Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL)
The Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning is dedicated to promoting, enhancing, and assessing teaching effectiveness and student learning. We assist faculty, academic units, and teaching assistants in improving instruction. In addition to the events listed below, we are always available for individual consultations or special activities within a department or college. Most of the workshops count toward CITL certificate program continuing education credit. Please check back often to see what events have been added. Want reminders of what teaching sessions are coming up soon? Join our CITL listserv by sending an e-mail message (must be from your University of Illinois address) to listserv@illinois.edu, and in the body of the message write only the following: subscribe CITL
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on making your PowerPoint presentations accessible for everyone while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll begin with a brief overview of common accessibility challenges in PowerPoint and then dive straight into practical solutions.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on making your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets accessible for everyone! In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to prevent reading and navigating order culprits, freeze columns and rows, hide unused columns and rows, delete empty rows between elements, create accessible links, and use the Accessibility Assistant.
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Monday, June 23, 2025
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Get up to speed on using the Pope Tech Canvas Accessibility Guide to make Canvas pages more accessible for everyone! In this hands-on workshop, we’ll start with an overview of the Pope Tech Canvas Accessibility Guide, how it functions, what the various errors, alerts, structural elements, and features mean, and how to fix these issues on a Canvas page.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
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Learn the accessibility requirements for making your Canvas courses accessible. This hands-on workshop will cover using the Canvas editor to create navigable pages, writing effective alt text description for images, charts, and graphs, ensuring readable color contrast, creating accessible tables and links, and using Canvas accessibility tools to fix common issues.
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Learn the accessibility requirements for making your Moodle courses accessible. This hands-on workshop covers creating accessible navigation, headings, tables, lists, and hyperlinks, how to write alt text for images, generate and edit video captions, as well as the advantages (and limitations) of using Moodle’s accessibility checker and screen reader helper.
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We'll kick off the summer course design series with an overview of backward design, a simple course design method that will help you ensure proper alignment of objectives, assessments, and activities within your course.
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In this session, you will consider the constraints your course might be operating under. Is it part of a larger curriculum? Does your department, college, university, or accreditor require specific outcomes for the course? What are your students likely to expect from your course? What limits might that might place on your course design? But constraints inspire creativity.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Friday, June 27, 2025
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This workshop focuses on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework as a means for making design choices that ensure that all students are able to meet course and developmental goals
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Once the groundwork for your course is set, it is time to start building in earnest. In this session, you will learn the basics for crafting good learning objectives, and then start developing the objectives that will guide the rest of your course design.
Monday, June 30, 2025
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This workshop focuses on developing assessments designed to help students achieve the learning objectives of your course. We will examine different types of assessments and consider their respective strengths and downsides. You will then set to work choosing the assessments for your course.
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In a good course, your activities should count as good practice for your assessments, and since your assessments are well-aligned with your objectives, your activities will also help your students achieve their learning goals. Come learn a few activities in this workshop, how to find even more activities, and then start selecting activities to include in your course.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on making your Microsoft Word documents accessible for everyone while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll start with a brief overview of common accessibility challenges in Word and then jump right into practice.
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
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You will want to set fair, clear, and manageable course policies that you can explain and defend the entire semester. In this session, we'll identify a few questions you need to answer to have good course policies, and then you will create policies that are consistent with your course design so far.
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This workshop ties the topics of the previous workshops together by discussing and crafting a syllabus for your newly designed course. We focus on the necessary logistical information for the syllabus, items to include to set student expectations, syllabus language and tone, and how to craft a course schedule with assessments, readings, and other ancillary materials.
Thursday, July 3, 2025
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on making your PowerPoint presentations accessible for everyone while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll begin with a brief overview of common accessibility challenges in PowerPoint and then dive straight into practical solutions.
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Friday, July 11, 2025
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Documents must be proactively accessible for all students. This hands-on workshop will cover what to look for and several tools to help you find and fix issues. You’ll learn how to scan multiple document types for accessibility issues and remediate them.
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
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Learn the accessibility requirements for making your Canvas courses accessible. This hands-on workshop will cover using the Canvas editor to create navigable pages, writing effective alt text description for images, charts, and graphs, ensuring readable color contrast, creating accessible tables and links, and using Canvas accessibility tools to fix common issues.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Thursday, August 7, 2025
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
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Learn the accessibility requirements for making your Moodle courses accessible. This hands-on workshop covers creating accessible navigation, headings, tables, lists, and hyperlinks, how to write alt text for images, generate and edit video captions, as well as the advantages (and limitations) of using Moodle’s accessibility checker and screen reader helper.
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
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Get up to speed quickly on the basics of making PDF documents accessible for all while meeting state and federal accessibility standards. For hands-on participation, you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Acrobat Reader). U of I, UIS, and UIC faculty and staff can obtain Acrobat Pro free from the U of I Webstore: https://webstore.illinois.edu/shop/product.aspx?zpid=6065
For more teaching information, visit our main CITL web site. To join our CITL listserv, send an e-mail message (must be from your University of Illinois address) to listserv@illinois.edu, and in the body of the message write only the following: subscribe CITL