Blackboard course shells for WT2018 and SP2018 were created on December 6, 2017.
About Course Creation
Bb shells for WT/SP2018 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.
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:
As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Thursday, December 21st and Saturday, December 30th. 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, 12/21/2017 between 5pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Saturday, 12/30/2017 between 10am and Noon(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.
Thanks.
Tim Champ
Manager of Unix Infrastructure
UMBC DoIT
]]>On Thursday, December 21st 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 21st.
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.
]]>To receive the latest news and updates from M.O.S.T., join the M.O.S.T. Basecamp. The M.O.S.T. Basecamp will also connect you with other colleagues in the state adopting and scaling OER and provide you with a place to share resources and best practices. To join, click here: https://3.basecamp.com/3233682/join/MQrvqxBnAFMp.
Learn more about what the USM is doing as it relates to Open Educational Resources here.
See what was discussed at the Advancing Postsecondary Student Success Through OER: A Statewide Symposium on Open Educational Resources on November 8th here.
Questions about OER or other USM Center for Academic Innovation initiatives? Contact sherri.braxton@umbc.edu.
All SU2017 courses, which operated in a separate environment during the full Blackboard transition to the cloud, were successfully restored to the UMBC's main Blackboard site in mid-FA2017, per the cloud migration plan.
SU2017 courses were restored to the UMBC’s main Blackboard site in their original state from the summer site: that is, if they were unavailable at the time of archive, they were restored in an unavailable state. Please review this FAQ on course availability. If there are any technical issues with the SU2017 courses, please open an RT ticket and include screen captures or error messages, if possible.
As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:
Due to high demand, we have increased capacity for the Maryland OER Summit and have re-opened registration. This day-long summit will bring together faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and administrators from across Maryland’s higher education institutions to explore the promise of using open educational resources (OER) to replace costly textbooks with affordable, high-quality learning materials while giving instructors the opportunity to repurpose content to meet their students’ needs.
Advancing Postsecondary Student Success Through OER
A Statewide Summit on Open Educational Resources in Higher Education
Date:
Friday, December 8, 2017
Location:
College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center
3501 University Boulevard East
The Summit is open to all 2- and 4-year Maryland higher education institutions and welcomes attendees at all levels of OER experience. Join OER leaders to explore freely available open source materials; learn about the impact on student cost-savings, access, and success; participate in interactive workshops to gain new tools for curating, developing, and licensing OER; discuss accessibility and quality issues; and develop strategies to support your institution’s efforts to scale up the use of OER. Institutions are encouraged to bring teams of 4 – 5 members, including faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and administrators, to collaborate in the interactive discussions and workshops.
Co-sponsored by the University System of Maryland’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, MarylandOnline, and University of Maryland University College (UMUC), the Summit will feature a keynote address by Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons, and David Wiley, Co-founder & Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning, on the changing landscape of OER.
Learn more about the Summit. If you have any questions, please contact Fiona Yung at cai@usmd.edu.