Due to a recently published set of security vulnerabilities, UMBC’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) website at umbc.edu/faq  is no longer accessible outside of UMBC. DoIT is going to keep this restriction in place for the remainder of the week while we work to upgrade the software so that it is no longer vulnerable to these attacks.

The campus community can continue to access the FAQs while on campus, or off-campus through the Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Virtual Desktop Environment (VDE). There will be some downtimes needed later in the week to upgrade the services, and we will post those when we have more details available.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and we appreciate your patience as we work to keep our systems safe and secure.

Damian Doyle

Assistant Vice President

DoIT

The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the Summer session and beyond. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCWorks to apply. (Search for TSC Student Consultant.)

TSC Student Consultant Job Description

Technology Support Center (TSC) student consultants are the first points of technical contact for the UMBC community and those who do well often go on to work in other areas of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Minimally, consultants are expected to provide initial triage and support for a wide range of information technologies including accounts, hardware, instructional technologies, networking, software, telecommunications, and basic web development.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:

• Provide technical assistance to users by phone, online and in person;
• Answer TSC phones in a professional and courteous manner;
• Create, update and resolve tickets in the Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system;
• Create, update, suggest and recommend relevant FAQ articles to users (www.umbc.edu/faq);
• Provide direct assistance to users on technical issues they cannot easily resolve on their own;
• Complete in-person or online training about quality support as defined in umbc.edu/go/ticketrubric;
• Respond to all work-related communications in a timely manner;
• Escalate urgent problems to the Full-Time staff, as appropriate.

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate by phone or in person.
• Demonstrated writing ability.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve successful outcomes in handling difficult situations and customers.
• Demonstrated analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability & willingness to learn coupled with a clear understanding of one’s technical abilities, so as to triage and escalate an issue that leads to an effective solution for the user.

The deadline for requesting software to be included in our physical labs, virtual labs, and classrooms is approaching. Software requests for Summer and Fall 2019 are due by May 1 (Summer deadline extended). All software requests must be renewed each semester. Please see our Wiki page for information about this process.

Requests for licensed software must include: (1)  Proof of purchase and license information, and (2) software media and installation instructions. Please contact us if you have questions about the appropriate license volume or type to purchase. Requests to install unlicensed software, software with license modes incompatible with our labs, or software with system requirements incompatible with our labs, may be rejected. DoIT will make accommodations for such requests to the extent they are practicable.

Software requests must be submitted via an RT ticket containing the required information. You can create a ticket at https://rt.umbc.edu/, or by contacting the Technology Support Center (TSC) at 410.455.3838, if you require assistance. Software requested after the deadline is not guaranteed to be made available. DoIT will notify the requestor when the requested software is available in the lab. The requesting faculty or instructor is responsible for testing the software to ensure it is working as expected.  

Software requests for one-time events:

If you need software installed for a one-time purpose (for example, a 2-day workshop in which all users need access to the software), the request should be submitted no less than six (6) weeks prior to the first lab reservation for that class. The software will be removed once you are finished.

Earlier this week the Provost and Deans agreed to a DoIT proposal to go forward with a broad investment in instructional technology support staff, software tools and training stipends for faculty. As part of this effort, DoIT will also be delaying the date for moving all courses to Blackboard Ultra, originally announced and planned for the start of Fall 2019, and extending to Fall 2021.

Specifically, DoIT and the Division of Professional Studies (DPS) are investing in four instructional technology positions to be on board by the start of summer, and recently purchased Blackboard’s Ally software for improving accessibility. Also, DoIT will increase the number of Blackboard Ultra ambassadors from 15 to 32, and provide more opportunities for on-site and online training workshops, including “lessons learned” from colleagues who’ve already switched. Finally, DoIT and the Provost’s Office are partnering to offer one-time, $100 stipends to all faculty who 1) attend or participate in any Ultra training, and 2) complete the process of migrating their existing course(s) by the new phased rollout summarized below, based on the “Blackboard Use by College” report (requires myUMBC login with ad\ before username):

To be clear, any faculty member from any college, school, department or division can switch to Ultra now -- as 145 courses have done this term already and since we piloted Ultra in Spring 2018. But within each organization above, DoIT will also focus on supporting each instructor based on a course’s “archetype” of prior Blackboard usage at UMBC, which we’ve seen is different from most institutions Blackboard hosts on its “cloud” or Software as a Service (SaaS) system. Note: UMBC moved to the Blackboard cloud in 2017.

“The move to Blackboard Ultra presents a real opportunity for DoIT to work with faculty to improve overall course design, accessibility and effective practice,” says Jack Suess, Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer. “In some departments, this is working with faculty to provide training to develop online or hybrid courses, especially in collaboration with applied graduate programs. In other departments, faculty may be interested in deepening student engagement or outcomes.”

As part of the broader e-Learning strategy, DoIT will continue or expand support for the following:

Course Design: DoIT first introduced Quality Matters and online/blended teaching workshops to the campus through the DPS-supported Alternate Delivery Program (ADP) for summer & winter programs. Drawing on more than a dozen years of experience working with over 75 faculty, DoIT refined the ADP model in 2015 to include skill builder, course designer and quality booster workshops (and stipends) to participating faculty teaching in Fall and Spring courses, too.

Accessibility: DoIT is now supporting Ally, a new tool by Blackboard designed to identify and help address inaccessible course content. Currently, it is only available for Ultra courses.

Assessment & Academic Integrity: We’ll continue to offer training and support in effective practices with Adaptive Release, which DoIT has found is associated with higher use of course content by students, as well as SafeAssign and Respondus Lockdown Browser.

Learning Analytics & Student Success: We’ll continue to leverage analytics to help identify historically high-enrollment courses that have also reduced high DFW rates, to perhaps reverse-engineer effective practices that could be used in other courses.

Academic Continuity: We’ll encourage all faculty to become familiar with and use core Bb functions (e.g., announcements, gradebook, discussions, Collaborate video conferencing) that can support academic continuity in the event campus is closed for an extended period of time.

While there have been delays in some functionality not yet available in Blackboard Ultra (e.g., group management, specific publisher integrations, some gradebook calculation options, etc.), recent reviews by UMBC faculty also suggest Blackboard is heading in the right direction overall. For many reasons, including a more streamlined user interface, responsive design to support mobile device usage, and enhancements to improve content accessibility, Ultra is an improvement over the core 9.1 version release of Blackboard we’ve been using since 2012.

DoIT appreciates all of the good will and effort by faculty who have switched to Ultra as well as the feedback we’ve received over the last year. In addition to contacting anyone on the DoIT Instructional Technology staff, if there are questions, concerns or suggestions, we encourage people to also contact UMBC’s Bb Ultra Ambassadors, the Bb Faculty Advisory Group or Faculty Senate Computer Policy Committee (CPC).

Two new reports have been added to the REX Guided Reports.  Both reports can be accessed by going to rex.umbc.edu, clicking on 'Guided Reports', then navigating to the folder   Student Records and Enrollment > Plan Enrollment.

To support UMBC’s ongoing commitment to a more inclusive campus, DoIT is pleased to introduce a new tool called Ally into Ultra courses to help improve the accessibility of course content in Blackboard.

Ally automatically scans course content and performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Faculty who use Ultra courses will notice color gauges next to course files. Click on the Ally indicator to read detailed feedback about what the accessibility issues are with the file, why they matter, and how to fix them. Ally will not change how anything works in an existing course, and it won’t affect any course files. These Ally indicators are not visible to students.

Improving the accessibility of your course content will not only help ensure students with different abilities can access your materials, but it will also improve the learning experience for students who use mobile devices as well as those who want to engage with the material in a different way. Ally automatically generates alternative formats of your course files, and makes them available to you and your students. The alternative formats do not affect your original file, but they do allow students to access an HTML version for their phone, an ePub version for their tablet, an MP3 version for audio, and electronic braille for braille readers.

Both Instructional Technology staff and the Office of Accessibility & Disability Services (ADS) staff have been trained to support Ally questions. ADS is also available to assist in document remediation and other accessibility questions. Finally, the Ally FAQ collection is available for reference.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection

• New Features | Known Issues | Updates & Fixes

• About the Ultra Experience | What’s new in Ultra?

• Open a ticket via RT

• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

• Request a consult with instructional technology staff