TIPS for Teaching – Page 2 – Tips from the Office of Transformative Pedagogy at USC Upstate

February 6, 2026March 12, 2026 Lillian Reeves Faculty Development, Technology, Uncategorized

Start at the Library to Achieve Your Course Accessibility Goals

When selecting materials for your courses, where you start can make all the difference. Beginning your search at the library not only saves time, but it also helps ensure students have current, accessible content to supplement your instruction.

Start with Library Links

Academic libraries are the best place to start looking for course readings. Librarians can help you identify high-quality, current articles, open-access resources, and other digital content available through institutional subscriptions and thoughtful curation. For this reason, faculty may consider using stable library links instead of using PDF files. Many publishers provide full-text or HTLM versions of articles that can be read online and are more accessible for screen readers and assistive technologies. HTML is built using semantic markup (e.g., specific tags for headings <h1> to <h6>, paragraphs <p>, and lists) that provides an organized and logical structure for screen readers to interpret and navigate content efficiently. When we scan articles and turn them into PDFs, they become images that can be tagged, but improper or missing tags often disrupt the reading order or make the content unreadable for assistive technology.

Library access flowchart showing pathways to online content or PDF files as a last resort. A full description of the image is below.

Image full description: The flowchart above begins with a green library icon and the message “Start Your Search at the Library,” then splitting into two paths. The preferred left path (green) guides users to “Find Article Links,” leading to accessible online content such as HTML articles and full-text links, highlighted as “Digital & Accessible.” The right path (red) appears only when no link is available and directs users to use PDF files as a last resort, emphasizing the need to edit them for accessibility.

Searchable

HTML articles are properly formatted and linked to the full text, allowing students to search within the text, adjust display settings, use assistive tools, and activate any plug-in preferences. HTLM formats will also update over time as academic publishers work to achieve compliance with WCAG as well.

Recently, I was reading an article in the EBSCO database, and I noticed the toolbar across the top right of the page. In the toolbar, there are a headphone icon and an accessibility icon at the far right. The headphones allow users to listen to the article.

Toolbar with various icons on a light gray background. A full description of the image is below.

Image full description: The image shows a horizontal toolbar with a series of icons arranged side by side against a light gray background. From left to right, the icons include a bookmark symbol, a quotation mark, a camera with a plus sign, a curved arrow pointing right, a download symbol, a printer, a globe, a list with two lines, a set of headphones, and a circular icon with a person surrounded by a blue ring indicating accessibility options.

Accessibility Icon

The accessibility icon, however, launches a form that allows users to request “content remediation.” According to the website, content remediation transforms content into more accessible formats, ensuring compliance with accessibility standards and compatibility with assistive technologies. Remediated content can be requested as a Word document or as HTLM and will be returned to the user in 3-5 days. I tried this out and was very glad to receive a more accessible version of the article a few days later.

Pop-up window on a webpage titled "Accessibility support for users with disabilities" with article details and form fields. A full description of the image is below.

Image full description: The Ebsco pop-up window titled “Accessibility support for users with disabilities” appears over a text-heavy webpage. The pop-up references an article titled “Exploring Cross-Domain Relations in Language and Literacy Profiles of Latine Bilingual Language Learners in the U.S.” A section marked with a triangle icon containing an exclamation point explains eligibility and how to request accessible content formats.

Use PDFs Sparingly

If an article cannot be linked through the library, PDF files may be necessary, but they really should be the exception, not the rule. Scanned PDF files often require significant remediation, such as OCR and tagging, to meet accessibility standards. When PDFs must be used, plan for additional time to ensure they are accessible.

If the PDF has simple formatting, you may be able to use Blackboard’s built-in “convert a file” document feature, which converts the selected file into the Blackboard Ultra Document format. Supported file types include PDF, PowerPoint (ppt, pptx, pps), and Word (doc, docx, odt). Be sure to review the converted content for accuracy.

Scanning book chapters and sharing them as PDF files is ideally a thing of the past and may violate copyright laws. If there are text materials you can’t find anything comparable to, work with the library to request access to ebooks or other resources. Visit the USC Upstate Copyright LibGuide to learn more about copyright and fair use in higher education.

Support

CAIFS also has several accessibility trainings coming up with Celena and Jennifer on Word documents and Adobe PDFs. The Word document presentation covers Word as well as Powerpoint, email, and video captioning. To sign up for those trainings, please review the Accessibility Matters Form and choose any this spring that work with your schedule.

You can also log into Blackboard and visit the CAIFS professional development course and explore the guidance on Word and Adobe if none of the training times work for you. Additionally, if you’d like assistance from the CAIFS accessibility team, please complete our Accessibility Assistance Form and we’ll reach out and set something up.

A Small Shift with a Big Impact

By starting at the library, prioritizing links, and choosing accessible digital formats, faculty can create courses that are easier to navigate, more inclusive, and more sustainable. And when PDFs are truly needed, support is available through CAIFS as you develop your accessibility skills and make your online and face to face course material more inviting and welcoming for all learners.

February 6, 2026February 6, 2026 Celena Kusch GenAI

AI Spark Tips: Using Copilot to Free up Time for Real Interactions

When we talk about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it can be easy to focus on sensational stories about deepfakes, AI relationships, or humans offloading so much of their work that AIs are just summarizing and evaluating other AI’s reports. The greatest impact of AI isn’t in the splashy story, though. It’s in the small, AI-enabled changes that can free up hours of time that we can redirect to building human relationships.

Microsoft Copilot doesn’t get as much press as ChatGPT, but as a workplace productivity tool, it can make a meaningful dent in your workload. Copilot is built directly into Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Word, making it easy to use in everyday tasks.

Microsoft Outlook Menu with Copilot icons on the left and right

Many faculty and staff are using Copilot to draft weekly course announcements based on your course schedule, identify action steps from documents or emails, build email templates to automate interactions, and turn bullet points into polished messages they can quickly edit and personalize.

Try Today

Click the Copilot button in any Word document, PowerPoint, Excel file, or Outlook email to access embedded Copilot chat. Then, use preprogrammed prompts or ask your own.

The suggestions do not need to change your voice to streamline your workload. “What are some ways I could improve this document?” can point out suggestions for reordering, eliminating redundancy, and even just formatting for greater clarity.

Screenshot of Copilot chat in a Word document with several prompt buttons: "Suggest a list of action items from this file, Summarize this document in a bulleted list, What are some ways I could improve this document?, and What are the main takeaways from this document?

In the calendar document pictured above, I asked Copilot to create an invitation to faculty participants at my university for each item on the calendar. It compiled all the logistical details, which I can cut and paste directly into emails I can pre-schedule in Outlook. I didn’t have to worry about Copilot hallucinating events because this chat is already focused on my Word document. Try out a similar prompt with the Schedule of Assignments in your syllabus.

screenshot of auto-generated email invitation for DIY AI 2/13/2026 DIY AI Workshop-Feb. 13 with text inviting colleagues to a workshop.

Because it’s embedded in Microsoft tools, Copilot can be more aware of the context of your task and can save you time clicking between windows and applications.

Key Benefit: Accessibility

Working natively within Microsoft applications, Copilot generates more accessible content than materials created in another AI then exported or saved to Microsoft formats.

ChatGPT-generated presentations or Canva templates, for instance, can lose all master slide formatting and even generate language errors or other issues with file properties when exported to PowerPoint. Bringing the exported PowerPoint up to accessibility standards can lose a lot of the time you gained by generating your content.

In contrast, Copilot generates PowerPoints and Word documents with appropriate headings, styles, and themes, so your Accessibility Check does not add time to your workflow.

The Takeaway

AI use doesn’t need to be dramatic to be powerful. Sometimes, reclaiming time is the most meaningful move you can make.

January 23, 2026March 12, 2026 Lillian Reeves Faculty Development, Social and Emotional Learning, Student Success, TILT, Uncategorized

What Students Want

At the start of each semester, CAIFS hosts a very short and optional Blackboard Ultra Quick Start course for incoming students. The goal of the course is to invite students to explore the LMS and try out the discussion board, assignment submission, and Yuja video quiz so they have some level of familiarity and comfort with the learning environment before classes begin. The discussion board prompts students to discuss how comfortable they are with digital tools and to share some goals for the semester ahead and how they plan to achieve them. Of the students who engage with the course, almost all of them say they feel pretty comfortable with different digital tools, they want to establish and maintain a 3.5 GPA or higher, and they hope to meet some friends. These qualities and experiences that they hope for all contribute to and support student well-being and belonging. So what can we do to help students expand their tech skills, get the most from their courses and major, and find some friends?

Expanding 21st Century Tech Skills

Now that USC Upstate students have shared with us that they feel pretty comfortable with common tech tools, what can we do to increase their comfort with and use of 21^st-century skills? One consideration is to embed technology use within authentic disciplinary tasks rather than treating technology as a standalone skill or course. We might ask students to use technology to analyze data, collaborate digitally, evaluate content and sources for accuracy, and communicate to different audiences across multiple platforms. Designing assignments that require students to select tools intentionally, document their decision-making, iterate based on peer and instructor feedback, and reflect on ethical considerations, like accessibility, data privacy, and AI use, can improve student motivation and engagement. It also invites students to build durable, transferable skills beyond specific tools or disciplines. If you’re interested in learning more about tech-integrated authentic assessment, explore Digital Authentic Assessments (DAA) in the article, Authentic Assessment in Higher Education: The Role of Digital Creative Technologies.

Nurturing Academic Persistence and Career Readiness

Faculty can also play a role in supporting students as they reach their academic and career readiness goals. Instructional practices that support persistence, like transparent assignments, scaffolded skill development, timely and actionable feedback, and opportunities to revise, build students’ confidence and sense of belonging, especially in 100 and 200 level general education courses. At the same time, students are interested in their career prospects and rely on faculty to make disciplinary skills explicit, to provide access to simulations or applied projects, and to guide them through the practice of communication, collaboration, and problem-solving like a historian, nurse, educator, or other professional. Small shifts in how we describe our assignments can make a huge impact: by naming the transferable skills, inviting students to reflect on how course learning connects to several careers, and aligning assessments with career-focused expectations, we can guide students toward achieving their academic and career goals. To learn more about integrating career readiness into your courses, reach out to Lillian Reeves (reeveslg@uscupstate.edu) to learn about how to access ACUE’s Quick Study course on that topic.

Finding Friends

While students have plenty of opportunities outside of class to meet people, they also spend a lot of time in class, which makes it the perfect place to meet a friend or two. Faculty can play a small, but powerful role in helping students meet their peers by designing classes that make connections feel natural. Small group work, low-stakes peer discussions in the early parts of the semester, and in-class collaborative projects with clearly defined roles can give students the repeated opportunities they need to get to know each other. When students have opportunities to speak and be listened to, community can emerge. To learn more about how to nurture the kinds of connections that lead to student success or to add some new strategies for building community to your practice, visit Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning and read the free copy of Peter Felten and Colleague’s book, Connections are everything: A college student’s guide to relationship-rich education.

Students come to college often full of hope and nerves. In recognition of both, we can listen to their aspirations and create opportunities for them to achieve their goals and make lasting connections with peers, faculty, and staff. Evidence across institutional size, rank, and geographic location in the United States has shown that relationships enrich the college experience and strengthen students’ sense of belonging immeasurably. In this way, fostering connections becomes a powerful – if often overlooked – dimension of student success.

January 16, 2026April 9, 2026 Celena Kusch GenAI

AI Spark Tips: From Curiosity to Confidence: Improving Assignment Instructions with the OLC Course Review Assistant GPT

If you’re curious about ChatGPT.Edu but haven’t quite figured out how it fits into your teaching, you’re not alone. AI suggestions for course materials can fall flat when using a generic AI, but you may be surprised by what you find when you use a customized GPT designed by instructors for instructors.

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Course Review Assistant GPT is a first-of-its-kind chatbot trained on education research in instructional design and online and hybrid learning and tuned to OLC’s evidence-based scorecards to improve course quality.

OLC Course Review Assistant. Provides guidance and support for evaluating and improving courses with the OLC Course Review Scorecard with four getting started action cards.

A Strong First Use Case: Refining What You Already Have

Instead of tackling a full course review, start with something familiar: assignment instructions.

Try using the OLC Course Review Assistant in ChatGPT.Edu to:

Clarify assignment instructions in student-friendly language
Ensure that assignments are designed to measure your course learning outcomes
Break down assignments into step-by-step checklists or guides
Create rubrics for grading assignments based on your instructions and outcomes

Example prompt:

“My course learning outcomes are [PASTE FROM SYLLABUS]. First evaluate how well my assessments align to the course learning objectives. Then, offer any suggestions for improving the assignment instructions below. Flag any areas in the instructions that might confuse students.” [Copy and Paste or Upload Your Current Assignment]

Review the suggestions for clarifying your instructions. If they help, keep them. If they don’t, you’ve learned something without risk.

Based on its training in instructional design, the OLC Course Review Assistant will ask you follow up questions that may give you new ideas for supporting your students’ learning with assignment examples, guides, rubrics, and other clarifying features.

Getting Started with the OLC Course Review Assistant GPT

USC Upstate is an OLC member. To get started claim your account by going to the OLC homepage, then click on “Create an Account.” Please use your institutional email address as your username as this will link you to our institutional membership.

Once your account is active, you may explore the OLC site, or go directly to the OLC Course Review GPT through your USC Upstate ChatGPT.Edu account. Go to ChatGPT (also available in the SpartanHub), then login by entering your USC Upstate email address in the email box to use single sign on.

In the upper-left of your screen, you’ll see the OLC Course Review Assistant GPT button. Click it and begin interacting with the bot.

Screenshot of USC Upstate's ChatGPT Edu, with left menu options for New Chat, Search chats, Images, Apps, Codex, GPTS: OLC Course Review Assistant, USC Upstate NSE Department Alt Text Generator, and Explore GPTs

Final Thought

You don’t need to redesign your whole course to begin using AI thoughtfully to improve student learning outcomes. One low-stakes, repeatable use of a context-specific GPT can be enough to help you move from curiosity to confidence.

January 6, 2026January 6, 2026 Celena Kusch GenAI

AI Spark Tips: When Students Ask at 2 a.m.

How Blackboard’s AVA Supports Learning Without Replacing You

We’ve all done it. We know the answer is in the user guide or instruction manual, but we don’t want to skim the whole document. Students feel the same way about the course syllabus. They know the answer is in the syllabus, but they don’t know where it is or what to look for.

Blackboard’s AI Virtual Assistant (AVA) is designed to provide just-in-time automated answers about your course and syllabus information, so you don’t have to. You write your syllabus and course instructions into your Blackboard course, and AVA looks up the answers to students’ logistical questions based on your materials.

What Is AVA?

Blackboard’s AVA is a built-in AI agent designed to work only within the closed system of your Blackboard course. It answers objective questions posed in natural language by referring students to specific content you have added to your course. It does not share the information outside your course to train AI models, and it does not search beyond your content to make up answers that sound right.

AVA acts like a self-writing FAQ that students can access anytime, any place.

How Do Students Use AVA?

If you opt to enable AVA in your course, students access AVA when they send you a message through Blackboard. After they click Send on a new message or Reply to an existing message thread, AVA introduces herself.

Screenshot: I am AVA, your Virtual Assistant. I'm searching the course for a response to your message. Any results I suggest are also seen by the instructor to verify their accuracy.

When students ask about due dates, course policies, assignment instructions, and other objective questions, AVA provides answers and direct links to the source of your course information. The complete record of this interaction is saved for your review within the Message thread in your Blackboard course.

For example, a student could ask if any assignments are due tomorrow. Or they could ask for a list of assignment due dates. AVA searches your assignment due dates and compiles a list of course links.

Screenshot of AVA chat in Blackboard course. Student asks, "When are my assignments due?" AVA lists all upcoming due dates in order and provides assignment links in chronological order.

AVA will intuit some answers, but only if the link to course materials is very clear. For instance, I asked whether Respondus monitoring was required for tests, and AVA concluded it was based on the number of references to Respondus within the course.

screenshot of AVA chat. Student says, "Do I need to use Respondus for tests?" AVA answers that there are several modules and tests specifically labeled Respondus testing and provides links to those materials.

AVA did not, however, offer answers that were not directly available within the course materials provided by the instructor. My test course did not include a syllabus with a grading breakdown, so when I asked how much an assignment counted toward the Overall Grade, AVA directed me to wait for the instructor’s response.

Screenshot of AVA chat. Student: "how do I turn in my assignment?" AVA: "Currently, there is no direct information on how to turn in your video assignment. Please wait for your instructor's response for further guidance.

As you can see from the sample interactions, AVA is not “chatty” or personal. She does not make judgment calls nor offer a personality that may clash with your instructor presence in your course. She’s simply a clear, formal, automated messenger who directs students to the answers you have already posted in your course. Even at 2 a.m.

Getting Started with AVA in Your Course

AVA is disabled in your class by default. Instructors have the option to enable AVA directly from the Details and Actions area of the Course Content page.

Under the Virtual Assistant heading on the main Course Content page, instructors may click “Edit Settings” to enable or disable AVA messaging.

The Edit Settings button will take you to the Course Settings options, where you may toggle the switch labeled “Allow AVA to reply to messages from students.”

Instructors who wish to use AVA must opt in to using this feature in each course by editing those settings.

Screenshot of Blackboard Course Content page Details & Actions menu, including Virtual Assistant Auto-Reply to Messages with Edit Settings link.

Course Settings options showing Class Roster on, All AVA to reply to messages from students on, and Students can message anyone in their course on

Final Thoughts

AVA is a new student-facing AI feature in Blackboard. Its prompting is cautious and careful.

It effectively answers very straightforward questions about course logistics 24/7, and it provides a record of interactions for you to expand upon later.

December 11, 2025December 11, 2025 Lillian Reeves Faculty Development, Uncategorized

5 Practices for Winter Well-Being

And just like that, Fall 2025 is drawing to a close. Over the past semester, you’ve published articles, presented at national and international conferences, completed—or begun—the ACUE Effective Teaching Certification, experimented with GenAI, made your courses more accessible, and shared your ideas and expertise with students and colleagues—all helping to make USC Upstate a more enduring, informed, and future-focused community. As you move into the winter holiday and reflect on your achievements and discoveries, here are 5 practices to support your winter well-being and rejuvenation.

Continue reading →