tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5 2009-11-06T12:51:49Z Movable Type 3.34 tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11226 2009-11-06T12:45:16Z 2009-11-06T12:51:49Z

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...

Laura Brown 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. tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11223 2009-11-05T00:01:56Z 2009-11-05T04:27:11Z

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.

John Fritz scheduled downtime. ]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11212 2009-11-04T19:32:31Z 2009-11-05T04:18:50Z

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...

John Fritz 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."]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11217 2009-11-04T13:10:25Z 2009-11-04T14:41:12Z

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...

Laura Brown 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) tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11179 2009-10-30T15:45:26Z 2009-10-30T15:45:58Z

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...

Mike Carlin 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. tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11165 2009-10-26T15:19:24Z 2009-10-26T15:20:42Z

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...

Mike Carlin 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 ]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11138 2009-10-23T16:05:37Z 2009-10-23T16:10:13Z

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...

Mike Carlin 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. ]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.11040 2009-10-10T03:19:29Z 2009-10-15T22:18:58Z

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...

John Fritz 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.]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10974 2009-09-30T17:53:20Z 2009-09-30T17:55:03Z

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...

Anna Sniadach http://www.umbc.edu/circ/workshops/]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10973 2009-09-30T16:10:30Z 2009-10-05T20:01:48Z

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...

Debra Arnold 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.]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10972 2009-09-30T16:04:49Z 2009-10-05T17:19:27Z

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

Debra Arnold 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. ]]> www.umbc.edu/training/fdc.]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10971 2009-09-30T13:30:37Z 2009-09-30T14:11:32Z

DoIT would never ask you to send details of your username and password through email or any other means. Occasionally DoIT detect emails sent to staff and students asking them to confirm their username and password. These emails are always...

Anna Sniadach DoIT would never ask you to send details of your username and password through email or any other means. Occasionally DoIT detect emails sent to staff and students asking them to confirm their username and password. These emails are always fraudulent: the practice is known as "phishing". Despite their appearance, a closer look at the emails will show that they will not have been sent by DoIT but by someone fraudulently posing as DoIT. DoIT would never ask you for your password, for any purpose. Remember, your password is your secret. DoIT do not keep records of passwords. The University's Regulations forbid you from sharing your password with anyone, including DoIT staff. DoIT will not ask you for your password over the phone, by email, or by any other means. If you ever receive a request for your username and password details via email, NEVER RESPOND to it. Instead, just delete the email. Unfortunately, a few individuals have responded to phishing attempts, and in one case the account details were used in an attempt to perpetrate financial fraud.Please protect yourself: 1. If you think you may have responded to a phishing email, change your password immediately using myUMBC. 2. Never disclose your password to anyone. 3. Avoid using the same password on different systems (external to the University). In particular, be very careful with your University password, and with passwords that you use for financial systems, and for email systems. tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10967 2009-09-29T13:46:52Z 2009-09-30T13:31:20Z

Clickers and Peer Instruction: A Powerful Way to Improve Student Engagement and Learning, but Only If You Do It Right ELI Web Seminar, October 5, 2009, 1-2 p.m.(joint viewing available in ECS 023) Douglas Duncan is a faculty member in...

Debra Arnold Douglas Duncan is a faculty member in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado, where he directs the Fiske Planetarium. He began his career at the Carnegie Observatories, where he was part of a project that found sunspot cycles on other stars. Subsequently, he joined the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1992, he accepted a joint appointment at the University of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium, beginning a trend of modernization of planetariums that has spread to New York, Denver, and Los Angeles.]]> www.umbc.edu/training. For additional information, please visit https://net.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=468&bhcp=1]]> tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10927 2009-09-25T16:10:56Z 2009-09-25T16:19:17Z

A number of students have complained recently that their clicker that works in one class, but does not work in another. More than once it has been found that the student only registered it once, thinking it would apply to...

Steve Anderson A number of students have complained recently that their clicker that works in one class, but does not work in another. More than once it has been found that the student only registered it once, thinking it would apply to all their classes that semester. Students should be aware that a clicker has to be registered separately for each class through that class' Blackboard CPS Connection. They will only be charged a registration fee once per semester (for a maximum of 3 semesters), no matter how many of their classes use clickers that semester. Another common error is entering the serial number incorrectly upon registration. This can be rectified by the student going back to the CPS Connection and updating the serial number. After a student goes through either process, they must contact the instructor so the database can synchronized prior to class. The instructor will then be able to verify that they now appear in the CPS roster. tag:www.umbc.edu,2009:/blogs/oit-news//5.10845 2009-09-16T17:59:58Z 2009-09-25T15:46:27Z

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...

Mike Carlin 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 ]]>