Newsletter Editor Jane Weiss
Department Luncheon: Today, Tuesday, 12 December 2023, 11:00 in C333
A message from Annie DelPrincipe, Elroy Esdaille, Sara Rutkowski, Enid Stubin, and Toby Zipper:
We invite you to the first End-of-Semester Luncheon since December 2019–four long winter solstices ago! Please join us for a festive meal and warm conviviality today, Tuesday, 12 December, starting at 11:00 a.m. in C333. We’re asking for $20 from full-time and $10 from part-time faculty. Looking forward to seeing you!
Final Exam Schedule: 12 December – 18 December 2023
After a hiatus of a couple of years, the Registrar’s office has released the final exam period schedule for this fall, indicating when & where your particular class and section has been assigned to meet this week. You and your students can find the schedule here: https://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/registrar/finals-schedule.html For the most part, courses and sections have been assigned a meeting time that is very close to their normal class time during the semester. Some classes have been assigned their usual classroom, but others have been switched to different classrooms for the exam week meeting, so please check the schedule. If you’ve already invented a meeting time for your classes during finals week, please realize that students may have conflicts with that time due to another class having been assigned that same time slot per the Registrar’s schedule. Please note that all faculty are obligated to meet with their students at some point during finals week, December 12-18.
End of Semester Protocols
A message from Annie:
Faculty availability to students during finals week: Per Provost Russell’s guidance this semester, all faculty are required to use the final exam period that has been assigned to their course(s) during finals week for an educationally appropriate activity. If you wish to give a final exam, this is the ideal time to do it. You can find the fall 2023 final exam schedule at this link: https://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/registrar/finals-schedule.html. Of course, many of us do not give timed final exams, and there are a variety of other ways we might use this time: to give back student work and have conferences with individual students, to have students turn in final work and complete some sort of meta-cognitive reflection, etc.
Saving student work/records: Please remember that each faculty member is required by the CUNY Records & Retention Policy to keep copies of their own students’ final exams and/or sample final coursework for one year after final course grades have been assigned. The precise form the student sample coursework takes will depend, of course, on the courses you taught this term and the final projects you assigned to your students. Please make a plan to retain student work that is appropriate to the courses you’ve taught this term.
Creating, saving, and submitting a final grade roster: The CUNY Records & Retention Policy also states that instructors must keep a copy of their “grade records, tests scores, and marking sheets” for two years after final grades have been submitted. While this is the responsibility of each individual faculty member, the department requests that you complete and submit to Shelly Benjamin a simple, grid roster for each of your courses that includes very basic information: student name and ID number, last date of class attended, final grade, and, if you assigned an “Incomplete” grade, a simple list of what the student is required to submit in order to resolve the incomplete. Annie has attached a blank grid in a Word document on her “It’s December! End-of-Term Reminders” email, sent to your KCC email address, that you can use and complete for each course. If you have a different grid you’d like to send Shelly, that is fine, but please ensure that it is digital, is sent to Shelly as either a PDF or Word attachment, is legible, and contains the information I’ve listed here. I appreciate your cooperation with this, as it makes it much easier for course coordinators/directors to help resolve minor student questions regarding final grades without having to contact you.
Next English: Next English is no longer required for Eng 12, 12A0, or 24. It is still required for all ESL courses (101/102/91), so please check with ESL program directors if you have questions about that. If you’re new to us and do not know what “Next English” refers to, just know that it was sort of like a flip phone.
Final Grades Due: 11:59 pm on 12/21/23 on CUNY first.
Filing Final Grades
Final grade rosters will be available in CUNYfirst on 13 December 2023. The grade rosters for fall 2023 will shut down permanently at 11:59 pm on 21 December 2023. To file final grades, log on to the Kingsborough Website at www.kbcc.cuny.edu Hover the mouse over “QUICK LINKS” and in the drop down menu select “CUNYFirst Portal,” or on the main CUNY website cuny.edu hover over Login and select CUNYfirst. A detailed, step-by-step guide to filling out the grade roster is available here: https://files.constantcontact.com/0d3f8eec701/e73a05ec-500a-447e-a331-b21a9de8a8f3.pdf If you do not see your current courses in Faculty Center, or if you run into other difficulties, please call the IT helpdesk: 718-368-4840.
Book Orders Needed for Winter & Spring Courses
A message from Annie:
The bookstore has reached out to Annie because to date, hardly any of our department’s Winter and Spring courses have provided book or course material information on CUNY first. We are under a legal obligation to provide this information to students before they register for our courses. In order to comply with this obligation and provide students with this needed information, please do the following ASAP:
Log into CUNY first and go to Faculty Center and then My Textbooks and then, when you are viewing the correct course in winter or spring 2024, fill in your book or course material information. If you do not require students to purchase any books for your course, please click the box that signals this. If your course is zero textbook cost (ZTC), please add something like this under “course material notes” and “special instructions:” “This course will use a variety of online, free, open-access resources.” Of course, then you must ensure that the teaching materials you plan to use truly are open-access.
Mailboxes in C309
As the semester winds down, please be sure to stop by C309 to empty your mailbox.
PSC-CUNY Grant Applications Due Friday 15 December 2023 11:59 PM
PSC-CUNY Grants Proposal System is now open for Cycle 55 applications. The final, non-negotiable deadline to apply is Friday, December 15th, 2023 at 11:59pm. Please visit this PSC CUNY Webpage for important details about the process, or check your KCC email for detailed instructions: https://www.rfcuny.org/rfwebsite/principal-investigators/explore-pre-award-resources/psc-cuny-award-program/ .
PSC-CUNY Research Awards are designed to encourage the scholarly and creative pursuits of CUNY faculty, especially junior faculty. Funds for research and creative projects are available to all Permanent, Full-Time members of instructional staff, and untenured members of the faculty in particular (untenured associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, lecturer); and Full-Time staff in HEO series. For the purposes of the PSC-CUNY Awards, junior faculty comprise those at the rank of untenured associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, and lecturer.
The Grants Proposal System no longer allows attachments as Word Docs, only as PDFs. If you are unable to convert your project narrative to PDF, please send it as a Word document to Kathy Giaimo, who will then reformat it as a PDF and upload it to your application. Kathy will be happy to assist you with this or to answer any questions you may have. She is on campus every day except Mondays, when she works remotely. You can call her at 718-368-6858, or email her at Kathryn.giaimo@kbcc.cuny.edu.
As always, the Advancement office strongly advises applicants not to wait until the last minute to submit their application. The earlier you submit your proposal, the more time Kathy will have to review it and help you to address any issues with your submission. Again, the deadline for Cycle 55 applications is 11:59pm on Friday, December 15, 2023. Please click here to apply: https://rfcuny.org/gp/welcome.aspx
22 December 2023 and 26 December – 28 December 2023: English Department Office Open Remotely
The English Department office will provide services remotely on Friday 22 December 2023; C309 will not be open. The office will be closed 23 December through 25 December 2023. The office will provide services remotely Tuesday 26 December through Friday 29 December 2023 and will reopen on Tuesday 2 January 2024.
Brightspace Sandbox
A message from Neil Kernis:
The Brightspace “sandbox” is live and ready for us to use. You can now access Brightspace, create a course, and play around as you wish to get a feel for our new Learning Management System (LMS) that will replace Blackboard. Please note that it is only for training purposes, so nothing that you create in the sandbox will be transferred to your actual course shells once they become available.
Here is how to access the sandbox (Note: You can just skip to step 3; Steps 1 and 2 are not necessary, but Neil is including them because everyone should be aware of the CUNY LMS transition page, as it contains lots of useful info):
1. Go to the CUNY LMS transition page: https://www.cuny.edu/academics/brightspace-transition/
2. Scroll down to FAQ and click “How Do I Access D2L Brightspace?”
3. Click on https://brightspace.cuny.edu/d2l/home
4. Log in using your CUNY credentials (xxxxxxxx@login.cuny.edu)
5. You are now in Brightspace. Scroll down a bit, and on the right hand side of the screen click, “Create a Course.”
6. Have at it.
This is a link to CUNY’s recent Brightspace Demo. You may want to have a look before you start playing around with your own course. Neil thought it left much to be desired, but something is better than nothing: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/lgTlx4yqaL7t6wdWBDRhfiLMUU_dzBw5JrGThpEYa3w3rGxJs8hSKBBEIVfPBckU.rBEfSHebnoeWEzwo
Your courses from the past two years will (erm, “should”) migrate on December 15. Neil has have not seen a migrated course yet, but the word is that while most material does migrate, it end up in odd or unfamiliar places. You will likely need to do some rearranging if you plan to use that material for future courses. Note that only course material migrates; student work, your feedback, discussion posts, grades, etc., do not. We will need to preserve that material on our own. Neil will address this in a separate message.
KCC’s training period will begin in Spring 2024 (exact dates TBA) and Brightspace will officially launch on our campus in Summer 2024. You will still have access to Blackboard until the contract expires in December 2025, but you will not have new course shells starting in Summer 24. So if you plan to teach this summer, it is especially important that you get well acquainted with Brightspace in the spring.
Please let Neil know if you have any questions: Neil.Kernis@kbcc.cuny.edu
Sunshine Fund
A message from Elroy Esdaille and Enid Stubin:
We’re asking for contributions to replenish the Sunshine Fund, the means by which our hardworking and dedicated staff members receive a holiday gift, joyful and sad milestones are acknowledged, and anyone in the department suffering from a natural disaster—fire or flood—can be helped. If you have not already contributed, our request is:
$30.00 from full-time faculty (an increase of $5, the first in many years)
$10.00 from part-time faculty
Because the Sunshine Fund doesn’t have a PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle account, we ask that you make your contributions in cash. Those of you teaching off campus may send either Elroy or Enid a check or electronic payment, which we will then convert to cash and place in the Sunshine Fund. You’ll receive e-mail acknowledgment of your contribution. Please feel free to contact Elroy at Elroy.Esdaille@kbcc.cuny.edu or Enid at Enid.Stubin@kbcc.cuny.edu with any questions.
KCC Information Technology Services Office
You can call KCC’s ITS Help Desk at (718) 368-6679 or email helpdesk@kbcc.cuny.edu 9:00 – 5:00 on weekdays. For Blackboard support during hours when KCC’s Help Desk is not available, call 1-646-664-2024.
A Note about the Newsletter
This is the last Newsletter for the Fall 2023 semester; the Newsletter will resume on Monday 6 March 2024. You can send items (for publication next March) to Jane Weiss at jweiss@kbcc.cuny.edu. Please keep items brief (preferably 100 or fewer words). Longer items will be abridged. Items about publications and achievements are very welcome.
