DoIT is depreciating the legacy campus phone system and needs to meet with departments to migrate their phone numbers to the new phone system. We ask that a department representative please contact me to begin these discussions.

This past year DoIT has been aggressively working with administrative and academic departments to convert individual and departmental phone numbers over to a new campus phone system. To date, we have moved more than 800 campus numbers which represents the bulk of those types of phones on campus. If you or your department has not yet started this migration with us, we strongly encourage you to reach out to us to start this conversation. 

In addition to improved support and reliability, the new campus phone system offers many new features that enhance and simplify your experience including:

• You will no longer need FAC codes to make long distance calls.

• Using the Webex app on your computer or mobile device to natively make and receive calls using your campus extension improves mobility and hybrid work schedules.

• Receive Voicemail messages delivered to your email as an audio file. 

• Advanced in-call features including call waiting and easy conferencing.

Ray Soellner

Assoc. Director - DoIT

rays1@umbc.edu

The UMBC Instructional Technology Update is provided by the Division of Information Technology for students, faculty and staff. If you have questions or need help, please consult the Blackboard Help FAQs or directly at www.umbc.edu/blackboard/help.  You can also contact the Technology Support Center at 410.455.3838 or submit an RT (Request Tracker) ticket via the myUMBC Help Menu or directly at my.umbc.edu/help.

HEADLINES

What’s New

• 12 effective practices for delivering Blackboard tests

• Chromebooks Supported for Respondus Lockdown Browser on Ultra Tests

• Collaborate now supports 25 videos per page for all users & pinning videos

• Test Scoring Moving to Akindi Bubble Sheets

• SU2021 Courses Created in Blackboard on 04/27/2021

• Blackboard Courses Scheduled for Server Retirement in FA21 

• PIVOT selected for SP2021 Job Well Done award 

• Other PIVOT News:

• Faculty Survey Suggests Shift in Pre/Post-Pandemic Teaching

• PIVOT and the Student Evaluation of FA20 Courses

• Faculty prioritize grading & assessments for Ultra’s future

• Share your feedback: SP2021 Ultra Experience Faculty Survey 

• What’s new in Ultra for SU2021 

Training & Professional Development (view all events | recording archive)

• Instructional Technology workshops for SU2021

• 3 PIVOT Resources to Prepare for Summer Online Teaching 

• GO Chat: UMBC's Instructional Technology staff talks about all things instructional technology and Going Online.

• Read our recaps or listen to previous episodes via Apple Podcasts or Panopto 

Other DoIT & UMBC News

• FYI: Learning analytics mini-grants due 5/21

• DoIT establishes HyFlex support site

• Students favored OERs and would enroll in OER course

• Using Analytics to Improve Student Success

The legacy Pulse VPN has suffered a hardware failure and may not be recoverable. To access campus resources remotely please use the GlobalProtect VPN. Instructions for accessing this can be found here.

In January 2020 DoIT announced the replacement of the Pulse VPN with a new product. At that time, the Pulse VPN had reached its end of life and could no longer be supported. Since that time most of the campus has adopted the GlobalProtect solution however, DoIT has tried to maintain the Pulse system to support a graceful migration. 

Over the last two days the Pulse system has suffered hardware failures that have become increasingly worse. Yesterday the Network team was able to restore service to the unit after a hardware failure took it offline. Today this service experienced a more severe hardware failure and recovery may not be possible. We will continue exploring options to temporarily establish the Pulse VPN service but this will only be a short term resolution.

A link to the GlobalProtect VPN instructions are included above, we strongly urge you to begin using this service now. If you experience any challenges installing the new VPN software, please contact the Technology Support Center.

Ray Soellner

Assoc. Director / DoIT

rays1@umbc.edu

Mathematics is a powerful tool.  We use applications from math all day, every day, like when we drive over a bridge or look at our email.  

Math is very difficult for many people, and they struggle with it.  Many students at our university (and almost all others) need to repeat a math class to progress in their program and complete their degrees.

Our research has uncovered some important facts:

• Many students repeating math classes often must do so more than one time, which extends their time to degree and could prevent them from graduating.  

• Students who use the Math and Science Tutoring Center improve their chances of passing their math courses.

• The positive effect from math tutoring is especially large for students who are repeating a course.  “Repeaters” increase their chances of success by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points!

• But, we found, only about 10 percent of students repeating math were going to tutoring

The Data Science Team, supported by DoIT and the Provost's Office, designed a pilot program in conjunction with the Math Department to “nudge” students repeating 100-level math courses to use tutoring.  

A nudge is a message designed to provide information to many people at very low cost that changes behavior over time.  An example of a nudge you see in everyday life is the roadside sign that says “Click it or ticket.”  Our nudges let students know not just that tutoring is effective, but also how effective it is.

This semester (Spring 2021) we sent nudges to 114 students using a myUMBC personal post.  About 70 percent of students receiving the nudge read them, and we have evidence that suggests that the nudge leads to an increased use of math tutoring by roughly 30 percent.  

The pilot is now in its 8th semester.  During that time we’ve nudged over 1800 students repeating their courses.  

In addition to this program, we’re using what we’ve learned about nudges to help students in other ways that support their success, including combining them with predictive analytics for enhanced early alerts.

By Bob Carpenter

Early next week, the week of 3/8/21, the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, will receive an upgrade enabling all features contained in the Webex meetings app. This change makes for a more simple user experience and means that many campus users will no longer need to run a second Webex Meetings software.

For the last year much of the campus community has needed to run both the Webex Meetings and the Webex (Teams) software in order to have complete functionality for calling, asynchronous communication and in-meeting experiences. In the next week Webex users will be able to upgrade their Webex application to include all in-meeting features previously available only in the Webex Meetings software. This includes in-meeting chat, breakout rooms, emojis, grid views and more.

In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.   In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.

Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.  

The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform.  Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.  

At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.  

This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time.