This program is aimed at pairing current political science students with alumni of the program.  Our hope is that this program will lead to fruitful connections between you and alumni that are putting their knowledge and skills to work across sectors.  With more than 60 alumni from varied personal and professional backgrounds we invite you to apply to the mentor/mentee program. 

TAKE THE SURVEY

While there is no obligation to participate, but if you believe you might be interested in this program, please complete the following survey by Wednesday, September 20th, 2023.  This survey is aimed at providing you with the best mentor based on your interests.

The pairing of mentor/mentee connections may take a few weeks, but if you have questions, feel free to reach out to Dr. Eric Stokan at estokan@umbc.edu.

Thank you for your interest and engagement.

Position Description

The Maryland Center for History and Culture seeks an enthusiastic Visitor Services Associate to join a knowledgeable and dedicated Visitor Experience team. The ideal candidate for this position would be a friendly, energetic individual who enjoys interacting with visitors, staff, trustees, volunteers and members, connecting people with the organization and its resources.

As UMBC finalizes its migration to Ultra, more faculty opted to use the new course experience during FA2023. Specifically, of 1588 total available Blackboard shells, faculty have enabled 991 using Ultra, or ~62%, -- a ten point jump from last year. Although a broad spectrum of disciplines including seven departments and eight languages opted to use Ultra by default, more than half of active Ultra courses were converted from Original to the new format by faculty this semester. 

Since instructors must choose to make a course available to students every semester, FA2023 also represents a notable increase in faculty use of Ultra courses at a much higher rate than their use of Original courses -- 89% of Ultra courses are available to students compared to 51% of Original courses. Additionally, Ultra adoption rose in STEM disciplines during FA2023. The College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences saw a 139% increase in Ultra courses from last fall while the College of Engineering and Information Technology increased by 55%.

Image 1: Comparison of active Original and Ultra courses over time (click to enlarge). For more information about Ultra adoption and course usage, please visit our Ultra course tracker.

With more than 200 enhancements and new features in the last year, Ultra courses offer more than 95% feature parity with Original including extensive updates to grading and assessment, content management, and course design functionality. Improvements to the gradebook, question banks, and groups management are key functional areas raised by UMBC faculty and addressed by Anthology. Ultra also provides exclusive progress tracking reports for learner engagement and new AI Course Design Assistant tools. 

Next Steps for Ultra at UMBC

The growth in Ultra course creation and faculty adoption fulfills a longstanding promise to the UMBC community to provide a consistent learning experience for students and support Blackboard innovation, beginning in SP2018 when four faculty piloted Ultra. Since that initial exploration, Ultra adoption grew slowly and steadily as faculty opted in to the new version of Blackboard when they felt ready. The pandemic also provided many faculty with an opportunity to try Ultra and move their courses. 

We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for all departments and faculties. 

• Following this semester, two full terms remain (SP2024 and FA2024) before we finalize the Ultra migration at UMBC. All courses for CAHSS will be automatically created in Ultra for FA2024 and the entire campus will be on Ultra by WT/SP2025.

• For departments or disciplines that want to adopt Ultra by default, Blackboard course shells can be designated as Ultra when courses are created. Please open an RT ticket to coordinate your request with Instructional Technology by November 1, 2023 for WT/SP2024 courses and by June 1, 2024 for SU/FA2024 courses.

• In mid October, faculty who have not yet migrated to Ultra will automatically receive a development shell with a copy of their FA2023 course that is converted to Ultra. This copy will not have any student enrollments and will not impact the current term. Faculty are encouraged to review the copy and modify the course. If the course conversion is not the best path to Ultra, there are ample Blackboard resources at umbc.edu/go/ultra as well as Instructional Technology support over the next 15 months to build a new course.

• Instructional Technology will also work with departments to customize Ultra workshops and provide dedicated support sessions according to faculty schedules or specific use cases for teaching with Ultra. Please open an RT ticket to schedule a training session or request a consultation appointment.

The campus community continues to play a vital role in championing change throughout our Ultra migration. Faculty and student feedback helps shape the ongoing development of Ultra and contributes to the dynamic platform students experience during their education at UMBC.

Connect with Instructional Technology

As always, if you have any questions about teaching, learning, and technology at UMBC, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection 
• What's new in Ultra? | Known Issues 
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff
• PIVOT | Academic Continuity | Keep On Teaching | Student Technology Resources

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UMBC is committed to providing a consistent learning experience for everyone. The last day we will support Blackboard Original is December 31, 2024. Please check out our training and support: umbc.edu/go/ultra

Richard Forno, assistant director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and a principal lecturer in the department of computer science and electrical engineering, has been appointed an honorary international professor in the School of Science and Engineering at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (UAEH), one of Mexico’s oldest universities.

Forno joins a select group of academics who have been named honorary international professors at UAEH. The recipients, some of whom have received some of the highest honors in their fields, are chosen for their overall academic and professional contributions.

The investiture ceremony coincided with the university’s two-week-long international book fair, held in late August and organized this year around the theme of cybersecurity. Over two days, Forno delivered five talks, met students and faculty, and spoke with university leaders about areas of possible collaboration between UMBC and UAEH.

Richard Forno delivers a lecture on cybersecurity. (Photo courtesy of UAEH)

Countries around the world share the challenge of maintaining cybersecurity in an interconnected and ever-evolving digital landscape. In his main lecture, Forno emphasized the importance of education and interdisciplinary collaboration to combat cybersecurity threats.

Forno says the formal investiture ceremony, held in one of Hidalgo’s oldest structures, was a particularly meaningful event for him. “It was a humbling personal experience and certainly a professional honor that I will not soon forget,” he says.

***reposted from OSP***

SciENcv is an NCBI tool for creating biosketches and financial support documents necessary for NIH or NSF grant proposals. This workshop is tailored to principal investigators and staff involved in proposal development who have no or limited experience with SciENcv.

NCBI has Account Tools to assist in the creation and production of these documents for both agencies. Through practical, task-oriented activities, participants will gain hands-on experience and general understanding of the document-creation process. We will also be highlighting the new and improved SciENcv interface for creating NSF Biosketches, which NSF grant submitters will be required to use starting October 23, 2023.

In this workshop you will learn:

• How to create and export an NIH or NSF biosketch and other award support documents using SciENcv
• What information is needed to become a delegate and their function
• How to use My Bibliography to create and store a reference list

A Q&A period will be held at the end of this workshop to discuss questions and issues of interest for the participants. However, please note that we will not address specific NIH and NSF policy changes or cover post-award processes.

Visit the link in this post to register by October 4th!

For nearly two decades, UMBC faculty and students have been deeply engaged in story-driven research. The UMBC community’s contributions to this humanities-centered scholarship has included documenting the stories of former workers of the historic and now-defunct Sparrows Point steel mill in Baltimore County, and projects such as “A Place Called Poppleton,” which chronicles the history and culture of Baltimore City’s Poppleton neighborhood.

UMBC’s commitment to highlighting storytelling research continued this summer as the university co-hosted the first state-side edition of the 11th International Digital Storytelling Conference—a four-day event showcasing an expansive range of storytelling-focused projects and initiatives. The conference was a collaborative effort in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, StoryCenter, and Montgomery College, who previously partnered with UMBC on digital storytelling projects.

A commitment to community storytelling 

The multi-day conference included workshops, presentations, storytelling tours, and site visits to partner institutions illuminating the impact of digital storytelling. Julissa Gómez Ruvalcaba, M.A. ’23, applied sociology, was one of the featured presenters at this year’s conference, her work adding to UMBC’s ongoing research of Latinx immigrant communities in Baltimore. During a site visit on the first day of the conference to the Creative Alliance, a non-profit art space in Baltimore City, Ruvalcaba discussed her capstone research project that included an ethnographic study of the city’s Latinx community. 

Ruvalcaba shared that she felt a sense of “culture shock” when originally moving to Baltimore to study at UMBC. She is from a predominantly Mexican community in Northern California and took note of the drastically smaller Latinx population in Baltimore City, which, according to the 2020 Census, makes up about eight percent of the city’s population. 

“I became curious about how Latinx people understood their cultural identity and how they expressed themselves while living in a city that is predominately Black and white. That was the starting point to my thesis.”

That curiosity culminated in “Nest Making,” a short film that Ruvalcaba created documenting the Latinx community living in Highlandtown, a neighborhood in Southeast Baltimore that Ruvalcaba says is often referred to as “Latino Baltimore.” During the conference, Ruvalcaba held a screening of the film, which captures Ruvalcaba’s year-long research journey of examining how Latinx people are building their homes and communities in Highlandtown as they express parts of their culture and heritage.

“Digital storytelling is a medium that I’m really excited about. I thought about how to make my research accessible to all, including my family who may not understand all of the research jargon,” says Ruvalcaba. “Showing your story in a way that’s visually engaging, along with audio, captures [many] of the senses, which is something that I want to show people that can’t really be shown on paper.”

Digital storytelling history at UMBC

Bill Shewbridge ’80, history, a professor of practice in media and communication studies, attended a StoryCenter workshop in 2004 and was excited to bring the practice back to UMBC. The university’s cultivation of storytelling research grew following a series of several StoryCenter workshops organized in 2006 by UMBC’s New Media Studio, the university’s multimedia production hub. Faculty and staff learned about digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool and have since brought the practice into the classroom. 

“Over the years, UMBC has become an active participant in a growing international community of the digital storytelling practice through conferences and collaborative projects,” explains Shewbridge. “[Bringing] the international conference to our region grew out of discussions had at the 2018 conference in Zakinthos, Greece, so it was in the works for a long time.”

UMBC’s Digital Storytelling and Civic Agency in Higher Education working group, which Shewbridge leads, collaborated with Loughborough University in England, Montgomery College, the Smithsonian Office of Educational Technology, and StoryCenter to bring the international conference stateside for the first time. 

“It was a great experience to be able to share our work in the Baltimore region with this very special group of colleagues,” says Shewbridge. 

That sentiment was echoed by Charlotte Keniston, MFA ’14, intermedia and digital art, associate director of UMBC’s Shriver Peaceworker Fellows program. “What’s significant about UMBC hosting the conference is that it represents nearly 20 years of digital storytelling work that’s been happening here on campus,” she noted.  

Keniston, who co-chaired this year’s conference, has championed digital storytelling research since she was a student at UMBC: “I have been using digital storytelling, teaching it, and facilitating others in using it since my start at the university. There are hundreds of students who have used it in the classroom, and dozens of faculty who teach it in their curricula as a way to engage students in reflection.”

For more information on storytelling research happening at UMBC, review a collection of UMBC’s digital storytelling projects here.