UMBC has participated in the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) student survey for 11 of the past 12 years, and taken part in  the Faculty survey on its bi-annual deployments. Participation in these surveys helps ECAR highlight notable trends related to technology use in higher education and publish a snapshot infographic to illustrate some of these key findings. UMBC uses survey results to inform our community through news articles, to benchmark against national and peer institutions, and to support data-driven practice.

One national trend of note is a large plurality of both students (79%) and faculty (71%) prefer some form of hybrid learning to either fully face-to-face or online environments. However, despite this partiality, only 21% of UMBC faculty surveyed agreed that online learning helps students learn more effectively.

By contrast, UMBC faculty share similar views to peers related to smartphone use. Only 6% of students nationally report either being encouraged or required to use smartphones in class. At UMBC, 75% of respondents reported they are either discouraged from using these devices in class or they are banned from use. Given the ubiquity of student mobile devices – 95% of UMBC students report owning a smartphone – are there ways to leverage these tools to support students’ engagement and learning?

To address faculty technology needs, UMBC’s Instructional Technology group regularly hosts events and consultations to help maximize their constructive use of supported tools. FYI: DoIT will host a "joint viewing" of an Educause webinar on November 30 at 1 p.m., that will present findings from the 2017 "Students and Faculty" ECAR national study.

UMBC plans to participate in the 2018 ECAR Student Survey this coming spring.

During the grading and evaluation process, Blackboard’s inline grading tool allows instructors, teaching assistants, and graders to embed feedback, such as comments, highlights, and even drawings, directly on a converted view of student assignments in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF file formats.

The current interface for the inline grading tool is powered by a third-party conversion tool called Crocodoc, which will be discontinued by Box on January 15, 2018.  DoIT staff and Blackboard engineers will need to migrate existing documents and grading annotations to a new service,  now powered by New Box View, on the weekend of January 6, 2018. No downtime is expected for Blackboard itself, but the inline grading tools will not be available for up to six (6) hours at a time to migrate all assignment and feedback artifacts. DoIT will make every effort to run the migration process during low peak periods to minimize impact on grading for faculty and teaching assistants. 

If you use UMBC Box for cloud storage, you are likely familiar with how documents render in that web interface. Here is a comparison of the current inline grading tools (left) and the new inline grading tools (right):

What to expect with the change

Blackboard has worked closely with Box to integrate the New Box View into the grading process and to migrate the databases containing submitted student data and documents. The New Box View service will completely replace the existing back-end tools in exactly the same locations within Bb Learn. The overall interface is simplified and contextualized. More file types are supported.

After the transition, faculty, teaching assistants, and graders will not be able change or remove previously created annotations as that feedback becomes “read only.” All assignment feedback saved before the migration will be uneditable and saved as a PDF. As such, we strongly encourage faculty and graders to complete grading BEFORE the document process begins since grading procedures may be affected if a submission is not fully annotated in the middle of the transition. Rubrics are not affected at all by this change. New grading may begin using the updated feedback tools. 

Please review these FAQs on the changes to inline grading 

• Explore freely available open source materials;
  
• Learn about the impact on student cost-savings, access, and success; 
  
• Participate in hands-on 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.