Educational Technology Services is committed to helping the campus reduce energy use during the winter break and will be participating in the campus-wide curtailment. Emails and requests received during this time will be answered in the order in which they were received when the campus reopens Wednesday, January 3, 2019.
Curtailment will be observed: 5:00 pm Friday December 21, 2018 through 5:00 pm Tuesday, January 2, 2019.
Web-based Services
Due to the AFSCME and UPTE labor action scheduled on October 23 -26, ETS currently expects delays in responses for many of our services including bCourses and classroom technology due to limited capacity anticipated at CSS IT Help Desk during and after the labor strike.
Classroom Technology Support:
From approximately 4:45-5:05pm on Tuesday, August 28, bCourses was unavailable due to an unscheduled vendor outage. This outage affected UC Berkeley and other institutions who use the Canvas learning management system. More information about this unscheduled downtime can be found at: http://status.instructure.com/
Over Summer 2018, the ETS classroom team worked in coordination with the Office of Registrar to install or update the technology in 10 large (50+ seat) General Assignment classrooms (GAC) on campus. The bulk of the work was completed by the end of June and during evening hours in order to have the least impact on Summer classes.
12:30pm 8/23 update: All affected recordings have been posted.
3:40pm update: The issue has been resolved. We will be processing the affected recordings during the outage. Please be patient as we work through all of them.
Shortly after 11am, Course Capture has stopped posting recordings to bCourses and CalCentral. We will be able to post these "lost" recordings once the problem has been resolved.
Updated 10/28/2018
The ETS General Support form has been restored.
Thank you for your patience.
The ETS General Support form is currently unavailable. We are working with CSS IT to restore the form as quickly as possible.
Please use one of the email addresses below in lue of the request form. Contact information for services and facilities not listed below can be found on in the Service Catalog
Planning to use the iClicker system this fall? Here’s what you need to know:
This email was sent on July 25, 2018 to instructors using or interested in using clickers.
After piloting the Blackboard Ally accessibility tool in Spring 2017 (https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/news/spring-2017-pilots-and-trials-ally-vericite-gradescope-google-apps-integration), UC Berkeley will begin making it available in all bCourses sites in Fall 2018.
bCourses (Canvas) offers a tool called the "grade distribution graph", which allows students to see the minimum, maximum, and average score given for all assignments. Through conversations with instructors at Berkeley, we have learned that making this information available to students does not meet the expectations of many instructors on our campus.
During the 2018-2019 academic year, the bCourses vendor (Canvas) plans to begin making new gradebook and quizzing tools available for testing. As of May 2018, Berkeley expects that the new gradebook tool will replace the existing gradebook in mid-2019, and that new quizzing tool will be available alongside the existing tool sometime in 2019, with the current tool being phased out during the 2019-2020 academic year.
This email was sent on April 27, 2018 to instructors using or interested in using clickers.
To instructors who have used Clickers this academic year:
UPDATE: Wednesday, 4/4/18
All Similarity Reports have been generated for affected submissions. Thank you for patience. Please contact bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu should you continue to experience issues seeing Turnitin Similarity Reports for your students' assignment submissions.
UPDATE: Friday, 3/30/18
We are excited to announce the official launch of Gradescope as a campus-wide service beginning January 2018. The Gradescope tool designed to improve the grading workflow. Along with speeding-up the grading process, the tool provides richer and more consistent feedback to students as well as analytics for instructors and graders. The tool was conceived at UC Berkeley, and we are excited to be able to offer it to the campus community.
ETS would like to help you create a great start to the spring semester. Below is a quick list of things to do and to know before classes start to help you through the next couple of weeks.
This issue was resolved on January 10, 2018. All UC Berkeley users with bConnected accounts are able to access Course Capture recordings on YouTube.
Original:
The Course Capture service is experiencing an issue in which a small number of users are unable to view recordings despite logging into YouTube with their bConnected account. We are working with YouTube to correct the issue. No timetable currently available.
If you are one of the affected users, please contact coursecapture@berkeley.edu.
Educational Technology Services (ETS) will observe the annual campus curtailment December 25, 2016 – January 1, 2017. Staff support will be limited during this time. Read More
On Friday morning, December 15, the bCourses team received reports about student grades in the E-Grades Export CSV not matching the student grades in the bCourses Gradebook. We took the E-Grades tool offline from approximately 11am-5pm to resolve these issues. These errors were caused by Canvas returning different data to the E-Grades tool than what is displayed to instructors and students in bCourses.