Fall 2022 Registration - Advising Appointment Information for Current Students:

All students must meet with an advisor in order to obtain registration clearance for the upcoming Fall semester. Registration clearance is required to register for Fall courses.  

Pre-Majors and all first semester transfer students should schedule an advising appointment with a COEIT advisor here starting March 7th.

All students who have passed their gateway, are not first semester transfer students, and have been updated to the full major will be advised by faculty in the department. More information about advising for students who are full majors can found here.

COEIT Advisors will start granting advising clearance on Monday, March 7th. Faculty advisors may wait until the schedule of classes is posted on March 28th.  

Information Systems and Business Technology Administration majors (or students intending to change to one of these majors) are advised in the Information Systems Department. Please go here for more information.

If you are changing your major to a major outside the College of Engineering and Information Technology, please contact the respective department of your new major for advising appointment instructions. Please remember to complete a Declaration of Major form for your new major.

Summer 2022 Session

Summer session registration began March 1st. Students do not need to meet with an advisor prior to registering for summer courses unless they have questions or concerns. If you intend to take a course off-campus during the summer, a Verification of  Transferability Formis required in advance of taking the summer course.

New Students Admitted for the Fall Semester:

Newly admitted students for the Fall semester may not register for courses until Summer Orientation. Please sign up for Orientation here.

Questions?

Please contact an advisorfor additional information.

Western culture remains terrified of aging, particularly for women, but that fear doesn’t stop any of us from actually aging. Kathy Marmor, associate professor of visual arts at UMBC, delves into the heart of these anxieties with a pair of innovative collaborative works, collectively titled Beyond Midlife: What’s Lost, What’s Gained, on view at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) on the UMBC campus through March 12. 

Marmor’s new work appears as part of the CADVC’s Spectrum: 2022 Visual Arts Faculty exhibition, which also features works by UMBC visual arts faculty Lisa Moren and Lynn Cazabon. 

While Marmor typically works alone, in recent years she’s begun a series of collaborations. “I thought it would be interesting to work with women from UMBC. [Penny Rheingans] and I had talked about working together when I first came to UMBC, but timelines didn’t work out.” Marmor said. “I knew Robin [Farabaugh] as a writer and I really wanted to work with a writer because I often use text in my work. The timing was good for them both.”  

Unspooling is a textile-based installation created with Rheingans—a former professor of computer science and director of the Center for Women in Technology at UMBC who is now on the faculty at the University of Maine. 

“I’ve worked for a long time with technology, using computers to mediate the environment, using sensors and interaction with people’s presence,” said Marmor. “This new work is a pause or break from technology. We wanted people to come in and get a different sense of the body. We see that there’s a decay, or a sense of unspooling, and unwrapping of daily life.”

Rheingans, an accomplished knitter, added new dimensions to the work. 

“She’s a fabulous knitter, and a dedicated collector,” said Marmor. “She gave me all these materials to work with. I fell in love with yarn. It’s a really accessible material, fun to work with and it hinged on craft. My work has always been tactile and sculptural, but this was change for me.” 

Comprising four vivid mixed-media sculptures, the piece charts vulnerabilities of aging women, including cognition, reproduction, appearance, self and autonomy. Echoing Suzanne Valadon’s “The Blue Room,” which depicts a middle-aged woman reclining on a day bed, together the pieces form an abstract portrait of a complete body. 

“The Blue Room’ is one of my favorite paintings by a woman about being a woman, present and in her body,” Marmor says. 

The second piece, Philomela’s Thread: a Commonplace book, was created with Robin Farabaugh, an essayist and former senior lecturer in UMBC’s English department. Consisting of ten prints and a single channel video, the pieces draw on the classic Greek tragedy of Philomela, a princess who was violently silenced. 

“I really wanted to work with a writer because I often use text in my work,” said Marmor. “[Farabaugh] had never worked with a visual artist before, so it was an adventure.” 

Historically, commonplace books were kept by men as personal compendiums of knowledge. Notable men like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson were famous for their commonplace books as reference works and historical documents. Women, Marmor notes, also kept commonplace books, but they tended to serve a different purpose. 

“Women were taught to read, but not allowed to go on with education, so one way in which women taught themselves and had a sense of themselves is by keeping commonplace books,” said Marmor. “They’d put many things in them, recipes, letters, scriptures, writings and poems they would come across, these miscellanies of their lives. That’s how women understood themselves.”

The ten prints in Philomela’s Thread combine abstract images that simultaneously recall Hilma af Klint and Alexander Calder, peppered with Farabaugh’s text. 

“Robin wrote these beautiful words which we distilled so that each one is about paper, thread and voice through the centuries,” said Marmor. “I really wanted to make it clear that the way in which women have recorded the stories of their lives has changed over time. We depicted the digital stylus to ask how will the life experiences of women be preserved now in this contemporary digital age?”

The four-minute video loop that stands as the centerpiece of Philomela’s Thread takes a more linear narrative form, centering on a story of love and loss. 

“It’s moving through the story of a woman’s desire for her sexuality, getting older, and then the loss of her family. I think it really captures our understanding of the world, like a memory, or an inner space,” said Marmor. 

Marmor’s work remains on display through March 12, with a closing reception 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. March 10. For those who are unable to visit the gallery in person, the entire Spectrum 2022 exhibition can be viewed via the CADVC website. 

Header image: Philomela’s Thread: a Commonplace Book — 10 gouache and giclee prints that depict a multiplicity of threads that make up a woman’s life and a single channel video that voices to her inner thoughts. Photo by Heather Braxton.

Before the Spring 22 semester started, four Biological Sciences professors -- David Eisenmann, Hua Lu, Jeffrey Leips, and Kevin Omland -- reached out to DoIT to see if they could (and should) try an experiment: proctor their first semester exam in the University Center (UC) Ballroom and online (via Blackboard). 

All four have been teaching in the UC as part of the pandemic-driven retrofits for teaching designed by DoIT and managed by Events & Conference Services (ECS). Also, after teaching remotely for nearly two years, they'd come to like the benefits of online exams other faculty have discovered with Blackboard exam question pools, including randomization, item analysis and quicker student feedback. So, as more classes were offered on campus, the faculty wondered if they could leverage student laptops and mobile devices that made UMBC's pandemic pivot to online learning possible. 

"Initially, our biggest concern was power for student laptops to make it through a 50-minute class period and exam," says Omland, who reached out on behalf of the group, and has co-taught BIOL 142 "Foundations of Biology: Ecology and Evolution" with his colleague Leips for 20 years. "Then, we wondered if the campus WiFI would melt, so we thought maybe we should check with DoIT first." They were joined by colleagues Eisenmann and Lu, who co-teach BIOL 302 "Molecular and General Genetics."

After several emails exploring potential issues -- and two RT tickets to schedule DoIT support on their first exam dates -- the faculty briefed their students and conducted a "dry run" test of the UC's power and WiFi 1-2 weeks before the exams. "We appreciated that step very much," says DoIT's David Toothe, Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions, who leads the AV and Desktop Support units that collaborated with the faculty. It also helped that DoIT's Networks group had just upgraded the UC WiFi as part of a larger campus wireless initiative in January.

Interestingly, each course had similarities and differences in their approach to online exams proctored in the UC:

• In addition to using Bb exam question banks, both courses enroll over 200 students, and planned to use adjacent rooms (301, 310 and 312) for overflow or so students could plug into extra power outlets provided by DoIT, if needed. They also had paper back ups of the exam, in case there were issues that could not be fixed during the test.
• BIOL 302 required the use of Respondus Lockdown Browser (not Respondus Monitor) to access and take the test, and asked students to update their browsers/software before hand. It also uses Bb Original. However, BIOL 142 used an "open note" and "open web" (but not "open neighbor") approach, assigned students to specific UC rooms, and uses Bb Ultra.

Results

During the last week of February, each course administered its first exam of the Spring 22 term. Results included the following (excerpted with permission from emails provided by Eisenmann and Omland):

BIOL 302 "Genetics" (1st SP22 exam on 2/24/22)

• No students reported Wifi connectivity issues to [instructors]
• Several students had problems with LDB but went away upon hard restart.
• ~6 students (out of 200) needed to use outlets, the rest were fine.
• The calculator in the menu bar does not appear for students using LDB on a Chromebook [a known issue DoIT has reported and documented in a related FAQ]. Otherwise no Chromebook or iPad issues.
• 2 students had problems that could not be fixed and took paper copies of a similar exam.
• For a class of [302's] size we would have used 2500 pieces of paper to print this one exam. This way we printed 10% of that number (back up paper copies and scratch paper to give out).
  
  

BIOL 142 "Foundations of Biology" (1st SP22 exam on 2/25/22)

• 4 students needed paper copies of the exam
• One student said he always has trouble connecting in rm 301, so we moved him to 312 where he seemed to have no problem.  
• 5 students used outlets in rm 312.
• The only fairly annoying problem was that one student was unable to submit her exam at the end. [Took photos of each exam page, No idea what happened]
  
  

"After this experience I say we SO need a testing center," says Eisenmann, a sentiment echoed by others on the department's faculty email group after he and others shared their results. "This is the first time I have ever given an exam to 200+ people in 20+ years, online or in-person, and not really worried about cheating. And so much more pleasant for them and us than stadium seating."

Added Omland: "I spoke with about 10 students afterward - 8 said the format was fine, but 2 said they preferred paper exams so they could cross out answers, write on the side. We really appreciated the ability to have students spread out from each other . . . and walk to any part of the room to answer student questions.  Also, two students reported that they were home with covid. Since it is an online Bb exam with open book, open web etc, we just had them take the exam at home at the same time as the other students.  Can't do that with a paper exam!"

Lu also spoke briefly with about 8 students after the 302 exam. "Only one expressed that she was not used to clicking on the screen for an exam but she did not seem to be bothered by it. All students seemed to appreciate the benefit of the format - reducing the use of paper, reducing grading labor (their own words). [We] were also very happy to see that the cheating problems could be largely eliminated/reduced with this format. As I walked around the room, I rarely saw that students next to each other had the same screen. Of course, this will depend on the pool size of a given exam."

DoIT briefly presented the Biology faculty's "experiment" at the February 28 Faculty Senate Computer Policy Committee (CPC), which had been exploring the idea of a UMBC testing center before the pandemic. The biology faculty have also been invited to share their experience at an upcoming Classroom Committee meeting this semester.

By John Fritz