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.

Earlier this year, Blackboard released a “course archetype” system administrator’s tool that allows institutions to see how the company’s Learning Management System (LMS) software is being used across campus. The “course archetype” tool was informed by Blackboard’s 2016 research on clients it hosts, including UMBC (since 2014). The primary reason DoIT was interested in the “course archetype” tool was to get a better understanding of the depth and complexity of our current Bb usage, as we gauge the work to be done to move to our Ultra migration in Fall 2019 (see umbc.edu/go/ultra).

A few observations are worth noting:

1. Blackboard’s course archetype research initially focused on more than 3M students, in 70k courses from 927 institutions hosted by Blackboard in Spring 2016. After extensive filtering for courses between 10 and 500 students, at least average student use of 60 minutes, and faculty use of the grade book, the resulting data set for analysis “included 601,544 learners (16.25%) in 18,810 (26.87%) courses” (p.2 of the study). When DoIT ran the course archetype tool on our 1,469 active FA18 Bb courses, only 464 (31%) did not meet the same enrollment size and usage criteria compared with 51,190 (73%) of the 70k courses hosted by Blackboard, but also filtered off for the study.
2. Blackboard found the vast majority of courses it studied were "supplemental" (content-heavy, low interaction) or "complementary" (1-way, instructor-led, minimal communication) courses, or 53% and 24%, respectively (77% total). By contrast, DoIT found nearly 40% of UMBC’s remaining 991 FA18 courses are characterized at the top end of Blackboard's course design archetype: "evaluative" (heavy use of assessments) and "holistic" (high LMS activity with balanced use of assessments, content and discussion), or 21% and 18%, respectively (or 39% total).
3. Except for students checking grades, Blackboard found that other high student LMS activity wasn't necessarily associated with better student outcomes. We've not looked at how our UMBC students' activity is associated with outcomes (yet), because the term isn't over, but we'll do so after Fall 2018 grades are submitted in early January. 

Special thanks to Mariann Hawken, DoIT’s Coordinator of eLearning and certified Blackboard MVP, and Tom Penniston, our Analytics Specialist in Instructional Technology, for this analysis.

DoIT needs to explore our own data further, but UMBC's Blackboard courses appear to represent a significantly different profile compared to most Bb client institutions hosted by the company. We’ve always had high adoption -- typically 95% of all students, 87% of all instructors and 82% of all PeopleSoft sections use Bb during any given term. But when we first started our own learning analytics research in 2007, just over 40% of all our Bb courses used the grade book, even though the annual "Undergraduates and IT" Educause national study has frequently found that students value checking grades more than any other LMS function. Typically, about 73% of all active UMBC Blackboard courses now use the grade book, a characteristic common to many of our most active Bb courses.

“DoIT has always wanted to use analytics to help inform and grow the depth and sophistication of our Bb LMS usage,” says John Fritz, Assoc. Vice President for Instructional Technology, who profiled UMBC's course design experience in a 2017 Educause article that also referenced Bb's course archetype research. “Our institutional Blackboard usage suggests UMBC may be helping higher ed better understand how good LMS course design could be one of the most scalable student success interventions any institution can pursue.”

By John Fritz and Tom Penniston