On Friday, January 4, Educational Technology Services (ETS) became aware of a data discrepancy impacting all Fall 2018 end-of-term course evaluation reports managed by our online course evaluation platform. As of January 9, 2019, this issue is now resolved for all reports. For more information, please see issue summary below.
Please contact course-evaluations@berkeley.edu for further information.
Our Classrooms Technology Services team can help you get the most out of your General Assignment Classroom.
[January 11, 2019, email communication from Vice Chancellor Cathy Koshland and Assistant Vice Chancellor Jenn Stringer]
Dear Colleagues,
If you are planning to use iClicker this semester, ETS has a number of recommendations:
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 2, 2019.
Curtailment will be observed: 5:00 pm Friday December 21, 2018 through 5:00 pm Tuesday, January 1, 2019.
Web-based Services
In Spring 2019, the Ally accessibility checker will be enabled in all bCourses sites (https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/ally-tool-within-bcourses). Ally integrates seamlessly with bCourses to offer instructors a course-wide picture of the accessibility of their online course content while also providing students with downloadable alternative formats.
In late 2017, Canvas made its initial release of an updated Gradebook (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13333-canvas-release-new-gradebook). Since that time, Canvas has released a series of updates to ensure stability of this tool and add new features making this new tool comparable to the existing one. As of late 2018/early 2019, Canvas has achieved feature parity between the current and revised gradebook.
In Summer 2019, ETS plans to make a new quizzing tool available in Canvas (currently known as Quizzes.Next: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-15014-67952929189). This tool will provide a more modern interface and new question types for instructors developing quizzes in bCourses.
bCourses now supports Blueprint Courses (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11513-canvas-release-blueprint-...), a feature intended for departments or programs who wish to centrally manage content for multiple courses. This tool introduces a new indicator in the Settings page for all courses, showing whether the class is a Blueprint Course; for most classes, this will read "Blueprint Course: No", meaning that the Blueprint Course feature is not in use.
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.