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/
August 28, 2018
August 24, 2018
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.
August 22, 2018
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.
August 16, 2018
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
Instructors experiencing classroom support issues that need immediate attention, please call the Classroom Hotline at 510-642-2800 (Press 1).
August 9, 2018
This email was sent on 08/09/2018 to fall 2018 Instructors of Record
ETS would like to help you create a great start to the fall 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.
To Do:
Review Classroom Tech and Equipment Checkout
July 31, 2018
Planning to use the iClicker system this fall? Here’s what you need to know:
July 25, 2018
This email was sent on July 25, 2018 to instructors using or interested in using clickers.
May 9, 2018
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.
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.
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.
April 27, 2018
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:
March 23, 2018
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
February 5, 2018
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.
January 12, 2018
January 12, 2018
This email was sent on 01/08/2018 to instructors who are registered iClickers users
January 8, 2018
This email was sent on 01/08/2018 to Spring 2018 Instructors of Record
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.
January 3, 2018
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.
December 18, 2017
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
December 15, 2017
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.
December 13, 2017
[Resolved]
Course Capture links became available again on 12/13 at 3:30 pm.
Original
As of 11:30am on Dec 13th, Course Captures service have been down. Links are not available on bCourses. We are currently investigating.
December 1, 2017
Here at Cal, we’re fond of blue and gold. Both on the field and in the classroom, our students at all levels are renowned for their achievements, earning blue ribbons and gold medals in every discipline imaginable. Earlier this month, the 2017 College Broadcasters, Inc. National Student Electronic Media Convention in San Antonio were no different, with Berkeley claiming two out of the four nominees for “Best News Reporting - Audio”.