Online Teaching Resources

I’m Daniel Collins of the CUNY/Kingsborough Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. In our department, we have of course been working with digital and online environments since the inception of our CS program, and a number of our faculty have been at the forefront of distance learning for many years. Some of our instructors have been using the Blackboard learning management system for a few decades (myself: 20 years and counting), and we’d like to share our knowledge and expertise with you.

Prominently in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced CUNY to shift all courses to distance learning on an emergency basis, and required all college faculty to pick up online teaching via Blackboard in just a few days. Some of us found ourselves suddenly producing tutorials, videos, documents, and consulting to support that effort, and we hope that you’ll find them useful as well. See below for the resources that we’ve developed.

Note that in 2024 CUNY switched from the Blackboard LMS to D2L’s Brightspace. As a result, this page will likely not be updated going forward, but will be left here as a resource for other faculty who still use Blackboard.

Executive Overviews

Here you’ll find brief slideshow PDFs, providing a “crash course” overview of various major topics on Blackboard.

Video Walkthroughs

Below you can see detailed video walkthroughs for important tools in our teaching of mathematics and computer science at CUNY, using Blackboard (and most are applicable to other courses as well). See above for brief overviews of many of these topics.

Best Practices

Documents outlining suggested best practices for using different tools go here.

Student Handouts

Here are a few handouts that some of us provide to students to help navigate certain corners of the Blackboard interface.

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