannot attend any of the scheduled sessions, CITL has created a self-paced workshop on the Ultra Course View.  
The Teaching and Learning with Blackboard site contains instructions, tutorials, and other helpful information related to using Blackboard for your courses, including answers to Frequently Asked Questions.
For login and password-related questions, please contact the IT Service Desk at 815-753-8100 or ServiceDesk@niu.edu, or use the Division of IT Self-Service system to submit a ticket. For other teaching-related Blackboard questions, faculty can submit questions at niu.edu/blackboard/ask.
Interaction requirement for your online course - 8/19/2025

Dear Colleague:

As someone who is scheduled to teach an online course during the upcoming fall semester, I wanted to make sure you were aware of an important federal requirement from the U.S. Department of Education of all online courses, that “there is regular and substantive interaction between students and faculty.” All NIU online courses are expected to meet this requirement and include regular and substantive interaction.

What is “regular and substantive interaction?” You can find a detailed explanation with examples, but in essence, regular and substantive interaction is:

  1. Initiated by the Faculty - To count as ‘regular and substantive,’ interactions need to be started by you. This doesn’t mean students should be discouraged from contacting you or asking questions – far from it! But you should expect to take an active part in initiating and guiding a range of interactions with your students throughout the semester. This ensures that interactions are not optional and left up to each student’s individual discretion; rather, they are an integral part of your instructional plan for the course.

  2. Frequent and Consistent - Interactions with students should be reasonably frequent and consistently repeated throughout the term. This means that once a course begins, long intervals of time shouldn’t pass between the interactions you initiate with students. The mode of interaction may vary throughout the course, depending on your aims and the needs of your students, but the regular cadence of interactions you establish should remain as consistent as possible. Daily communication isn’t required, but at a minimum you should seek to interact with every student at least once each week and you should log in to the course every 1-2 days.

  3. Focused on the Course Subject - Interactions should be connected to the subject of the course and contribute to the students’ progress toward course, program, and college learning objectives. Routine procedural interactions, such as reminders of upcoming deadlines, aren’t ‘substantive’ on their own; neither are activities like assigning grades, unless they are accompanied by personalized feedback or suggestions for improvement. This doesn’t mean that interactions designed to welcome students or build classroom community aren’t important, merely that they aren’t sufficient by themselves.

Please take a look at the regular and substantive interaction guide on the CITL website for recommendations for promoting regular and substantive interaction in online courses and consider as you are drafting the syllabus and preparing your online course for the fall semester how you will ensure that your online course is meeting this federal requirement. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or any of the rest of our CITL team with any questions.

Have great fall semester ahead!

Jason Rhode
Associate Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Digital Education

Updated syllabus toolkit - 8/19/2025

Dear Colleague,

As you put the finishing touches on your fall courses, I wanted to share the updated NIU Syllabus Toolkit, designed to support you in preparing and refining your course syllabi.

Inside the toolkit, you'll find:

  • Guide to Create a Course Syllabus – A comprehensive guide that includes a downloadable sample syllabus template—ideal if you’re building a syllabus from scratch.
  • Syllabus Checklist – A quick-reference list of the essential elements every syllabus should include.
  • Syllabus Statements – All required and recommended NIU syllabus statements in one place, updated to include new academic support statements on Academic Coaching, Content Tutoring, Huskie Academic Success Center, Supplemental Instruction, and Writing Center
  • Accessible Syllabus Guide – Step-by-step instructions for creating a fully accessible syllabus in Microsoft Word.
  • Course Workload Estimator – A tool to help you gauge student workload as you design assignments and activities.
  • Student Success Guides – Practical strategies and resources you can link directly from your syllabus to support your students’ success.

I encourage you to bookmark the Syllabus Toolkit and explore these resources as you finalize your fall syllabi.

Wishing you a successful start to the semester ahead!

Jason Rhode
Associate Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Digital Education

Teaching resources to begin the semester - 8/18/2025

Dear New Faculty Colleagues:

Again, welcome to NIU! I wanted to share some information and links to a few of the resources that will be most helpful to you this week as you prepare to teach your first semester. You can find these and much more at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) website – citl.niu.edu

New to Teaching at NIU
Find course policies, teaching policies, and teaching-related resources to help you start your teaching career at NIU successfully!

Syllabus Toolkit
Find guides, checklists, and statements to include in your syllabus as you design a course syllabus to best meet your teaching style, course content, activities, and departmental requirements. Consider creating a learner-centered syllabus that targets student learning and success!

Strategies for Starting the Semester Well
This list of strategies you can use the first day and into the first weeks of the semester that will help you create an engaging, motivating, and organized classroom environment.

Week of Engagement Toolkit
The first week of classes is a critical opportunity to engage students actively and early, thereby setting the expectation for a high level of participation throughout the semester. The connections that students form in the first week with you and their classmates can have a profound impact on their sense of belonging and ultimately their success and persistence in the course. This toolkit offers principles and strategies to keep in mind as you develop your syllabus and plan your first week of class.

Support Units for New Faculty
Many support units are available at NIU to assist new faculty in their teaching, research, scholarship and artistry. This guide provides a quick overview and contact information to the support units that new faculty often connect with for support.

Learning Technologies at NIU
Catalog of available and institutionally supported software and web tools to promote collaboration, enhance communication, share multimedia, teach online and more.

Tips for Starting the Semester with Blackboard
Answers to frequently asked questions new faculty, teaching staff, and TAs may have, as they request course space and get ready to develop their courses in Blackboard, NIU’s learning management system. 

Our Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) is here to support you as you teach either in-person, hybrid, or online. If you ever have any questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally or anyone on our team. You can contact us by phone at 815-753-0595, email citl@niu.edu, or schedule an appointment with a member of our team. We look forward to serving you!

Go Huskies!

Jason Rhode
Associate Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Digital Education

Summer 2025

Registration open for the 2025 Teaching Assistant Institute - 7/29/2025

Department Chairs and School Directors:

I am reaching out to inform you that registration has opened for the Fall 2025 Teaching Assistant Institute. More details including schedule and registration information are available on the TAI webpage.

Like last year, the Teaching Assistant Institute will be a two-week-long event from Monday, August 11 through Sunday, August 25. The Institute will be entirely asynchronous during the week of Monday, August 11th, and our synchronous sessions will occur the week of Monday, August 18 (all synchronous sessions will be live captioned and recorded). Through this Institute, graduate teaching assistants will learn the basic principles of teaching and related responsibilities, receive information about campus support resources for their students, and network with other TAs, faculty, and resource staff. Topics will include cultural competency, engaging students, strategies for effective teaching, and resources at NIU to support success in teaching and learning.

The Institute will feature a mix of live online discussions and pre-recorded videos as well as asynchronous activities to promote connection and community. While some of the pre-recorded videos will be standard for all TAs participating in the Institute, each TA will also be able to choose from a selection of elective videos based on their experience and role. TAs will need to attend the three live discussions (or watch the recordings) and watch the required five core and three (or more) elective asynchronous videos to receive a certificate. We will track attendance in live sessions and views on the videos for departments that require TAs to complete the Institute.

Live online discussions will be held on Monday, August 18, Tuesday, August 19, and Thursday, August 21 from 9-10:30 AM, and there will be an optional networking event on Tuesday the 19th from 2-3:30 PM in the library. Departments that conduct their own training for TAs can integrate the live sessions within their training schedule.

Please share this information and link above with your directors of graduate studies and graduate teaching assistants.

Thank you,

Amanda Hirsch, Ph.D. (she/her)
Assistant Director of Teaching Excellence and Support
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
AC 116 | 815-753-5803 | a1404391@mail.niu.edu
citl.niu.edu

Blackboard access for new hires - 7/28/2025

Department Chairs and School Directors:

For new hires that may be awaiting the processing of hiring paperwork and activation of their NIU Account ID necessary to access Blackboard, we continue to have a technical solution in place that allows for new hires to receive access to their Blackboard courses for the upcoming semester using a temporary guest Blackboard ID associated with their personal email address. With this temporary Blackboard guest ID, new hires are able to login to access their fall Blackboard course(s) to develop and begin teaching as needed until their employee NIU Account ID is activated and they've been assigned as instructor of record in MyNIU. They then will be able to transition to using their activated employee ID and password to login to their Blackboard course(s) without any need to transfer any course content or settings.

If you have any new hires for fall who are still awaiting their employee Account IDs for Blackboard access or who have yet to be assigned their course(s) in MyNIU, please reply back to me or submit using the Blackboard Ask A Question Form the following for each new hire who still needs Blackboard access so we can expedite creation of temporary accounts: first name, last name, contact email, course(s) assigned to teach for fall (include course number and section). Upon receipt we will promptly ensure they receive access to their course(s) and follow-up individually with each to provide them their login details.

First Name Last Name Contact Email Course(s) Teaching for Fall (course number and section)

Best,
Jason Rhode
Associate Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Digital Education

Contact Us

Center for Innovative
Teaching and Learning

Phone: 815-753-0595
Email: citl@niu.edu