Fall 2025 Syllabus Updates

The Iowa Open Education Awards provide recognition to instructors across the state who have carried out innovative and impactful work through the use of open educational resources (OER) and/or the implementation of open pedagogy in their teaching.

OER are free, openly licensed instructional materials which can be adapted to meet different needs. In Iowa, OER have been implemented across K-12 and higher education contexts to support learning.

Open education goes beyond OER, including pedagogical practices that leverage openness to build engagement in the classroom. These awards have been developed to honor instructors across the state who are implementing various open educational practices in their classes.

Recipients of the Iowa Open Education Awards will receive $1,000–$2,000 and be featured on the Iowa Open Education Action Team’s website alongside a short description of their impactful work with OER.

These awards are sponsored by the Iowa Open Education Action Team with support from the Midwest Higher Education Compact (MHEC).

Grammarly Pilot Begins This Month

Quick Eval Update Saves Time Grading

Quick Eval has been around for several years now (if you're not familiar check this out), but starting later this month, the feature gets a much needed addition to save you time! 

The new functionality enables instructors to quickly iterate through their list of submissions in Quick Eval even if those submissions are sourced from different activity types or courses. For example, an instructor has activities to grade in Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes and has been assigned items that appear in Quick Eval Submissions. The instructor directly accesses each submission to evaluate the items instead of navigating back to Quick Eval and going into each item again.

Loads of New Zoom Features Coming Soon

Starting in July, NICC's licensing with Zoom is evolving to include access to more features.

• Unlimited storage for recordings (Replacing Panopto)

  • Say goodbye to storage limits of your lectures and recordings. They can now all live in your Zoom account without limitation! 

• Enhanced Zoom integration with Brightspace

  • Under 'More Tools' and 'Zoom', starting in July your lecture recordings will appear there

  • You have the ability with just one click to decide which lecture recordings are available to students

• Zoom AI Companion

  • You've likely seen this in some of your meetings with other institutions or businesses, but now it will be available to you as well!

  • It will be off by default, you will need to opt in to use the features.

  • When enabled, you can get meeting summaries along with action items. Those summaries ONLY go to the meeting host by default. 

    • As a meeting host, it is very important to review the meeting summary for accuracy!

    • You can edit the summary and choose to share with others.

• Zoom Clips

  • Record a quick video or screenshare and easily drop it into a Zoom Chat (and other areas) using Zoom clips.

  • If you find yourself saying "this meeting could have been an email" - Zoom Clips can be a great solution to meet asynchronously to free up your calendars a bit. 

  • You can actually try Zoom Clips now in your Zoom application, but there is currently a limit on length and number of Clips. This limitation will go away in July!

Stay tuned to the News Hub for more information! 

Let's Chat About AI

The AI Alliance recently launched a new group in MyCampus to share tips, ask questions, share resources, and explore the world of AI together. If you'd like to join us, select the button below or find us in MyCampus!