Hello everyone!

Retriever Essentials opening will be delayed until 1:15pm

We apologize for any inconviences, and please plan your trip accordingly.

Not only is Disability Pride Month is celebrated in July each year  the earlier 504 disability civil rights movements of the 1970s which is chronicled in the documentary, Crip Camp -   The Capitol Crawl in March of 1990 created momentum for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act later that year. This July marks the 36th anniversary of the ADA, and many cities across the country celebrate disability pride with parades and festivals.  Let's work together to support access and inclusion so more people can say it loud, "I'm disabled and I'm proud!" 
The Disability Pride flag strives to be inclusive of all disabilities, the colors/stripes represent:

• Red: physical disabilities.
• Gold: neurodiversity.
• White: invisible disabilities and undiagnosed conditions.
• Blue: emotional and psychiatric disabilities.
• Green: sensory disabilities, including deafness, blindness, and other sensory disabilities.
• Faded Black Background: mourning and rage for victims of ableist violence and abuse.

Celebrate the Anniversary of the ADA on July 26 (a Sunday) on Monday July 27 by stopping by UMBC's Office of Disability Accesss and Resources in Math/Psychology Building, rooms 212-222, or going on one of theAccessibility Walk and Roll UMBC Tours at 9:00or 11:00.
Learn more about the lived experience of people with disabilities:

• Stream, view or host a screening of The Ride Ahead film to appreciate the perspective of emerging adults with disabilities as they consider their future and call upon trailblazers for their perspectives.
• Explore access to large events with NARIC's A View From the Accessible Seats article.- there are tips and resources for hosting meals and events for people of all abilities as well.
• Accompany Andrew Leland's journey from sightedness to navigating blindness with How To Be Blind - for a deeper dive,  his recent memoir is The Country of the Blind, A Memoir at the End of Sight.
• Learn of Lolo Spencer's journey from advocate to actor.
• Engage with Naheen Ahmed's CBC First Person article: My Disability Makes My Body Feel Unpredictable: Art Helps Me Lean Into the Chaos 
• Navigating Personal Living Space with Heather Hogan on Making Accessibility a Part of My Home
• Navigating the existing healthcare system as exemplified with a chronically ill college student fighting against United Heathcare's denial of coverage.

Other ways to incorporate disability awareness, pride, and belonging: 

• Participate in the ADA National Network's 36th Anniversary Awareness Campaigns 
• Learn about Spoon Theory as well as UMBC's Sunflower Program about people with hidden disabilities.
• Attend Baltimore's Fourth Disability Pride Art Fest on July 18 (Sat) 10-2 at 400 Cathedral Street (EPFL Central Branch)
• Read from the Library Journal's Disability Pride Reading List 
• Take in Michaela Otera's 2023 Disabled Beauty Series.
• Watch a movie that includes actors with disabilities. Crip Camp is a classic documentary (Crip Camp Netflix link, Crip Camp YouTube link, which highlights the advocacy efforts of Judy Heumann the Mother of the Disability Movement and James LeBrecht, among others).
• Visit the Society of Disabled Oracles - a creation of the late Alice Wong, Aimi Hamraie and Jen White Johnson. If they sound familiar, Aimi Hamraie has presented here on Critical Access Studies via the Dresher Center, and Jen White Johnson has conducted two HTLab on Zines as Tools for Action.
• Faculty and staff can learn more about Accessible Course Design with these free upcoming webinars

Get familiar with local resources and technical assistance - here is a sampling of what is available at UMBC: 

• UMBC Critical Disability Studies courses as a minor area of study
• UMBC Disability Access and Resources(DAR) check out other events here
• For Academic Accommodations DAR's Student Disability Services is a wealth of information
• Report a UMBC Campus Accessibility Concern via this online form and be an accessibility ally - this is after being a good campus citizen by bringing it to the attention of the responsible department, such as reporting a Facilities Management repair to 410-455-2550.
• Learn more about UMBC's Disability Studies First Year Seminar and American Sign Language courses.  
• Become involved with student organizations such as Sign of Life (ASL), UMBC NAMI (Mental Health), Delta Alpha Pi (Honor Society), DAU, Best Buddies, and more - look for them during Involvement Fest!

We look forward to celebrating with you all month long.  We ALSO celebrate Disability Pride every day, and especially in October, when more people are on campus.

If you've bumped into the word "microcredential" on campus this year, in a course, an advising conversation, a hallway conversation, a Shriver Center flyer, you've probably noticed it means something a little different depending on who's saying it.

A student thinks about it as something to put on a resume. A faculty member thinks about it as an extension of the learning outcomes they already write. An advisor wonders if it's one more thing to track. An employer wonders if it's actually worth anything. And folks working in policy see it as part of a much bigger national conversation about how skills are recognized outside a transcript.

All of those framings are correct. But none of them are complete on their own.

So instead of writing one generic explainer and hoping it landed for everyone, the Digital Credential Innovation (DCI) team built five audience-specific briefs — each one answering the questions that particular audience actually asks, in the language they actually use.

Starting next week, we'll be featuring one brief a week here on myUMBC:

• Faculty — Your Teaching Already Does This. Let's Make It Count.

• Students — Your Skills, Verified.

• Academic Advisors — Microcredentials and Your Advising Conversations

• Employers — What Your Next Great Hire Can Actually Prove

• Government Relations & Policy Audiences — Digital Credentials and Maryland's Workforce Future

Why now? UMBC was selected for the inaugural cohort of the national LER (Learning and Employment Records) Accelerator, one of only 25 institutions nationwide, and Maryland had more institutions represented than any other state. Congress held a bipartisan hearing on LERs this past December, and federal legislation introduced this spring aims to build state-level infrastructure for verified credentials. In other words, the work UMBC has been building since 2015 is increasingly relevant to a much bigger conversation, and it felt like the right moment to ensure every part of our community understands where they fit into it.

Each post in this series will pull out something worth knowing from that audience's brief, not just a summary, but the parts we think are genuinely interesting or useful, with a link to the full brief if you want to go deeper.

First up next week: faculty, and the case that you're probably already doing the work microcredentials recognize; you just haven't had a way to document it yet.

Questions in the meantime? Submit a support ticket or reach out to the DCI team directly.

Hi everyone! I'm a UMBC PhD student graduating soon and looking for someone to take over my room in a 2-bedroom townhouse. Clean and relatively quiet preferred. All genders warmly welcome!

📍 Location: Belwood Green

• Peaceful neighborhood with plenty of other UMBC students
• 🚌 3-min walk to the UMBC shuttle stop
• 🚗 5-min drive to campus
• 🛒 Walking distance to Weis Markets and Giant
• 💖 Walking distance to a pharmacy, physical therapy, and more

🏠 The House

• 2 bedrooms · 1 full bath + 1 half bath
• Fully furnished with all necessary appliances
• 🧺 In-unit washer and dryer
• 🌡️ Central HVAC
• 📦 Plenty of basement storage
• 🐾 Pets: None
• 🌳 Private backyard
• 🚗 Dedicated parking
• 🚭 Non-smoking household

🤝 Your roommate: Rajat — clean, quiet, helpful, respectful, genuinely a great guy. (Note: the roommate staying is male.) Feel free to reach out to him directly: rajatj1@umbc.edu

💰 Financials & Lease

• Rent: $572/month (your half)
• Utilities: Aprox ~$125/month (your share of WiFi + BGE)
• Move-in cost: $1,144 — first month's rent + a $572 security deposit
• Move-in date: Mid to late August (flexible)
• Lease: Lease transfer, running through August 17

Happy to answer questions or show the place — reach out!

✉️ Email: asheshs1@umbc.edu
📞 Phone: +1 410 442 6194

Hi everyone! I'm a graduate student at UMBC (Fine Arts) looking for a private room in a shared apartment/house near campus. Here's what I'm looking for:

• Private room for a female
• Budget: around $600/month (flexible depending on whether utilities are included).
• Preferably on the shuttle route
• Move-in: September
• I'd prefer living with another graduate student or someone who is working.
• Arbutus, Catonsville, or Halethorpe

A little about me: I am neat, very respectful of everyone's private life, and mindful of keeping common areas clean. I also don't mind living with cats at all!

If you have a room available, please let me know where it is located, which shuttle route it's near, and share any photos of the room/shared spaces if you have them.

You can reach out to me by email : rokhsaa1@umbc.edu

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to share important updates regarding the start of the 2026-2027 academic year and its impact on key university events, including Convocation and Winter Commencement.

As the academic calendar shifts to a Monday start and introduces a Fall Recess, corresponding changes are necessary in how we welcome our newest Retrievers and support their transition into the UMBC community.

Convocation will now take place on Sunday, August 23, 2026 at 3 p.m., the day before fall classes begin. 

We recognize that a Sunday event requires personal and professional adjustments for many of you, and we truly appreciate your flexibility in supporting our students and our community.   Holding Convocation immediately before the first day of classes preserves its longstanding role as the formal opening of the academic year while also providing students and families additional time to settle in through move-in and Welcome Retrievers activities.

Convocation is one of UMBC’s most meaningful academic traditions. For our newest Retrievers, it marks the beginning of their academic journey and offers an important first experience of the faculty, staff, and community that will support them throughout their time at UMBC. It is the formal academic ceremony that marks the passage from prospective student to full member of the UMBC academic community.

We encourage all faculty to attend and participate in Convocation on Sunday, August 23. Your presence is essential to the ceremony, to the institution, and most importantly, to the students you will be welcoming.

Looking ahead, the updated academic calendar also results in changes to Winter Commencement. Both the Undergraduate and Graduate ceremonies will be held on Friday, December 18, 2026 following the conclusion of finals. The Undergraduate ceremony will take place at 10:00 a.m, and the Graduate Ceremony will be held at 3:00 p.m.  

Additional details about Convocation and Welcome Retrievers activities will be shared in the coming weeks. More information about Winter Commencement will be provided closer to the event.

Thank you for your partnership, flexibility, and ongoing commitment to UMBC and the students we serve together.

Sincerely,

President Valerie Sheares Ashby

Manfred H.M. van Dulmen
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

In partnership with the Math and Physics Departments, the Division of Information Technology is pleased to announce a pilot for Gradescope, a feedback and grading platform that integrates with Blackboard. Gradescope helps streamline the grading process, especially open-ended “short answer” or “essay” format questions for paper-based, digital, and code-based assignments.

What is Gradescope?

Gradescope is an AI-assisted grading tool that allows instructors to grade paper-based exams, quizzes, bubblesheets, and homework assignments online. It is known for its flexible rubrics and ability to group similar student open-ended answers together.

Here is what Gradescope brings to your teaching toolkit:

• AI-Assisted Grading: For short-answer or handwritten questions, Gradescope can automatically group identical or similar answers together, allowing you to grade an entire batch of student responses at once.
• Code Autograding: Perfect for computer science and engineering courses, Gradescope allows you to run custom autograders on student code submissions alongside manual rubric grading.
• Dynamic Rubrics: Tailor your rubric grading workflow with structured criteria grouping, positive/negative scoring, grid-view matrices, and leverage Markdown/LaTeX.
• Annotation Tools: Provide precise feedback directly on student submissions with text, a freeform pencil, a box tool to create overlays, and emojis.
• Detailed Analytics: Instantly view per-question and per-concept statistics to pinpoint exactly where your students are thriving and where they might need a bit more review.
• Blackboard Integration: Sync your course rosters and push grades directly back to the Blackboard Grade Center, keeping your workflow unified. Access Gradescope from the Blackboard Content Market.

How Does the Pilot Work?

The pilot is open to all UMBC instructors for the 2026-2027 academic year. 

The Instructional Technology team welcomes your participation and feedback on your experience and student outcomes to assess the tool's impact and inform decisions about tool access beyond the pilot phase. 

How to Get Started

Gradescope is available in Blackboard in the course Content Market.

• Explore the Resources: Review the Gradescope FAQs for instructor and student resources.
• Attend Training: Gradescope Essentials - August 18 (1pm-2:30pm)

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

Imagine a student opening a Google Docs syllabus with a screen reader. They expect to easily skip from section to section. Instead, they hit a wall of text. Why? Because simply making text bold and underlined doesn't turn it into a real header and assistive technology can't read it as one.

Because Google Docs live entirely in a web browser, building an inclusive document requires a slightly different approach than working in traditional desktop word processors. Google Workspace’s native tools make it easy to build in accessibility from the start, rather than fixing it after the fact.

Here are five steps to create inclusive Google Docs, from the first keystroke to the final share.

Step 1: Mapping the Foundation with Paragraph Styles

When building a document, it is tempting to use the font size, bold, and underline buttons to manually create visual section headers. However, screen readers cannot use visual styling to understand the hierarchy of a page. Instead, they rely on an invisible, structural blueprint.

To build this structure properly, swap manual formatting for the Styles menu:

1. Highlight your section title and click the Styles dropdown in the top toolbar (it usually defaults to "Normal text").
2. Assign Title for your main topic, Heading 1 for major sections, and Heading 2 for subsections.

The Google Advantage: Using native headings automatically populates the left-hand document outline panel (View → Show outline). Because this outline serves as a live, interactive map, it doesn't just help assistive tech users jump between sections—it allows everyone collaborating on the document to navigate massive files with a single click.

Step 2: Writing and Linking via "Smart Chips"

Pasting raw, lengthy URLs into a shared document creates a clunky visual layout and an incredibly frustrating experience for screen reader users, who have to listen to every single character read aloud. On the flip side, vague text like "click here" lacks critical context when scanned in isolation.

• Instead of: “For the library database, click here.”
• Write: “Search the Library Database directly.”

The Google Advantage: Google Docs offers a cloud-native fix for messy links. When you paste a URL into a document, immediately press the “Tab" key when prompted. Google will automatically convert the raw web address into a clean Smart Chip or a descriptive preview title pulled directly from the destination page's metadata.

Step 3: Handling Visuals and Decorative Content

Images, charts, and diagrams require text alternatives (Alt Text) so screen readers can describe the images in the Documents. 

To add this in Google Docs:

1. Right-click the image and select Alt text (or use the shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Y / Cmd + Option + Y).
2. Type your summary strictly in the Description box, focusing on why the image matters to the document. You can leave the "Title" box blank.

The Google Disadvantage: Unlike desktop processors, Google Docs does not feature a native "Mark as decorative" checkbox for purely aesthetic graphics (like accent lines or background shapes). To work around this limitation without confusing assistive technologies, either omit purely decorative images entirely, or explicitly type "Decorative image" in the description box so a screen reader user knows they aren't missing out on critical content.

Step 4: Creating Lists

A hand-type dash or asterisk might look like a list on screen, but screen readers have no way of knowing it’s meant to be one. Instead, they announce each line as a separate, disconnected sentences, leaving the listener with no sense of how many items exist or where they are in a sequence.

• Use numbered lists when sequence matters, such as steps in an assignment or the order of operations in a grading rubric.
• Use bulleted lists when items carry equal weight, like a set of recommended readings or optional resources.

The Google Advantage: Applying a native list format (Format → Bullets & numbering) tells assistive technology exactly how many items are in the list and which one is currently being read, while also letting collaborators reorder or indent items automatically, without retyping symbols by hand.

Step 5: Maintaining Simple Typography

Decorative or script fonts, along with fully justified paragraphs, can be difficult for low-vision or dyslexic readers to track, since justification stretches spacing unevenly and creates awkward gaps between words. Standard, legible fonts paired with left-aligned text keep spacing consistent and predictable for every reader.

• Keep body text at 11pt or larger, since smaller sizes force low-vision readers to rely entirely on browser zoom.
• Reserve underlining for hyperlinks only since underlined body text can be mistaken for a broken or dead link.

The Google Advantage: Selecting "More fonts" from the font dropdown lets you preview and filter Google's full font library before applying it document-wide, making it easy to swap in an accessible typeface consistently across the whole file.

Remember: The biggest difference between Google Docs and desktop alternatives is the ecosystem: Google Docs does not feature a native, built-in "Check Accessibility" button in the toolbar. Therefore, you must review your work for accessibility before selecting the “Share” button.

On May 26th, UMBC welcomed academic leaders and enrollment professionals from Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) and the College of Southern Maryland (CSM) for the Strategic Transfer Excellence Plan (STEP) Convening. Supported by the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) and the Aspen Institute, the event brought together partners to align priorities, strengthen collaboration, and advance a shared vision for improving the transfer student experience.

STEP is a student-centered partnership focused on creating seamless pathways from community colleges to UMBC. Through the initiative, the partner institutions are working together to identify and remove unnecessary barriers to transfer, reduce time to degree, and increase bachelor's degree attainment for community college students. The partnership has committed to five shared goals:  expanding transfer enrollment from AACC and CSM, improving first-year success, increasing graduation rates for community college transfer students, reducing equity gaps in student completion, and strengthening STEM pathways.

The convening was centered on laying the foundation for the next phase of the work through discussions on governance, accountability, stakeholder engagement, communication strategies, and the resources needed to support long-term implementation. Participants represented a broad cross-section of the transfer experience, including deans, faculty, and leaders from admissions, advising, financial aid, the registrar, institutional research, information technology, orientation, student success, and student affairs.

Student voices grounded those conversations in lived experience. They highlighted the different pathways students take to UMBC and the opportunities institutions have to better support them along the way.

Zoha Waleed and Joaquin Seminario, AACC students who presented research through UMBC's inaugural URCAD Partners program, shared how participating in undergraduate research before transferring helped them see themselves as part of the UMBC community and inspired them to consider pursuing PhDs.

Laura Comey, who participated in dual enrollment at CSM before enrolling at UMBC as a first-year student, reflected on the lasting impact of her community college experience.

"Looking back, CSM was not just the place where I earned college credits. It was the place where I learned how to be a college student. It was where I learned how to advocate for myself, how to ask for help, how to lead, and how to imagine a bigger future for myself."

Markala Pharr, who transferred from CSM to UMBC, shared how delays in credit evaluation affected her first semester.

"Since I also had to wait for certain courses to be reevaluated during my first semester, my options for classes were limited."

Together, the students reinforced a central theme of the convening: transfer students bring resilience, experience, and valuable perspectives to their institutions, and their success depends on intentional, coordinated systems that make navigating the transfer process as seamless as possible.

The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) and the Aspen Institute, also in attendance recognized the partnership's commitment to expanding opportunity, noting its excitement about the life-changing impact the initiative can have for students across the region through UMBC's efforts to expand access and invest in transfer student success.

This summer, STEP enters Phase 2 of the Maryland Transfer Initiative, with work focused on stakeholder engagement and governance, shared vision alignment, resource alignment, and strengthening data and institutional infrastructure. As executive leadership across all three institutions continues to guide the partnership, STEP will serve as the framework for advancing coordinated action that improves outcomes for current and future transfer students.

• Rent: $318 /month + utilities
• No lease signing required
• Available for August or immediate move-in

Amenities include:

• Balcony
• Furnished living room
• Bidet fitted in toilet
• Parking access
• TV

5-minute walk to UMBC & MTA bus stop.

Perfect for students on a budget.

If interested, please message +1 (410) 961-8708 or WhatsApp

Desi students preferred 🇮🇳