SkillSoft Spotlights focus on just-in-time online learning to help you more masterfully manage yourself personally and professionally, improve your effectiveness in managing your work, and support you in skillfully leading your teams. Each course is 30 minutes or less and is curated to provide tools, strategies, and practices to accelerate your success.

This week's spotlight course is Facing Virtual Team Challenges.

Facing Virtual Team Challenges (27 min)

Virtual teams can face the same difficulties as other teams, but also have unique challenges. In this course, you'll learn how to handle challenges facing your team, and how to evaluate your own style.

SkillSoft Spotlights focus on just-in-time online learning that supports you in navigating complex challenges in personal and professional life, helps you to increase your effectiveness, and to improve your relationships. Each course is 30 minutes or less and is curated to provide tools, strategies, and practices to accelerate your success.

This week's spotlight course is Staying Balanced in a Shifting World.

Staying Balanced in a Shifting World (15 min)

Achieving a healthy work.life balance gives you the chance to practice mindfulness and focus on what's important in all aspects of your life. Maintaining this work/life balance requires constant vigilance. This course focuses on techniques for managing stress and recognizing the behaviors like passivity, aggressiveness, and assertiveness, and how these affect your ability to find balance in life. Techniques that can be used to achieve and preserve balance are also discussed. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.

View this webinar recording, Getting Started with Bb Annotate.

Please check the FAQ collection after May 20 to learn more about specific functionality. Instructional Technology staff are updating documentation and linking to Bb resources.

No planned downtime is expected on May 25, 2020 when Bb Annotate is enabled for UMBC. The file migration will begin in the background and could take some time to complete depending on the number of annotated files that need to be migrated. However, the current inline grading tools will remain available and all pre-existing grading comments will be migrated and visible in Bb Annotate. Please review additional information about the transition to Bb Annotate on this FAQ. 

As always, if you have any questions, 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

Hello Retrievers!

This is an important message about the ENTR URA research opportunity from the Director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships

There are many changes happening to student research as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and campus closure. The URA selection committee has some advice to encourage you to apply for a URA and start to plan your research, even if there are some unknowns for the summer and fall semesters.

1. We have moved the application deadline back to May 15, 2020 in order to give students some extra time to prepare their research proposals.

2. Some research that was scheduled to start this summer may be delayed until the fall or spring semester- that’s ok! The URA is good for the entire year, June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2121. You can complete the research at any point during that time frame.

3. Our expectations for a final product are fluid and relaxed. If the research plan doesn’t work out exactly as you proposed, that’s ok- it’s the nature of doing research.

4. Be creative in the ways you think about your project. You may have to focus instead on doing a thorough literature review, using a pre-formed data set to analyze, or looking at case studies, rather than collecting in-person data, or conducting research in a lab.

5. Methods such as lab benchwork, participant observations, focus groups, travel-related, in-person interviews, or other real-time collection methods may need some re-thinking. How can you collect data via online interviews, the internet, or other technological interventions?

6. Creative arts projects may incorporate some kind of online delivery method. We are hoping to be back on campus for URCAD 2021, but consider how VoiceThread might be used to display your creative work.

*Remember:*

URAs provide up to $1,500 to undergraduate students to support their research, scholarship, or creative work with a UMBC faculty mentor on an original project. UMBC students of all years and disciplines are invited to apply, as long as they remain enrolled at UMBC long enough to complete the proposed work.

Deadline: May 15, 2020

Applications require a research proposal and mentor statement of support.

Speciality URAs will be awarded to Social Scientists and Entrepreneurs- see below for more details. ur.umbc.edu/ura