September 2026 Newsletter

Missed September’s Faculty Center newsletter? We’ve got you covered. View the highlights, key updates, resources, and opportunities you may have missed below.

Our newsletter is designed to support your teaching and keep you connected to what’s happening across our community. If you’d like to stay in the loop moving forward, you can subscribe anytime on the homepage of the Faculty Center’s News page.

Since our launch of the Faculty Center in May, we have continued to look for ways to make the site experience more responsive to the way faculty work. A clear need we heard is the importance of getting to the right resource quickly, in the exact moment when a teaching question or course design decision comes up.   To support that experience, we are introducing the Faculty Center Assistant, a new AI-enabled chatbot within the Faculty Center.   The bot is designed to help faculty use natural language questions to surface relevant resources, guidance, and best practices. Whether you are looking for topic-specific resources, ways to upskill your teaching and learning practices, or trying to solve a particular course design problem, the bot can guide you to useful content!   The next time you visit the Faculty Center, click the text bubble icon at the bottom right of your screen to ask the bot a question, search for a topic, or describe a current challenge to see what resources it recommends!   Engage with Us in Upcoming Webinars   AI and the future of feedback   September 17, 2026 at 2:00 PM ET   Feedback is one of the most powerful tools for supporting student learning, but providing quality feedback can also be one of the most time-intensive parts of teaching. AI-assisted grading and feedback tools offer new possibilities for helping you respond to student work more efficiently, consistently, and constructively. This session examines how you can use AI to support feedback practices while maintaining fairness, transparency, academic judgment, and meaningful instructor presence.   The State of Regional Public Colleges   September 30, 2026 at 2:00 PM ET   State of Regional Public Colleges Virtual Forum with The Chronicle of Higher Education and support from Risepoint. Panelists will explore strategies regional public colleges are using to address enrollment challenges and prepare for what lies ahead.   Want webinars that align with your schedule? Check out other upcoming webinars or review past recorded sessions on the Webinars page of the Faculty Center. Many university teachers want practical ways to integrate AI into course design without it replacing their expertise. AI-assisted course design is our quick-start toolkit for prompt templates and guardrails spanning brainstorming, course planning, review, communication, assessment, and grading design. Faculty can jump directly to any workflow that fits their current task, swap in their own course details, and use AI to help with course design while keeping their own expert, disciplinary judgment as the final word.   Need more resources? Visit the Resources section of the Faculty Center for articles on best practices in online higher education and how to practically apply them. This month’s news roundup tackles higher ed’s next AI challenge: moving past “should we allow it?” to “how do we teach and assess with it?”. MIT’s new institute-wide recommendations call for rethinking assessment design and building sustained faculty support, while fresh Handshake data shows AI career skills are now spreading well beyond computer science. Coverage of Anthropic’s experimental Claude watermarking and a new Educause piece both push the same point: technical detection isn’t the same as understanding a student’s thinking, so making reasoning and revision visible matters more than ever. Rounding things out, a New America report on health care degree apprenticeships offers a timely model for connecting flexible online coursework to real workplace experience.   Stay Up to Date Check out the News section of the Faculty Center to learn about the latest happenings in online teaching and learning and Risepoint Academic Services. AACSB Deans Conference   The Adult Online Learner Opportunity: New Business Education Research | October 19–21 | Orlando, FL   Discover how data-driven insights from the Voice of the Online Business Learner can help your institution build stronger business programs and achieve sustainable enrollment growth. Kerry Pokorny, VP of Research & Insights, Risepoint The information in this newsletter links to documents stored at faculty.risepoint.com.     Risepoint | 2803 Philadelphia Pike, Suite B PMB 7250 | Claymont, DE 19703 | Privacy Policy