DoIT News

Bb Maintenance to Fix Email Announcements: 11/20, 10 p.m. to 11/21, 1 a.m.

2009-11-17T21:20:32Z

To address a recent issue with Blackboard announcements not being automatically sent by email when an instructor or manager selects that option, UMBC's Blackboard system will be down from 10 p.m., Friday, November 20, to 1 a.m., Saturday, November 21. Reminder: Why Blackboard needs scheduled maintenance.

Reminder: LDAP master downtime 11/14/09 10am-4pm

2009-11-12T11:51:51Z

Just a reminder of the scheduled downtime this weekend... On Saturday 11/14/09 LDAP master will be down 10am-4pm to move to new server hardware. The following services will be unavailable during this time: - Calendar (for the first hour only) - Password changes via Webadmin - Email forward changes (Webadmin) - Changing of campus information (Webadmin)

Panasonic HVX200 P2 HD Camera Workshop

2009-11-11T19:39:27Z

On December 9 the New Media Studio will host a presentation on the HVX200 camera by Panasonic rep Jim Jensen. Jim will go over in depth the extensive customizable features on the camera and answer any questions we may have. We will meet at 2pm in ECS 023. We are planning on taping the presentation for future reference. Please pass this on to others (including students) who may be interested. To reserve a seat in the workshop please visit http://www.umbc.edu/brownbag

Digital Storytelling Workshop for Faculty Jan. 20-22 2010

2009-11-11T19:06:25Z

A three-day digital storytelling workshop for faculty will be held at UMBC on January 20, 21 and 22, 2010. Staff from the UMBC’s New Media Studio will conduct the workshop, during which participants will learn about the digital storytelling process while creating their own personal story.

Bringing together writing, photography and audio, the digital storytelling process facilitates the telling of personal and reflective stories in the form of digital movies. Through the process of producing their own digital stories over a three-day period, workshop participants gain insight into potential application of this approach in their own teaching. Here are samples from last summer’s workshop.

There are a limited number of seats available for faculty from other area institutions. The fee for non-UMBC faculty will be $500. If you are interested in reserving a seat please contact Bill Shewbridge at shewbrid@umbc.edu . Preference will be given to those who have not taken one of our workshops before, however alumni are welcome to join us if space is available.

GL Linux Servers downtime Monday 11/9/09 6:30am-7am

2009-11-06T12:45:16Z

Critical security patches have been released for our GL Linux systems. The patches have been tested internally with no issues. We will be pushing those out to the GL Lab workstations this morning (Friday 11/6). In order to minimize service impact, we will be taking a small downtime window on Monday 11/9, from 6:30am - 7am to apply the same patches to our GL Login servers.

Bb Will Be Down 11/6, 10 p.m. to 11/7, 6 a.m.

2009-11-05T00:01:56Z

24/7 Blackboard Support Starts Wed, Nov. 11

2009-11-04T19:32:31Z

As indicated in the August 24 "Challenges and Changes to Blackboard Support" announcement, UMBC's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) will begin working with Presidium Learning to provide basic Blackboard support starting Wednesday, Nov. 11. The DoIT Help Desk and Instructional Technology staff will still provide walk-in and by-appointment Bb support, but all students, faculty and staff will be able to get 24/7 Blackboard support via phone, IM chat or online knowledge base. Based in Lexington, Kentucky, Presidium specializes in answering technical support questions for faculty, staff, and students at more than 700 educational institutions, and provides a 95 percent first call resolution rate.]]> UMBC Blackboard Support Portal (sample) The partnership with Presidium is a one-year pilot to determine if and how external support can improve use of Blackboard, as well as free up DoIT staff for more advanced issues and opportunities, including refinement of Blackboard course creation and enrollment integration with the new Student Administration (SA) system, trend analysis of our most frequent user support demands, and assessment to help identify and promote effective uses of Blackboard. For the Nov. 11 implementation, students, faculty and staff can do the following to get Blackboard help: 1. Access the online knowledge base at http://bbsupport.umbc.edu (will be active on 11/11). 2. Ask a question via live Instant Messenger (IM) Chat 3. Call the existing DoIT Help Desk phone number of 410.455.3838 Note: A short, brief phone tree will be implemented so as to route all other IT-related calls to the DoIT Help Desk, while still allowing Presidium to handle Blackboard-related calls. In addition, UMBC users will have to create a separate account and password the first time they submit a help request ticket. This may change in the future to use the UMBC userid & password, but is not available at this time. Initially, Presidium will be responsible for the following:

All Blackboard-related application questions or issues, including how to get started, add content, manage discussion, create electronic assignments, quizzes and surveys and use the new grade center.
Refer all UMBC-specific uses of Blackboard back to the DoIT Help Desk. These include all account management and password resets as well as integration with SA to auto-create and enroll courses.
Provide a monthly report to DoIT showing all Bb-related support requests or knowledge base accesses, identify trend and root-cause analyses, and help benchmark UMBC usage against similar institutions using Blackboard.

"As we go forward in this pilot, it is important to note we are augmenting not outsourcing Blackboard service," says John Fritz, Asst. VP for Instructional Technology & New Media. "By supporting one part of the overall structure with a partner who has a wealth of experience in higher education technical support, we hope to provide a higher level of service for UMBC students, faculty and staff."

LDAP master downtime 11/14/09 10am-4pm

2009-11-04T13:10:25Z

On Saturday 11/14/09 LDAP master will be down 10am-4pm to move to new server hardware. The following services will be unavailable during this time: - Calendar (for the first hour only) - Password changes via Webadmin - Email forward changes (Webadmin) - Changing of campus information (Webadmin)

Update on Web Services Outage

2009-10-30T15:45:26Z

This morning at approximately 1:00AM we suffered a hardware failure that interrupted myUMBC and campus web page (e.g. www.umbc.edu) services. The problem was reported at 6:30AM today and DoIT staff began working on the problem remotely. Our response team arrived on campus by 7:15AM and had all services restored by 8:15AM today. We are currently examining logs and other records to determine what caused this hardware failure to ensure it does not occur again. This outage only affected the web services listed above. Peoplesoft, Blackboard, and E-mail were unaffected by this outage.

Re-Register for E2Campus By Oct 31

2009-10-26T15:19:24Z

A recent change to the authentication system for E2Campus means that all members of the UMBC community need to re-register for emergency campus text messages. If you registered your phone prior to August 26, 2009 you MUST login through myUMBC under your personal profile and notifications or directly at: https://my.umbc.edu/personal/notifications/ Users who have not re-registered by October 31, 2009 will no longer receive UMBC alerts. FAQs I already registered for E2Campus, can I migrate my old account? Unfortunately, existing accounts cannot be migrated. All existing users will need to re-register with E2Campus. Since we now know who the person is relative to UMBC's identity management system we will not need to do future re-registrations. How long before my existing E2Campus account is deleted? Existing E2Campus accounts will remain functional through October 31, 2009. UMBC will purge the old accounts after this date, thus leaving the new accounts in place. If I re-register now will I get two text messages sent to my phone? Users that have re-registered but still have an old account (i.e. until Oct 31st) will not receive duplicate text messages. E2campus can tell if the same phone number is in their system for more than one account, and will only send one message to that phone number. After October 31, 2009, old UMBC accounts that have the same phone number as new accounts will be deleted. Why is UMBC changing the system? Background: E2Campus was initially setup to use external, non-UMBC accounts. This meant that users had to create a user name and password that was hosted at E2Campus. This presented a few challenges for UMBC. -There was no way to know a user’s affiliation (Faculty, Staff or Student) -We can't tell if a user is still affiliated with the university (e.g. graduated, quit, terminated etc.) -Users forgot both user name and password but UMBC DoIT Help Desk could not assist. Solution: DoIT worked with E2Campus to be the first campus nationally to use the Shibboleth authentication standard to provide single sign on (SSO) ability. This means that users will no longer need to create an external account with E2campus. Instead UMBC is the identity provider and passes this information to E2Campus. Benefits of New Authentication System: - We know who the person is and their affiliation (e.g. student, staff, faculty, grad student etc.) - We know the person’s status (graduated, quit etc.) - There is no password to remember since the login is done via SSO from myUMBC. - We can purge/delete old accounts of people who have left the University

Windows 7 Is Here But Don't Rush an Upgrade

2009-10-23T16:05:37Z

Windows 7 Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. DoIT staff have been actively testing the Beta versions of Windows 7. Initial results from the testing are promising. The new interface is more streamlined, the boot times are faster and many features that worked just barely under Vista now work flawlessly. While testing has gone reasonably well DoIT will not officially support Windows 7 until February 2010. We encourage waiting a few months before upgrading existing systems to Windows 7. This will allow many of the bugs and lagging application and driver support to catch up thus preventing problems for users.

UMBC "Check My Activity" Reports for Students Now Available Inside Blackboard

2009-10-10T03:19:29Z

Based on user response to a system-wide announcement in all UMBC Blackboard courses this past week, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) has made a permanent link to the self-service "Check My Activity" (CMA) reporting tools for students on the myBlackboard tools menu. ]]> Check My Activity" (CMA) and "Grade Distribution Report" (GDR) tools for comparing their own activity against an anonymous summary of their course peers. Using this same myBlackboard tools menu link, faculty and staff have access to similar reports, though staff are unlikely to have need for the GDR tool, which is only valuable if a grade has been entered in a Bb grade book. As reported previously by DoIT and The Retriever Weekly, students have had access to their own CMA and GDR tools since Spring of 2009. However, adoption has been slow, probably because the tools don't reside inside Blackboard. So, a link to both reports was posted on Friday, October 2, at 5 p.m. and expired a week later at the same time on Friday, October 9.

CMA & GDR Demo

The Results?

In just one week, CMA & GDR usage activity increased more than 1,000 percent to 6,051 visits compared to 391 visits the entire previous month (Sept. 1 to Oct. 1).
The total number of page views increased to 20,008 from 537 the previous month. Average page views per visit also increased to 3.31 compared to 1.37.
The average time spent on the CMA & GDR reports jumped to 1 minute, 18 seconds, compared to just 13 seconds the previous month.
Also, returning visitors accounted for 83 percent of all page views, and they spent more time on the site (1 min, 26 secs) compared to new visitors (58 secs). This means the the CMA & GDR tools constitute a "sticky site," in that once visitors discover it, they come back again and again.
Is is worth noting that the Grade Distribution Report (GDR) was by far the most popular tool, accounting for 73 percent of all visits to the UMBC Blackboard Reports site that contains all "self service" tools and list of Most Active Courses for each semester over the last two years.

While user activity steadily declined as the week progressed, it may be because there were fewer new grades to compare user activity against. This strong interest in grades and related Blackboard activity confirms key findings of a national study showing students value the ability to check grades and gain access to practice quizzes and sample exercises as the most valuable functions in a course management system (CMS) like Blackboard. A full report showing the CMA & GDR usage activity from September 1 to October 9 is available here.

CIRC Software Workshop Schedule

2009-09-30T17:53:20Z

The workshops last for one hour and are held during Free Hour (12 noon - 01 pm) in ENGR 122, an instructional computer lab in the Engineering Building at UMBC. Though the seating is limited, no sign-up is required; we will accommodate as many people as possible. http://www.umbc.edu/circ/workshops/

Peer Instruction Workshop

2009-09-30T16:10:30Z

Peer Instruction Workshop Thurs, Nov. 12, 2009, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m., UC 312 Limited to 30 participants

Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University. ]]> two hour workshop, participants will learn about Peer Instruction, serve as the “class” in which Peer Instruction is demonstrated, discuss several models for implementing the technique into the classroom, and learn about available teaching resources. Limited to 30 participants. For more information and to register, please visit www.umbc.edu/training/fdc.

Confessions of a Converted Lecturer

2009-09-30T16:04:49Z

Lecture: Confessions of a Converted Lecturer Wed, Nov. 11, 2009, 6-7 p.m. LHV (Engineering Bldg.)