The Instructional Technology Team will celebrate its 4th Annual TechFest on March 1, 2019 and is looking for presenters!  TechFest is designed to bring together UMBC students, faculty, and staff to demonstrate instructional technology tools, discuss the use of learning analytics, and share best practices with the campus community through workshops, presentations, and hands-on activities.  This year’s event will be hosted alongside the Faculty Development Center’s Symposium sponsored by the Provost’s office, providing a poster session and luncheon with keynote address by renowned speaker Randy Bass.

Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome and encouraged to attend.

Follow this link to submit your proposal today!

Are you a student, faculty, or staff member interested in leading a 45-minute workshop session or providing a brief overview of an instructional technology tool in the Technology Test Kitchen?  Past session topics have included Clickers, Blackboard, iCloud, Accessibility, Phishing, CourseArc, and Lynda.com but new topics are encouraged and appreciated!  Key themes for the upcoming TechFest include (but are not limited to) the following:

·       Using Learning Technologies for Instruction and Engagement (LTIE)

·       Using Data Collection and Analytics to Inform Instruction and Strategy, Measure Success, and Prompt Intervention (DCA)

·       Integrating Technology Tools into Best Practices (TBP)

There are two types of sessions that will be offered at TechFest 2019:

·       Workshop Session (45 minutes)- Presenter(s) provide a brief overview on a theme-related topic with time for Q&A. Participants are provided with at least three take-aways they can incorporate as a best practice.

·       Technology Test Kitchen Demo (45 minutes)- Presenter(s) provide brief overviews, give 15 minute demonstrations, and answer questions about a particular technology tool to participants visiting demo stations.  Participants are given the opportunity to explore the technology through "hands-on" activities.

Deadlines and Notifications

Please submit your proposals no later than 5pm on Friday, January 18, 2019 by completing this Google Form.  Applicants will be notified about acceptances within two weeks of the submission deadline.  Selection will be based on how well the proposal connects to the overall themes and goals of TechFest.

So mark your calendars for Friday, March 1, 2019 and spread the word!  The day will be filled with TechFest talks and technology demos, the Faculty Development Center’s Symposium hosted by the Provost Office, and an opportunity to participate in a TechFest Escape Room activity!  More details on all events are forthcoming, so look out for future postings.  

Follow this link to submit your proposal today!

For questions and more information, please contact us at techfest19@umbc.edu.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Thursday, December 20th and Saturday, January 5th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Thursday, 12/20/2018 between 5pm and 7pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Saturday, 1/5/2019 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

On Thursday, December 20th starting at 2pm LDAP-Master and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  Account authentication and logins will not be affected during this downtime.  

The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last two hours with services being restored by 4pm on Thursday, December 20th.

During the outage window account creations will be queued and then processed upon restoration of services.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Technology Support Center at x53838.

Blackboard course shells for WT2019 and SP2019 were created on November 29, 2018.

The Ultra Course Preview setting is enabled in both WT2019 and SP2019 courses. This tool allows faculty to convert an existing Original course and see what it looks like in the Ultra Experience. Blackboard provides a conversion log with a list of Original features and functions that change in Ultra or those that won't carry forward if you choose to convert the course to Ultra. Faculty may also choose to use the Ultra Course Preview sandbox, which was provided earlier this semester.

• Related FAQ: How do I preview my course as an Ultra course?

About Course Creation

Bb shells for WT2019 and SP2019 are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. As new course sections and/or instructors are added to the SOC by Department Scheduling Coordinators, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. 

• If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. 
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.
• If you need a Bb shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

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

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff