Blackboard course shells for SU2018 were created on April 25, 2018

About Course Creation

Bb shells for SU2018 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

Respondus will be presenting a special training webinar that focuses on the advanced features of LockDown Browser on Tuesday, April 24th at 1 PM ET.

LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within a learning management system.

During this training webinar, Respondus will show how to allow students to use ebooks, spreadsheets, and calculators during an online test, and it will cover some best practices as well.

New reports for Sponsored Accounts (formerly known as Grants Reports), Funds 1253 and 1263 are now available in REX Finance.  The reports are in a user friendly format with features that include drillable expense detail such as voucher information and payroll bi-weekly data by employees.  We thank those of you who provided input on data and report layouts that would be most useful and are confident the reports will meet your needs.

The reports available are:

o   Department Summary 

o   Detail Report 

o   Actuals Only

o   Project Detail

o   By Award

o   By PI

A full description of reports is attached.

Effective March 12, 2018, access to REX Finance will be available to all campus faculty and staff.  In order to best understand report navigation, it is critical that users view the documents and the video tutorials located on TAP. Alternatively, you may register for an instructor led session of REX Finance Report training.

If you have any questions regarding REX Finance Reports, please contact Julia Golbey  (golbeyj1@umbc.edu).  

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, March 16th and Saturday, March 17th.  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.

Friday, 3/16/2018 between 5pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost and jabba) 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
• Expected to be unreachable from 5pm to 7pm
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Saturday, 3/17/2018 between 10am and Noon(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, March 15th 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, March 15th.

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.

Note that this report will only be accessible to users authorized to see reports in the Details folder.