OIT News

Posted by fritz at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

SP2008 UMBC Blackboard Update

UMBC Blackboard update is provided by the Office of Information Technology for
students, faculty and staff using Blackboard at UMBC. If you have questions or
suggestions, contact John Fritz (fritz@umbc.edu or 410.455.6596) or Bob Armstrong
(rarmstro@umbc.edu or 410.455.3885). For more information about using Blackboard,
login via myUMBC or visit http://blackboard.umbc.edu.

HEADLINES

1. SP2008 Course Shells Expire on 6/15

2. SU2008 Course Shells Created on 4/30

3. OIT Publishes FA2007 Blackboard User Survey Results

4. New myUMBC Tools Show How Good Students Use Blackboard

5. UMBC Joins Two National, Online Learning Faculty Development Networks

6. Job Opening: UMBC Blackboard Graduate Assistant

7. FYI: Using Blackboard for Job Search or RFP Committees

8. FYI: OIT to Upgrade Labs to MS Office 2007 (PC) & 2008 (Mac)

9. FYI: BbWorld'08 World Conference is July15-17

Posted by fritz at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2008

Job Opening: Blackboard Graduate Assistant

OIT’s Instructional Technology & New Media unit seeks a graduate assistant to provide Blackboard support to students, faculty and staff. The person will assist with routine Bb system administration functions (e.g., course & community site creation), and development of Blackboard user support procedures and documentation. Candidates will be expected to work well in a collaborative team environment and to communicate effectively with customers from a variety of academic and administrative departments.

In the past, special projects have included design and development of the following:

UMBC Blackboard Reports
UMBC Blackboard Help

The successful candidate must be self-directed and work well communicating information to technical and non-technical users. The candidate must also be able to interact with customers of all levels in a highly professional and competent manner.

Qualifications

The qualified candidate must be an officially registered UMBC graduate student with demonstrable experience providing end-user support. The candidate must have good problem-solving skills, strong analytical and organization skills, and excellent oral/written communications skills. Experience with web application development (ideally using PHP & MySQL) is preferred.

Compensation & Hours

Term (9 Month)
Closing Date: Open until filled
Compensation: TBD by Graduate School policy (typically stipend, tuition & health)
Hours:
• PT (20 hours/week) in Fall & Spring
• FT (40 hours/week) possible in Winter & Summer

Application Process | Show Me (video)

1. Login to Blackboard via myUMBC or directly at http://blackboard.umbc.edu
2. Search for and “Enroll” in the “Blackboard User Group” organization on the Bb Community tab
3. Complete the “UMBC Bb GA” application by attaching the following:

- Cover Letter (include a brief description of how you use Blackboard now)
- Resume or CV
- Unofficial PDF version of your transcript from myUMBC
- Names of three references and how they know your work
- Note: You can “save” your application and come back, but can only “submit” it once.

Send an email to blackboard@umbc.edu when you have submitted your application using the process described above, or if you need help doing so.

Posted by fritz at 12:15 PM | TrackBack

OIT to Upgrade Labs to MS Office 2007 (PC) & 2008 (Mac)

This summer, OIT will be upgrading the Microsoft Office suite in all labs for the start of the Fall 2008 semester. Windows XP machines will be upgraded to Office 2007, and Apple machines will be upgraded to Office 2008.

Microsoft Vista is tentatively scheduled to be installed in the OIT labs beginning in Fall 2009.

Currently, OIT is working with UMBC Training Centers to offer "bridge" training for users accustomed earlier versions of MS Office as they make the transition to Office 2007 (PC) or Office 2008 (Mac). Details will be announced on the OIT News site at a later date.

Posted by fritz at 9:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 30, 2008

CS Major Wins "Students & IT" Focus Group Drawing

Junior Computer Science major Andrew Winder won the iPod Touch "door prize" drawing at yesterday's UMBC student focus group sessions for the 2008 "Undergraduates and IT" study sponsored by the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). Pictured with Andrew is Judy Caruso, principal investigator of the 2008 ECAR study, and Director of Policy and Planning in the CIO's office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Thanks to all of the students who participated.

Posted by fritz at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 8, 2008

4/30 Team Based Learning Demo

If you want to make sure students are prepared for class and group work, come to this demo of Team Based Learning (TBL) and its Readiness Assurance Process (RAP) that includes the following:

1. An individual quiz over assigned readings;
   
2. A team quiz over the same material using immediate feedback "scratch off" cards;
   
3. An open book "appeals" phase for incorrect "team answers" only.
   
4. Corrective instruction (mini lecture) by the instructor based on a real-time understanding of what students didn't understand.
   

For more information and to register, visit www.umbc.edu/fdc/training

Posted by fritz at 9:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2008

4/29 Workshop & Focus Groups Look at How Undergraduates Use IT

On Tuesday, April 29, Judy Caruso, the principal investigator of a national study on how undergraduates use technology will deliver a "Brown Bag" presentation at noon, followed by focus groups with students at 4, 5 and 6 p.m.

For the past two years, UMBC freshmen and seniors have participated in Undergraduates and IT conducted by the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). UMBC is also participating in this year's ECAR study.

During a Teaching, Learning and Technology (TLT) Brown Bag workshop Caruso, who is Director of Policy and Planning in the CIO's Office at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-principle investigator for the 2008 study, will share the 2007 study's key findings, and talk about what she's learned from five years of studying the nation's undergraduate technology trends.

FYI: UMBC's Past ECAR Study Results

• 2007
  
• 2006
  

Later in the afternoon, Caruso will conduct focus groups with UMBC students about their technology use to inform the 2008 study. If you are a UMBC undergraduate, and would like to participate in a focus group at 4, 5 or 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29 (food will be provided).

NOTE: Undergraduate students who register for and attend a focus group will be eligible to win an iPod Touch. Each participant will receive a ticket for the iPod drawing, which will take place after the 6 p.m. focus group is finished. If you can't be present for the drawing, an OIT staff member will put your ticket in the drawing and you will be notified if you win.

Posted by fritz at 4:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 6, 2008

New myUMBC Tools Show How Good Students Use Blackboard

OIT announces the release of two new myUMBC tools designed to show the campus community how top UMBC students use Blackboard.

Specifically, students can "Check My Blackboard Activity" to see a comparison of their own activity against an anonymous summary of other students in their classes. In addition, faculty can now run their own "Grade Distribution" and "Tool Usage" reports showing their students' Blackboard activity by any item in the Blackboard grade book (including final grade), or by overall tool usage within the course.

While the trend needs further study, initial findings suggest that students who earn higher grades tend to use Blackboard more than students earning lower grades. It is NOT the case that using Blackboard alone will produce higher grades, simply by "gaming" the system.

But if students know how their activity compares to an anonymous summary of peers, at any time during the semester, this timely and personal feedback may allow them to monitor and change their own behavior as it pertains to engaging with course concepts, materials, instructors or each other. In essence, students can now draw their own conclusions about the quantity AND quality of their Blackboard activity and the impact this may or may not have on their learning.

Since the "Check Grade" tool in Blackboard allows students to view statistical differences between their grades and the class average for any visible item in the grade book, OIT will eventually publish student reports showing activity by grade distribution as well. In the meantime, faculty who wish to can provide further insight to students, by viewing, printing and publishing (as PDF files in their Bb course site) their current or past student activity GDRs for their specific courses.

Background

A year ago, OIT began reporting on UMBC's "Most Active Blackboard Courses" based on a simple "average hits per user" approach. In this way, "rankings" don't favor large enrollment sites over smaller ones. To date, we now have reports for the Spring, Summer and Fall 2007 semesters.

After OIT announced the Fall 2007 Blackboard reports and availability of the "self service" faculty Grade Distribution Reports (GDR), 16 faculty used their GDRs, which collectively showed overall Blackboard usage was higher by students earning higher grades. The self service GDRs complemented earlier pilots with two faculty from Geography and Environmental Systems (Karin Readel and Chris Swan), which also showed higher Blackboard usage among students earning higher grades.

While there is no statistically significant difference among students earning As, Bs and Cs (numerically there is: students earning higher grades tend to use it more), there is a significant difference between this group and those students who earn Ds and Fs. So far, the pattern has held true in the courses mentioned above, and OIT is working on a way to load final grades into a table that looks at all Bb courses to see if the trend is broadly generalizable.

OIT recognizes that hits alone are no endorsement (or indictment) of course quality. But looking at and publishing user activity is one way to help faculty and students identify and consult each other about effective teaching and learning practices. By adopting an attitude of transparency about Blackboard usage, the entire UMBC community (and not just OIT system administrators) gains a "birds eye view" of how this Course Management System (CMS) is being used.

For more information, visit http://www.umbc.edu/blackboard/reports. You can also view a brief video demo of these new myUMBC tools for students and faculty.

Posted by fritz at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2008

UMBC Joins Two National, Online Learning Faculty Development Networks

On behalf of the UMBC community, the Office of Information Technology has recently joined QualityMatters and the Sloan-Consortium, two national, online learning networks that specialize in faculty development, online training and research-based "best practices." Membership in both organizations is made possible through a partnership with the University System of Maryland (USM).

Established in 2003 with a three-year, $500k grant from the Fund for Improvement to Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), QualityMatters is a nationally-recognized initiative by MarylandOnline that focuses on defining and evaluating best practices in quality online or hybrid course design--not instructor delivery.

Last year, OIT staff and selected faculty participated in several USM-sponsored course design and peer reviewer training workshops by QualityMatters, which is now an institutional subscription service supported by more than 100 colleges and universities in 31 states who have voluntarily adopted the QM course design and peer review standards. UMBC's own Alternate Delivery Program also adopted the QM standards as part of the Hybrid Course Design Workshop.

Now that UMBC is an institutional QM member, all faculty may access summary or annotated versions of the the highly regarded rubric (or "check list") of 40 course design characteristics that educational research literature identifies in good online courses. An interactive version of the rubric, as well as a form to request peer review by QM trained reviewers, is also available. Send email to John Fritz at fritz@umbc.edu to receive your userid & password for the interactive QM services.

Note: Two Education faculty members, Zane Berge and Greg Williams, are QM certified "peer reviewers," as are Jack Prostko, Director of the Faculty Development Center, and John Fritz and Bob Armstrong from OIT.

Known for its research-based course design rubric--which takes a lot of the guess work out of developing or evaluating online courses--QM does offer face-to-face and online training workshops, but also frequently partners with the Sloan-Consortium, which specializes in online faculty development in all aspects of online learning.

As 2008 institutional members in Sloan-C's "College Pass" program, UMBC has a total of 100 free "seats" to be used toward any online workshop (including how to use the QM rubric) and 50 additional "seats" in select workshops. UMBC also has ten (10) $50 registration discounts toward Sloan-C's highly regarded Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks in Orlando, Florida (Nov. 5-7).

For now, OIT will manage the "College Pass" registration codes on a "first come, first served" basis. To receive a Sloan-C "College Pass" code, click here.

Finally, faculty are reminded that UMBC has also been a member of the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) since 2006. While ELI does not focus exclusively on online learning, it provides excellent resources, including free webinars on timely topics, a very popular "Seven Things You Should Know About . . ." series, and the annual Horizon Report that looks at new and emerging technologies likely to be adopted in the next one to five years. The Horizon Report is also a partnership with the New Media Consortium, which UMBC also belongs to.

For more information about any of these opportunities, contact John Fritz at fritz@umbc.edu or 410.455.6596.

Posted by fritz at 11:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 20, 2008

Change to Weekly Blackboard Maintenance: Fridays, 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Starting this Friday, February 22, OIT will change the weekly, scheduled maintenance window to Fridays from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Last semester, OIT announced the need for scheduled, weekly maintenance when Blackboard could be unavailable. If OIT plans to use the new weekly maintenance window, we will post a "Down for Maintenance" notice users will see when they attempt to login.

While rare, OIT found some classes were actually held on Saturday mornings during the Fall 2007 semester. The new Friday evening maintenance window also works well because overall usage has been historically low during this time.

Note: As it did last semester, the Faculty Senate's Computer Policy Committee approved the new change in weekly Blackboard maintenance at its February 12 meeting. For more information, contact CPC Chair Ant Ozok

Posted by fritz at 9:55 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 15, 2008

Mac Office 2008 is Here!!

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac was released on February 14, 2007 for Faculty and Staff at UMBC. Faculty and Staff can obtain the media by visiting myUMBC

Students who want to purchase MS Office for the Mac should visit the UMBC bookstore.

Posted by mikec at 1:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 14, 2008

VPN Upgrades Will Support OSX 10.5 (Leopard)

This Sunday February 17th at 8:00am we will be upgrading the software on our web based VPN. We expect VPN service to be unavailable for approximately 10 minutes. On the first login after the outage you may see a message pop-up that it is installing a new version of the VPN client. This process should not need any user intervention and should appear seamless. This upgrade will offer full support for Mac osX 10.5 (Leopard) as well as some other minor big fixes.

Posted by mikec at 4:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 25, 2008

Blackboard "Turnitin" Issues & Scheduled Downtime (1/26, 6-9 a.m.)

Following the planned upgrade to version 7.2 last week, OIT has discovered issues with the Turnitin "Building Block" that instructors may want to understand before using this tool.

In addition, the main Blackboard production server will be down for routine, scheduled maintenance this Saturday, January 26, from 6 to 9 a.m. This is unrelated to the Turnitin issues described in this announcement.

Basically, the Turnitin "Building Block" (or plug-in) for Blackboard we have used for several years has been going down sporadically in Bb versions 7.2 or higher. This was not publicly announced and it seems to be an issue when Blackboard is used in a multiple server configuration such as UMBC uses to guarantee redundancy and performance. We've learned that other schools have experienced similar issues.

The issue has become more complicated since Blackboard released its own plagiarism detection tool, SafeAssign, this summer. While SafeAssign is free (the Faculty Development Center currently pays for Turnitin), the key to any tool like this is the library of past submissions to compare future papers against. Clearly, Turnitn has a larger library at this point, but given its wider availability across all 3,700 colleges and universities using Blackboard, SafeAssign is bound to catch up. Also, there were early reports of "issues" when Safe Assign first shipped, but they appear to be settling down.

While we have worked with Turnitin, there is no guarantee the tool will not go down if you use it inside Blackboard. Accordingly, OIT has made SafeAssign available in all courses and suggests the following options:

1. Use Turnitin Outside of Blackboard

As a campus, we haven't done this in a while, but it is possible to access Turnitin outside of Blackboard; it's just not as easy for faculty and students who may be accustomed to using it inside Blackboard.

Instructions

After the class is created online, students will need to create accounts and submit papers using your class ID. If you have questions, please contact Jack Prostko, Director, Faculty Development Center (ext. 5-1829 or prostko@umbc.edu).

2. Use SafeAssign

While we do not have a lot of experience with this tool yet, OIT has made it available. Also, faculty can upload student papers from past courses to "jump start" the rebuilding of their respective bank of papers SafeAssign can check against. For more information on how to use SafeAssign, visit www.safeassign.com.

3. Use Turnitin Inside Blackboard | More Information

OIT recommends piloting “Safe Assign” for those courses where issues would be most problematic or for faculty who do not wish to worry about Turnitin. We will keep the Turnitin service running for faculty who wish to continue using it and accept that there is some risk.

If you have questions or concerns, please add them as a comment to this announcement, which OIT will monitor, or send email to blackboard@umbc.edu.

Posted by fritz at 1:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 14, 2008

Reminder: Blackboard Down for Upgrades 1/15 to 1/17

As announced November 30, 2007, UMBC's main Blackboard production server (http://blackboard.umbc.edu) will be down for hardware and software upgrades from Tuesday, Jan. 15 through Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008.

Note: The alternate Blackboard server being used in Winter session (http://bbss.umbc.edu) will continue to operate during the production server upgrades.

Posted by fritz at 1:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2007

GES Faculty Show and Tell How and Why They Use Blackboard

Karin Readel

Chris Swan

In addition, OIT has published pilot reports for some of Readel's and Swan's recent courses showing student activity by final grade distribution:

While this kind of individual course report is not yet available (faculty can do it manually), OIT intends to provide this service to faculty who wish to view it privately (or eventually post it inside a Bb course for future students to monitor and benchmark their own activity).

OIT will also be publishing a similar, public report that summarizes student activity and tool use by grade distribution in the top 25, 50, 75 and 100 percentile ranges of all UMBC Blackboard courses. The goal is to see what difference, if any, exists in student grade distribution across a range of Bb courses and activity levels.

After watching Readel and Swan show how they use Blackboard in their actual course sites, faculty may want to check out why they do so in two new "Q & A" video interviews on UMBC's iTunesU service (for more information about UMBC on iTunes, see http://itunes.umbc.edu).

OIT plans to publish more "Show & Tell" (how) and "Q & A" (why) videos from faculty teaching active Blackboard courses in other disciplines, but if you or a colleague has an effective practice or insight you'd be willing to share, send email to fritz@umbc.edu. Please include a short description of the pedagogical problem that is solved or the new learning opportunity that is created in using Blackboard.

Note: To protect the work and identity of students who may appear in the "Show & Tell" videos, only UMBC faculty can access them with their myUMBC userid & password. These videos are intended for collegial, professional development only, so all faculty are reminded that any medium containing identifiable student academic information constitutes an "educational record" that is protected by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Posted by fritz at 4:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 13, 2007

Weekly Blackboard Maintenance Begins Sat., 9/15 (6-9 a.m.)

Starting this Saturday, September 15, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) is implementing weekly Blackboard maintenance on Saturdays from 6 to 9 a.m. While OIT may not always use all or part of these weekly maintenance "windows," Blackboard users should plan accordingly.

Since 1999, UMBC has used Blackboard which now supports more than 1,000 courses and 350 organizations every semester, making it one of the largest, most mission-critical technology services on campus. However, there is no good time when OIT can perform necessary patches, upgrades or even simple reboots because the academic semesters all overlap (except the third week in August, which is too close to the start of Fall).

OIT will continue to implement major upgrades in January, when the small number of winter courses can be run on a separate Bb server. But we need regular weekly maintenance and think the 6 to 9 a.m. window on Saturdays minimizes disruption to users while giving OIT staff access to the system to maintain it.

For the next month, OIT will post system-wide Blackboard maintenance "reminders" on Thursdays, develop a generic "Blackboard is Down for Maintenance" message for anyone who logs in when Blackboard is down, and continue to note any changes to the system.

Long term, we think regular maintenance will help improve Blackboard's performance, and appreciate the campus community's support and patience as we move forward.

Posted by fritz at 8:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 28, 2007

Blackboard Will Be Down 9/1 (9 p.m.) to 9/2 (9 a.m.)

To extend a fix of recent "database connection" errors that have increased during the busy days leading to the start of semester today, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) needs to take Blackboard down from 9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 1, to 9 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 2.

Working with Blackboard, OIT has developed a short-term fix to the "database connection" errors, but needs extended downtime with no user access to address an underlying issue with the production database. No content has been lost, nor is it expected. But the production database that runs Blackboard needs to be "cleaned up" so performance does not degrade throughout the semester, when the user load will only increase. We are also continuing to work with Blackboard to identify existing processes that may be contributing to the problem.

Currently, we believe overall performance is stable. If we find otherwise, we will post an update on the OIT News site at http://www.umbc.edu/oit/news which you can also subscribe to by RSS feed or view in myUMBC. If you encounter system performance problems, please send email to helpdesk@umbc.edu.

We understand this is a busy time of year, and appreciate your patience as we address these system issues to maintain acceptable performance during the semester.

Posted by fritz at 2:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

UMBC on iTunes U

UMBC on iTunes U is now available at itunes.umbc.edu. UMBC on iTunes U provides access to UMBC-related digital video and audio content through Apple's iTunes Store, a popular online music, video and podcast service.

Initially, UMBC is offering public content through the service, including special events, video features and lectures. Select course lectures are also available with the permission of instructors.

In the coming months, we are planning to integrate iTunes U with UMBC's user authentication system, allowing course-restricted access to content through UMBC's Blackboard course site. Instructors who are interested in making course lectures and materials available through UMBC on iTunes U, either in a public or a restricted way, should email us at newmediastudio@umbc.edu

Once authentication is in place, we also plan to open the site up to campus organizations as a way of distributing media content. If your group or department is interested in participating, please email newmediastudio@umbc.edu

On March 15, Aaron Davis, Senior System Engineer with Apple gave a presentation on what UMBC can expect with iTunes U. You can view the presentation here.

You can also find more information on what iTunes U has to offer on Apple's support site.

UMBC on iTunes U is sponsored by the Office of Information Technology and the New Media Studio. For more information email us at newmediastudio@umbc.edu.

Posted by shewbrid at 10:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

OIT's Bill Shewbridge Named UMBC's Employee of the Quarter

Bill Shewbridge, who is manager of OIT's New Media Studio, has been named UMBC's "Employee of the Quarter" effective April 1 to June 30, 2007. OIT celebrated Bill's accomplishments during an Instructional Technology & New Media staff meeting on Thursday, March 29, at 2:30 p.m. in ECS 023.

"Bill's work is distinguished by his patient persistence. He listens well and knows how to 'cut to the chase' of a problem and propose an effective solution," says John Fritz, director of Instructional Technology & New Media. "He is extremely creative and well-versed in all kinds of new media technology (e.g., Web, multimedia, podcasting and video production/streaming). He is also very responsible, doing whatever it takes to complete a project on time to the client's satisfaction."

Bill has been manager of UMBC's New Media Studio since it's inception in 2001, shortly after the merger between University Computing Services (UCS) and the Office of Instructional Technology (OIT). Prior to this, Bill was a video and multimedia producer and has more than twenty years of experience at UMBC providing educational media support and expertise.

Working with campus leaders and historians, Bill and the New Media Studio staff produced the UMBC 40th anniversary oral history video and the related interactive timeline. With his leadership, the New Media Studio annually produces well over 100 projects with a staff of two other full time employees and up to four part time student research assistants.

"Bill is a natural born teacher and approaches his job as a learning opportunity for both himself and his student research assistants," says Fritz. "Sitting in a biweekly NMS staff meeting is a treat. In addition to reviewing status and completing numerous projects, Bill and his staff use the meetings as a connection point between interesting, new technologies and real campus needs that require creative, out-of-the-box solutions. Bill gives direction but also receives it with aplomb."

In recent years, Bill has distinguished himself serving on the advisory board of the New Media Consortium's 2007 Horizon Report, which looks at new and emerging technologies over the next 1-5 years. He also served on the advisory board's 2005 Horizon Report.

Finally, Bill has been a constant shepherd of the new relationship forming between UMBC and Retirement Living TV. He has helped serve as a liaison for the RLTV temporary takeover of the UMBC TV Studio in ACIV, and served as an advocate for faculty affected by the move. He has also led the development of several "Digital Storytelling" projects involving Charlestown Residents, which may likely appear on RLTV as pilots. These projects involve UMBC students interviewing Charlestown residents and capturing their stories with 2-3 minute, first-person, narrated documentaries complete with family photos and memorabilia. Bill first used the "digital storytelling" workshop method in his ART 395 "Video Production" class, and has led the charge to bring this new kind of literacy to UMBC, through an open workshop this past January, which will be repeated in Summer 2007.

Originally from Frederick County, Maryland, Bill holds a B.A. in History from UMBC, an M.S. in Instructional Design from Towson University, a Certificate in Environmental Studies for the Johns Hopkins University and a Doctor of Communications Design from the University of Baltimore. Bill lives with his wife, Janet, a graphic designer, near UMBC.

As UMBC's Employee of the Quarter, Bill will receive the following:

A check for $500;

A personalized employee parking space;

One day of administrative leave;

A certificate;

His name on a plaque located on the fifth floor of the Administration building;

An invitation to the annual Service Award Ceremony for all the recipients of the quarterly award.

For more information about UMBC's Employee of the Quarter award (including eligibility, a list of past recipients, and a nomination form), click here.

Posted by fritz at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 2, 2007

Daylight Saving Time Issues

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 changed the dates for Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November: March 11, and November 4, in 2007.

Different layers of computer applications implement DST in different ways. There may be required patching at the OS, database, programming language, or application level to ensure correct representation of current time during the expanded portion of DST as well as correct date calculations that cross the new DST boundaries.

For more detailed information about desktop machines and PDAs please visit the page below.

http://www.umbc.edu/oit/DST/

Posted by mikec at 7:27 PM

February 26, 2007

Elimination of SGI Support

UMBC has had a long history of using Silicon Graphics (SGI) IRIX computers. Over the past few years, SGI has been struggling financially, and has not been continuing development of these technologies. The SGI computers used inside OIT include Titan, UMBC7, and Irix2.gl. The newest of these systems is 6 years old, and the oldest is over 10. OIT will eliminate these machines and remove them from service on August 31, 2007. If you are a current user of any of these systems, please be aware of other OIT supported computing options that are available for your use:

Applications - Applications that OIT has current software support arrangements for, such as Matlab, SPSS, SAS and Maple are available on OIT's centrally managed Linux and Solaris servers. Updated versions of popular open source software packages are also available on these other platforms.

Titan- For some time, OIT has had available a multiprocessor Linux-based server, hercules.rs.umbc.edu, which is many times more powerful than Titan. Many of the popular applications that have been used on Titan are available on this server and other computing resources. Users who have been granted access to Titan are also able to access this server; the filesystems and data that have been available on Titan are also available there. OIT is also working with the research computing subcommittee to further develop resources to be used for campus-wide research cmoputing. The only application which was specifically licensed for Titan is Spartan; users of this application have been previously notified and been given appropriate time to make alternate arrangements. It is available under other operating systems such as Linux and Windows in student or server editions.

UMBC7- UMBC7 has been primarily used by faculty and staff to access email. Most of our users have migrated to using our IMAP, POP or WebMail services. The pine email application is availble on our general purpose cluster under both Linux and Solaris. Users can access these servers by logging into:
*linux.gl.umbc.edu - For Linux access.
*solaris.gl.umbc.edu - For Solaris access.
Both of these servers provide a more modern computing environment than the existing UMBC7 server, and a similar suite of applications -- including, of course, the popular pine. OIT will also be augmenting and updating the solaris.gl.umbc.edu resource in conjunction with the retirement of UMBC7.

GL - OIT will be eliminating 'irix2.gl.umbc.edu' from service. Similar, or newer software, is available on the solaris.gl and linux.gl servers.

Outside of OIT, the migration away from SGI IRIX based systems has been in progress for some time. OIT no longer provides support for departmental IRIX-based computing resources.

Finally, OIT recognizes that change is always hard. We have held off discontinuing support for these systems as long as possible; however, these systems have reached the end of their useful life. If there are any issues we have not identified or addressed, please let us know so that we can be of assistance.

Posted by mikec at 10:55 AM

January 16, 2007

Oracle Calendar Downtime Jan 18 from 7:00PM to Midnight

On Thursday, January 18th, 2007 Oracle Calendar services will be unavailable from 7:00PM through Midnight. OIT will be performing an upgrade to the production calendar environment.

**Will I notice any changes?
The most noticeable difference will be by customers that access Oracle calendar via the Web (calendar.umbc.edu). The initial Web login page will look slightly different. However, subsequent pages will look the same as they always have. Customers that use the desktop Oracle Calendar Client will notice no significant differences.

**Why Are We Upgrading?This upgrade will provide for the future use of collaboration features. Of most interest will be the ability to synchronize calendar entries over-the-air (OTA). OIT will have device and configuration recommendations that support OTA by the end of the Spring 2007 semester.

Posted by mikec at 9:14 PM

January 8, 2007

Seven Faculty Selected for SU2007 "Alternate Delivery Program"

Seven UMBC faculty have been selected to participate in UMBC's Alternate Delivery Program (ADP) to redesign existing UMBC courses for online or hybrid delivery in Summer 2007.

Sponsored by the Office of Summer, Winter and Special Programs (OSWSP) and supported by the Faculty Development Center (FDC) and Office of Information Technology (OIT), the Alternate Delivery Program provides a course development stipend, instructional design training and technical support to redesign existing courses for online or hybrid delivery.

Since the ADP began in Spring 2005, 16 faculty have redesigned their courses for online or hybrid (part online, part face-to-face) delivery in UMBC's Winter and Summer Special Sessions. Of the seven new faculty accepted into the SU2007 cohort, five will be redesigning an existing course, and two will participate as "peer mentors," which was a new award announced in the Summer 2007 "Request for Proposals."

The SU2007 ADP faculty cohort includes

Matthew Belzer (Music)

Mary Davis (Economics)

Linda Harris (English)

Jodi Kelber-Kaye (Gender & Women's Studies)

Katherine Morris (Social Work)

Susan McCully (Theatre)*

Greg Williams (Education: Instructional Systems Design)*

* Selected to serve as "Peer Mentors."

After two half-day training workshops in mid-January, the SU2007 cohort will begin working on their course redesign deliverables. These include meeting twice during the spring semester (March 1 and April 5) to present two learning objects, assignments or activities that represent how their courses will be redesigned for hybrid or online delivery. Each faculty member's departmental colleagues are encouraged to attend the lunchtime presentations (location and presentation schedule to be announced).

Quality Matters Online Learning "Rubric"

One new development in the SU2007 ADP cohort is the use of the Quality Matters online learning "rubric" or checklist as both a proposal form for the new "peer mentor" awards and as a guide for all new faculty developing future online or hybrid courses. Quality Matters is a voluntary, standards-based method of evaluating online course design (NOT instructor performance or course delivery). In addition to having their online courses evaluated, QM also trains faculty to serve as QM peer reviewers who can earn $150 for participating in a three-member team evaluation of another faculty member's online course.

From 2003 to 2006, QM was funded by a $500,000 grant from the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). It has won numerous awards for articulating a simple, but effective standard by which online learning design can be evaluated. Currently, QualityMatters is operating on an indvidual and institutional "subscription" model. However, during the 2006-2007 academic year, the University System of Maryland is sponsoring several QM workshops and training programs to System schools and faculty. In March, QM will host online and face-to-face workshops on how to improve an online course and how to become a QM peer reviewer.

For more information about the UMBC Alternate Delivery Program, visit www.umbc.edu/ssfaculty/adp or contact John Fritz at 410.455.6596 or fritz@umbc.edu

Posted by fritz at 2:00 PM

January 7, 2007

Part-Time Employment Opportunities

The OIT Help Desk have positions open for part-time customer support. Available hours are Sunday thru Saturday. Must be able to start training immediately. Interested UMBC students should complete our online application at http://www.umbc.edu/oit_jobapp. All majors welcome.

Job Description:

The Help Desk is the first point of contact for students, staff and faculty seeking technical assistance for campus technology issues. They serve as members of OIT by providing technical support over the phone and in person, and maintaining the smooth operation of the OIT equipment and facilities. Help Desk employees are under the supervision of the Help Desk Manager.

Specific duties include but are not limited to the following:

• Primary responsibility is user support and customer service. Be present and visible in the Help Desk and available to customers requiring technical assistance.
• Respond to questions from callers; assist in person with problems in the computer lab.
• Learn fundamental operations of commonly used software, hardware, and other equipment.
• Follow standard Help Desk operating procedures; accurately log all Help Desk contacts using call tracking software.
• Accept general responsibility for the computer lab and ensure that it is ready for use; stock paper and toner in printers, push in chairs, restart frozen computers, etc.
• Enforce all Computer Lab policies.
• Manage the circulation of headphones, manuals, or other materials as appropriate.
• Attend all Help Desk training sessions.
• Become familiar with available help resources; stay updated on campus technology changes or problems.
• Become familiar with OIT policies, services, and staff.
• Direct calls to appropriate OIT staff as necessary.
• Maintain reasonable discipline and decorum in the Help Desk and computer lab areas.
• Other duties as assigned by the Help Desk Manager.

General Requirements:

• Must be fluent in English and be eligible for employment in the U.S.
• Friendly presence and helpful attitude; good interpersonal skills and ability to work well with others.
• Ability to provide technical support over the phone; good phone skills, professional demeanor, previous customer service experience strongly desired.
• Good problem solving skills; ability to visualize a problem or situation and think abstractly to solve it.
• Ability to handle constantly changing flow of traffic; remain productive during slow times, be able to multitask effectively during busy times, exercise patience and professionalism during stressful situations.
• Ability to work responsibly with or without direct supervision.
• Working knowledge of common operating systems and software applications.
• Adequate familiarity with equipment found in OIT computer facilities.
• Work a minimum of 12 hours per week; maximum of 35 hours per week.
• Be a current, registered student.

Term of Employment:

• Year-round employment, reviewed each semester, renewable upon favorable review.
• Must start shifts a month before the start of each semester.
• Required to work before the start of semester (during Move-In Days), during holidays, and Finals week.

Posted by anna at 8:00 AM

December 22, 2006

Help Desk Hours of Operation during Winter Semester

The OIT Help Desk will have the following hours of operation:

Sunday 12noon to 10:00pm
Monday 8:00am to 10:00pm
Tuesday 8:00am to 10:00pm
Wednesday 8:00am to 10:00pm
Thursday 8:00am to 10:00pm
Friday 8:00am to 10:00pm
Saturday 9:00am to 5:00pm

Our 24-hour lab in ENGR room 021 will be available. Please use your UMBC ID to access.

Posted by anna at 8:55 AM

November 28, 2006

Greylisting FAQ

Overview:
- How does Greylisting work?
- Why is my legitimate e-mail taking so long to get delivered to me?
- What if the external e-mail is still not delivered to me after 4 hours?
- Should I update my personal Whitelist?
- Why am I getting legitimate e-mail in my “Spam” folder?
- Does Greylisting affect e-mail sent from UMBC?

How does Greylisting work?
Essentially any new message, one that has not been seen by UMBC’s mail servers for a period of time, is rejected by our mail servers the first time it is received. Properly configured external mail servers will send the message again, typically twice within the first hour, but some mail servers may wait for several hours before resending. Unfortunately, the “resend” configuration of external mail servers is outside of UMBC’s control.

However, when the second delivery attempt is made UMBC’s mail servers will accept the message and record this in a database. Recording this successful e-mail delivery allows UMBC’s mail servers to deliver future e-mail from that particular sender without first having to reject the message again. The result is that all future mail from that specific e-mail address will be delivered without delays.

This procedure helps to prevent SPAM because spammers typically do not “retry” or “resend” their spam after receiving a failed delivery the first time. They simply move on to the next victim. Therefore, by rejecting the first attempt at delivery OIT can help reduce SPAM on campus.

This is a very brief description of Greylisting. More detailed information can be found at http://www.umbc.edu/oit/news/archives/2006/11/what_happened_t.html

Why is my legitimate e-mail taking so long to get delivered to me?
Greylisting relies on the principle that a properly configured mail server will retry a failed delivery attempt. Unfortunately, not all mail servers are setup the same. For instance, UMBC’s mail servers will retry a failed delivery twice within the first hour. However, some mail servers at external businesses and schools may take 3-4 hours before making a second attempt. The good news is that once the message has been resent, UMBC’s mail servers will allow that particular e-mail address to send mail to UMBC without future delays. Basically the initial delivery delay is a one-time penalty that we endure to help prevent SPAM.

What if the external e-mail is still not delivered to me after 4 hours?
Other servers do not have a well identified fix to make them compliant. For that, the following two procedures exist:
1. Manually perform the "re-send" that the external server should be doing automatically:
a. If it has been a few minutes and the message is not arriving, tell your sender to just re-send the message once to the intended recipient. The recipient might receive 2 copies (one from each send), but the process will not need to be repeated, future messages will pass through without any delay (with only a single sending of the message).
2. Request help in identifying the problem if the above does not work to immediately pass your e-mail:
a. E-mail with the bounce message or e-mail address of the external sender
b. OIT will extract the information needed from that message
c. OIT will verify the information and see if the problem did or did not stem from a communication with our server,

Should I update my personal Whitelist?
Updating your personal whitelist found at http://accounts.umbc.edu will have no impact on Greylisting. Greylisting does not filter SPAM based on SPAM filtering rules. Instead all e-mail is rejected the first time (See “How does Greylisting Work?”)

However, once the e-mail is successfully delivered your personal SPAM filtering rules and Whitelists will work. This is why you will still see SPAM e-mails in your “Spam” folder. It is also possible that the occasional legitimate e-mail will be flagged as SPAM and placed in your “Spam” folder. Please continue to check your SPAM folder.

Why am I getting legitimate e-mail in my “Spam” folder?
Greylisting does not filter messages based on SPAM filering rules. Therefore, mail successfully delivered to your Inbox will have the same Spam filtering rules applied that we always have. If you find that legitimate e-mail is being placed in your “Spam” folder then you should add them to your personal Whitelist found at http://accounts.umbc.edu or you can simply move them back into your Inbox.

Does Greylisting affect e-mail sent from UMBC?
No, Greylisting has no impact on e-mail being sent from UMBC. It also does not impact mail sent from one UMBC address to another UMBC address.

Posted by mikec at 7:19 PM

November 27, 2006

What Happened to all my Spam?

OIT’s Core Systems group has put in place an implementation of greylisting on the central email servers over the thanksgiving holiday weekend. Greylisting is another method of combating spam which relies on the methods that most spammers are currently using to send their messages by returning a temporary error to a mail server the first time it attempts to communicate with a particular recipient. While well behaved mail servers will simply retry sending their message within a short period of time, spammers won’t, causing your wanted messages to get through but leaving the spam on the floor.

Like any anti-spam technique, greylisting does have a negative side effect. The side effect is that a delay – sometimes significant – may be incurred on the first time a message is sent to a UMBC recipient from a particular server. However, after the initial message does get through (after a short timeout period), messages from that mail server should flow smoothly to your mailbox from that sender. While our servers are configured to accept mail 2 to 5 minutes after the initial attempt is made – the remote server is responsible for scheduling the re-try.

We’d like your feedback on how the greylisting is working.

The Details

First, a little about how internet email works. Email is a store-and-forward system – a message is passed along from mail server to mail server, and if at any point there is a temporary failure in transport, an attempt is made to retry sending the message to the next hop.

Back when internet Spam first became a problem, spammers would use “open relays” – misconfigured hosts on the internet – which they could use to send mail from anywhere, to anywhere, in this fashion. Mail server administrators caught on to this, and made efforts to secure open relays, or, track them, so that they could reject mail coming through these insecure access points. The spammers, of course, caught on to this, and now rely on bot-nets – armies of compromised PCs throughout the world – as the initial source of their spam. These hosts are numerous hard to track – some may only be used to spam for very short periods of time – so the methods of blocking spammers by the hosts their messages originate from became almost impossible.

Attention then turned to content-analysis of messages – phrase analysis, or other patterns – which could flag a message as being junk mail. Again, the spammers quickly caught on to this, and began to craft the content of their messages to evade such detection.

Spammers need to send their messages quickly and move on – after all, they have millions of individuals to offer their latest and greatest stock tip, or discounted Mexican Viagra to. Therefore, spammers don’t spend much time trying to re-send a message when it returns an a temporary or permanent error – they just move on, sure to get you in the next round of messages.

What is Greylisting?

Greylisting is a practice of using the spammers ‘shotgun’ approach against them. When a mail message comes into a mail server, three pieces of information that make up the envelope are recorded: the source IP address of the message, the SMTP FROM: address, and the SMTP recipient. This triple is looked up in a database of triples recently seen by a mail server, and if a matching record is found and is recent, but not too recent, the mail is allowed to pass. If a triple is not found, or the timestamp recorded in the database is too old, or too young, the mail server returns a temporary error to the sending host. A well-behaved mail server will simply queue this message for a retry at some later point (usually within 30 minutes, usually less), at which time the mail will go through, as that triple has already been seen. A bot-net’d PC being used to send spam won’t retry – either because the spammer has moved on to spamming someone else, or, that host has been discovered and cleaned of it’s infection.

Posted by mikec at 3:42 PM

October 18, 2006

HFS12 Still Having Problems - Update on UMBC Campus E-mail Problems

Today 20% of our e-mail users were without e-mail access from approximately 11:00AM until 2:30PM. One of our file servers suffered a failure during a fix that we were applying to deal with slow e-mail performance problems. It took several hours to salvage this server and restore access.

Over the past couple of weeks e-mail performance has been extremely slow. OIT is aware of the problem and are awaiting new e-mail servers, which are currently on order with the vendor that should help to ease the problem. Over the next two days OIT system administrators will be applying fixes that we hope will alleviate some of the performance problems until the new hardware arrives and can be installed.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this is causing.

Michael Carlin
Director of Infrastructure and Support
Office of Information Technology

Posted by anna at 8:43 AM

August 29, 2006

myUMBC Downtime Wed at 12:15 a.m.

Tonight OIT staff will be performing database maintenance on myUMBC. This work will begin at 12:15 a.m. Wed August 30th and will be completed by 2:15 a.m. Wed August 30th (i.e. late at night).

Posted by mikec at 4:10 PM

August 14, 2006

ListProc Migration Schedule for Sunday August 20th

During the past eight months OIT has been engineering a new mailing list replacement for ListProc. ListProc has served us well over the past years but recently it has begun to show its age. Messages frequently hung in the system, list management was cumbersome and the online archives left much to be desired. The replacement for ListProc is an open source product called Sympa (http://www.sympa.org/). OIT staff presented the new system to a large group at the Departmental IT meeting in May 2006. During this meeting much appreciated feedback was received with regard to the configuration and setup. The result is UMBC’s new list management package.

OIT will be migrating to the new system on Sunday, August 20th. All active lists will be migrated beginning at 2:00 p.m. and ending by 6:00 p.m. During this time all lists will be unavailable to the campus.

FAQs
***How Do I View My List(s)***
Sympa has a very easy to use Web interface. If you visit http://lists.umbc.edu and login using your UMBC username and password you will be able to manage your lists and subscribe to others.

HINT: lists.umbc.edu will only work after Sunday, August 20th. If you would like to see the interface before please visit http://sympa.umbc.edu

***Will List Subscribers Notice Any Difference***
List subscribers will notice that messages will be From: listname@lists.umbc.edu instead of the old naming convention of From: listname@listproc.umbc.edu

***What Happens if a Message is Accidentally Sent to the Old List Address?***
For the foreseeable future OIT will maintain an alias for all existing list addresses. If someone sends a message to listname@listproc.umbc.edu it will be forwarded to the correct list address of listname@lists.umbc.edu

***Will My Customized E-mail Filters Still Work?***
All personalized mail filters created using UMBC’s centrally managed system will be converted to use “lists.umbc.edu”. You will not need to modify those rules created at http://accounts.umbc.edu under Email > Email Filtering

Unfortunately, locally created filters are client specific and reside on the local machine. OIT will not be able to modify filters created by the local e-mail client. It will be up to each individual user to modify their respective filters to reflect the new naming convention.

***What Has Changed in the New System?***
*List Address
Please note the list address has been changed to the industry standard of “lists.umbc.edu” Please do not advertise “listproc.umbc.edu” once this migration is complete.

*Web Interface
The web interface is cleaner, easier to use and allows owners complete management of their list.

*Username changes don't impact subscriptions and are seamless to the list owner
All three aliases plus the username can be used to post messages. Customer can have their mail client setup with user.name@umbc.edu, username@umbc.edu etc. and Sympa will allow any of them to post the message.

*Live Synchs to LDAP (UMBC’s Identity Management System):
Campus groups can be automatically enrolled in a given list. For instance if we have the need for an UMBC-Faculty@lists.umbc.edu then we can set this list up to poll LDAP for ALL faculty. The list owner does not need to manually update the list as they do now, instead will be automatically updated in real time.

*RSS Feeds:
You can use RSS readers or web page plugins to publish the archives from

Posted by mikec at 1:48 PM

August 4, 2006

Comcast Blocking Inbound Emails from @umbc.edu

OIT System Administrators confirmed today that Comcast blocks inbound email addressed from @umbc.edu.

Many myUMBC account holders prefer to view their email from one account. They use the email forwarding feature to automatically transfer an email sent to their @umbc.edu to @comcast.net. Unfortunately, this forwarding is an all or nothing option which means it also forwards SPAM messages.

This forwarded SPAM has caused UMBC to be blacklisted by Comcast's mail servers. We have been working with Comcast technicians to resolve this issue and will keep the campus posted.

Posted by anna at 11:20 AM

August 3, 2006

Power Outage Scheduled for August 18th and 19th

Engineering Computer Room Power Outage on August 18th and 19th
On Friday, August 18th beginning at 9:00PM, all Internet and campus services will be taken down due to electrical work being performed in the computer room. Services will be restored by noon on Saturday, August 19th.

In order to facilitate this work all computer room equipment will need to be shutdown. All OIT services will be unavailable between the hours of 9:00PM on Friday August 18th and Noon on Saturday August 19th, 2006 while this work is being performed.

The electrical contractors will perform their work during the evening and early morning hours of August 18th and August 19th. Once power is restored network services will be brought back online and tested.

What Campus Services Are Impacted?
At a minimum we expect the following services to be unavailable from 9:00PM Friday to 12:00PM (Noon) on Saturday.
PeopleSoft
Email
myUMBC
remote login to gl.umbc.edu (campus Unix servers)
Web services
OIT Computer Labs
Network Services (DNS, DHCP etc.)
HP3000
Active Directory (e.g. H:, I:, P: etc.)
Network Printing
Blackboard
Dial up Modems
Off-campus Internet Access
Main UMBC Web Page

OIT will have staff in the help desk from 9:00AM to 5:00PM on Saturday, August 19th to answer any questions that may arise as a result of this power outage.

Background:
Over the past few months OIT has been working with electrical contractors and Physical Plant to perform a critical power upgrade to the computer room located in the Engineering building (formerly the ECS building). They have completed the rough-in work and now require a power outage to complete the connections to the main power grid. This upgrade will provide the additional circuits required to meet the increasing IT demands of the campus.

Posted by mikec at 11:07 AM

August 1, 2006

OIT Units Merge to Become Instructional Technology & New Media

After 33 years of service, Victor Aulestia, OIT’s Director of Classroom Technology retired on June 30, 2006. As a result, Classroom Technology merged with New Media Learning & Development to become Instructional Technology & New Media, reporting to John Fritz as director of the combined unit.

“As more faculty use Blackboard in the classroom, the lines between online and face-to-face instruction have blurred,” says Fritz. “Victor left a strong group that joins another one to support UMBC’s focused efforts in teaching, learning and technology, as well as the campus’s broader innovation with new media such as streaming video, multimedia and web development.”

The newly merged ITNM unit is still sorting through the transition, but generally, instructional technology encompasses in-class, audio-visual support, including fixed and mobile classroom presentation technology, the International Media Center, all OIT computer lab scheduling, and Blackboard. The New Media Studio (www.umbc.edu/studio) focuses on all aspects of video production, including video streaming, video conferencing and video/audio duplication services, as well as multimedia and Web development & support.

For more information or to make comments or suggestions, contact John Fritz at 410.455.6596 or fritz@umbc.edu.

Posted by fritz at 12:27 AM

July 27, 2006

Dell & McAfee v8.0 Issue

There is a conflict between McAfee VirusScan Enterprise v8.0 and Wave Systems Embassy TrustSuite Document Manager which comes preinstalled on Dell Latitude D620, D820, Dell Precision M65 and Precision M90, that causes Windows to crash and shutdown. In addition, due to the complexity of the enhanced security with the Wave Embassy Trust Suite software you could potentially be locked out of your laptops if you have forgotten your security settings. For these reasons OIT recommends customers who have purchased or will be purchasing our recommended Dell Latitude D620 laptop to install McAfee v7.0 available for download at myUMBC.

Posted by anna at 8:52 AM

July 23, 2006

FYI: 9/15 Assessment Webinar & TLT Brown Bag

Assessment of student learning outcomes has become very important, as the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), the Education Department and even the University itself has learned through recent accreditation visits and reports. Join Peggy Maki, Higher Education Consultant and former Senior Scholar and Director of Assessment, American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), for an Educause Learning Initiative “Webinar” on Assessment, on Friday, September 15, at 1 p.m.

OIT has recently joined the Educause Learning Initiative (http://www.educause.edu/eli), which offers conferences, “best practice” online repositories and frequent “webinars” on timely teaching, learning and technology topics. OIT will host a “joint viewing” of this Assessment webinar in ECS 023, as part of the Teaching, Learning and Technology “Brown Bag” workshop series (refreshments will be provided). To “register” for the Brown Bag, visit http://www.umbc.edu/brownbag.

Posted by fritz at 12:41 AM

June 30, 2006

OIT System Interruptions June 29, 2006

At 7:00pm on June 29, 2006 multiple OIT systems suffered a failure due to an electrical circuit overload in a rack that contained several servers.

OIT staff have been on site throughout the evening and early morning hours restoring the affected systems. These systems were E-Mail, WebMail, Web pages and a few other ancillary systems.

- E-mail service was restored at approximately 11:00PM
- Web Services were restored at 12:10AM
- WebMail was restored at 12:20AM

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

Mike Carlin
Director Infrastructure and Support

Posted by mikec at 12:33 AM

May 26, 2006

Help Desk Hours of Operation

Summer hours of operation begin Tuesday, May 30th until Saturday, August 19th. The Help Desk will be opening on:

Sunday - 12 noon to 8:00 pm
Monday - 8:00 am to 10:00 pm
Tuesday - 8:00 am to 10:00 pm
Wednesday - 8:00 am to 10:00 pm
Thursday - 8:00 am to 10:00 pm
Friday - 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
Saturday - 9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Posted by anna at 7:00 AM

May 11, 2006

Shibboleth is Key to Single Sign-On

In March, UMBC joined the Shibboleth community to allow single sign-on to some web-based applications.

Shibboleth is a "standards-based, open source middleware software that provides Web Single SignOn (SSO) across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner," according to its official web site. It is part of the Internet2 project.

With Shibboleth, UMBC users can access programs that are not part of the campus's web presence by using their UMBC login and password. As of now, those include the alumni site and a new music sharing service available through the University of Maryland System. More applications will be added later.

The Shibboleth Community currently consists of about 40 institutions, with more planning to join.

Posted by jward at 1:54 PM | Comments (0)

May 9, 2006

Computer Lab Now Open 24x7

To accommodate the needs of students and others who need late-night computer access, OIT staff worked during spring break to set up a 24-hour computer lab in Room 021 of the Engineering Building.

Students, faculty and staff can enter the room at any time of the day or night using their Campus One-Card to open the door.

The lab houses both personal computers and Macintosh computers, and a pay-for-print service that uses the same campus-one ID card that allows access to the room.

For security purposes, the room is under video surveillance and is equipped with a panic alarm that notifies campus police when activated.

Posted by jward at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

Computer Replacement Initiative

The Office of the Provost is working with all units that report through them to subsidize upgrading office and lab computers that don't meet minimum standards.

Minimum requirements are defined as below a Pentium 1.0 GHz or a Mac G4.

As part of the replacement initiative, OIT has worked with Dell to negotiate special volume pricing so computers can be purchased at far less than regular prices.

OIT is encouraging any department that plans to buy computers at the end of this fiscal year or the beginning of the next to contact Mike Carlin, OIT's Director of Infrastructure and Support, and arrange for all orders to be part of the discount package.

Orders are scheduled to be placed June 12. Complete details about minumum requirements can be found on the replacement website.

Posted by jward at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)

The Continuing Battle Against SPAM

OIT has stepped up its efforts to eradicate SPAM, but it's a stubborn problem that will never completely go away.

For one thing, said Jack Suess, Vice President for IT, 20 percent of the SPAM the UMBC community receives is from phishing scams, and SPAM filters don't block addresses that look legitimate.

Phishing is the practice of sending SPAM from e-mail addresses that appear to be legitimate and asking users to provide personal information, often to "verify" or "update" an account. Ebay and Amazon are among the return addresses used in Phishing scams. And since those are legitimate company names, SPAM filters won't block them.

However, OIT has made changes that are helping to block other forms of SPAM. In late January, filters were set to automatically reject messages that had a high score as likely SPAM.

While some faculty members have complained that some legitimate mail could be blocked, Suess said the change was necessary because of the huge volume of unsolicited, unwanted e-mail that passes through UMBC's mail servers each day.

The university receives approximately 500,000 inbound e-mail messages every day. Between 60-70 percent, or as many as 350,000, appear to be SPAM. Many messages are filtered into Spam folders where users have the opportunity to review them to assure they really are unwanted e-mail.

Messages more than 21 days old that have been labeled as SPAM are deleted from campus e-mail accounts. This is necessary, Suess said, because of the huge amount of space those unwanted, unread messages consumer on UMBC's mail servers.

Suess said OIT continues to monitor and re-evaluate the SPAM problem, and will continue to look for innovative solutions for blocking unwanted e-mail.

Posted by jward at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

May 8, 2006

From the CIO--Save the Internet

As Congress looks at updating the 1996 Telecommunications Act, one part of the revision could severely limit the Web sites available to you through your Internet service provider.

As it is now written, the Telecommunicaitons Act requires "Network Neutrality." That means regardless of which service provider you use, you have access to any site on the Internet. The service provider can't block you from visiting any site you want to see.

But big companies like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T are hoping to change that. They're lobbying Congress to allow them to choose what Web sites you can see, based on who pays them the most.

Many--including myself--feel that Network Neutrality is a critical element that we want to see in whatever bills come out of Congress, and we need to let our representatives know.

You can help assure that free and open access to the Internet remains a fact of life by contacting your Congressional representatives and letting them know how you feel.

The website savetheinternet.com makes it easy by providing a form that automatically determines who your representatives are, based on your home address. You can also sign up for a mailing list that will keep you up to date on what's happening with the Telecommunications Act revision and how to get involved in preserving network neutrality.

Posted by jward at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

Help Desk Switching to Parature

This summer, OIT will begin using Parature, a web-based support product that offers unlimited site licenses, a knowlege base to help users resolve issues more quickly, and an easy, Web-based user interface that allows users to file a help request form and check on the status of tickets they have previously filed.

UMBC purchased Remedy, the current Help Desk system, in 1998. Since then, the number of tickets filed annually with the help desk has increased to 25,000. Remedy has not been able to keep up with that demand.

"We identified shortcomings in the way Remedy supports the community," said Jack Suess, Vice President of Information Technology. "Parature is a better platform for UMBC."

Among other enhancements, the new product is Web based and does not require those managing tickets to install software on their computers. It also offers options for use by departments outside of OIT, and provides a knowledge base so users have an opportunity to resolve their problems immediately, without contacting the Help Desk.

The Help Desk will begin using Parature by the end of July. However, PeopleSoft support will not migrate to Parature until later. OIT will work with the offices of Finance and Human Resources to migrate to the new product at a later date.

Posted by jward at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

New Email List Management Coming This Summer

Beginning this summer, OIT will migrate e-mail lists from listproc to Sympa, an open-source application that offers flexibility and stability, and allows users to control more aspects of their lists.

Sympa offers an easy-to-use web interface and works well with other UMBC applications such as Webauth.

Sympa's features include:
-Configuration options are accessed through an intuitive user interface.
-Easy management of list owners, managers and subscribers.
-Searchable, threaded Web archive with access control.
-Each list has a Web-based file sharing repository with access control, moderation and an optional quota.

OIT will migrate mailing lists from listproc to Sympa this summer. Lists will still be accessible through myUMBC.

For a sneak-peak of Sympa, visit sympa.umbc.edu.

Posted by jward at 10:45 AM

May 7, 2006

Mail Service Problems Today, Sunday May 7th

UPDATE 3:00pm: All mail service has been restored as of 3:00pm today. Customers should be able to receive and send mail without further problems. We apologize for any problems that this may have caused.
-------------------------------------------------
Currently UMBC's e-mail service is down. At 12:30pm today OIT staff were notified and they are currently working to resolve the problem. Once we have further information this notice will be updated.

Thank You,
OIT

Posted by mikec at 1:06 PM

May 5, 2006

E-mail Delivery Failures on May 4, 2006

Yesterday afternoon UMBC’s e-mail service suffered a failure between 12:45pm and 2:00pm. After careful examination of this failure it has become apparent that any e-mail sent during this outage was not successfully delivered.

All mail sent TO: or FROM: an @umbc.edu address between 12:45pm and 2:00pm was not delivered. Due to the nature of the failure customers did not receive the customary bounce back message stating that your message could not be delivered. Therefore, many of our users are not aware that there was a problem yesterday.

We encourage you to resend any e-mail in your “Sent” mail folder that was sent between 12:45pm and 2:00pm on May 4th, 2006. Alternately, you may wish to send a follow up e-mail to your recipients to find out if they received your e-mail.

We truly apologize for this inconvenience and are working to ensure that a failure of this type does not occur again.

Michael Carlin
Director of Infrastructure and Support
Office of Information Technology

Posted by mikec at 9:30 AM

April 18, 2006

myUMBC Service Restored

At approximately 2:15pm today service was restored to the myUMBC portal. We are still examining the cause of the problem but have initiated procedures to minimize the chances of this occurring again. We apologize for any problems that this may have caused. If you experience any problems please do not hesitate to contact us at 410-455-3838 or by e-mailing us at helpdesk@umbc.edu

Posted by mikec at 4:09 PM

MyUMBC Portal Problems

This morning at approximately 10:30AM the myUMBC portal began experiencing problems. We are presently working to diagnose the cause and will provide further updates once the problem has been identified and fixed.

While myUMBC is unavailable you can reach many online resources by using the URLs below.

Blackboard:
http://blackboard.umbc.edu

Webmail:
http://webmail.umbc.edu

Peoplesoft Finance:
https://fsprd-web.ps.umbc.edu

Peoplesoft Human Resources:
https://hrprd-web.ps.umbc.edu

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may be causing.

Michael Carlin
Director of Infrastructure and Support
Office of Information Technology

Posted by mikec at 1:21 PM

April 12, 2006

Alternate Delivery (Online & Hybrid) Winter 2007 RFPs (deadline: 5/19)

The Office of Summer, Winter and Special Programs (OSWSP) is sponsoring a program to increase the number of alternate delivery courses - specifically, hybrid and online courses - offered during special sessions (winter and summer terms) in 2007.

Supported by OIT and the Faculty Development Center, the OSWSP invites proposals from UMBC full and part-time faculty to develop online or hybrid courses to be offered during the 2007 Winter Session. Course development funding, high speed Internet access, technical support, and the opportunity to participate in a faculty learning community are available through this program. The application deadline is Friday, May 19, 2006 (recipients will be notified the week of May 24, 2006). For more information, visit http://www.umbc.edu/ssfaculty/adp.

Posted by jward at 4:13 PM

March 4, 2006

Dates Set in the Future for Windows Machines

We are experiencing intermittent problems with computers running Windows. Symptoms include dates on the system tray changing to the year 2142 and the time to 2:22pm. The problem is affecting a variety of programs, including Oracle/Corporate Time Calendar and Outlook. OIT system administrators are working quickly to find the solution. If you have any questions regarding this, please call our OIT Help Desk at 410-455-3838.

Posted by anna at 11:17 AM

March 1, 2006

Spam & Trash Messages to be Deleted Beginning Week of March 12th

Beginning Sunday, March 5th, 2006, OIT will be sending out messages to users regarding automatic deletion of messages greated than 4 weeks old located in the "Spam" and "Trash" folders. After consultation with the IT Steering Committee, it was decided that OIT should implement such a procedure to manage the volume of "Spam" email that is consuming users' e-mail disk space.

The e-mail will be sent out 7 days prior to the actual scheduled deletion date. A message similar to the sample below is what our customers will see.

Subject: Automatic Spam & Trash Deletion
Date: Sunday, 5