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.
May 9, 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.
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”.
November 28, 2017
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 Tuesday, January 2, 2018.
Curtailment will be observed: 5:00 pm Friday December 22, 2017 through 5:00 pm Monday, January 1, 2018.
Web-based Services
November 17, 2017
Early in October, faculty, advisors and academic and IT staff came together to discuss an emerging concept in education, learning analytics, and what it means for Berkeley. The conversations that occurred inside and outside of Sutardja Dai Hall during the 2017 Learning Analytics Conference were a “community discussion”.
November 14, 2017
KALX Radio's North Gate Radio wins Best Audio News Reporting
October 27, 2017
Updated 2:13 pm, 12/27/2017
The issue is resolved.
Original
At 12:50pm, 10/27/2017, ETS was notified via automatic monitoring that http://course-evaluations.berkeley.edu was unresponsive.
We are currently working with the vendor Explorance to resolve this issue. .
We are currently working with the vendor Explorance to resolve this issue, but have no ETA on a fix as of yet.
October 17, 2017
On October 28, the current bCourses "Grading History" feature will be replaced with a new "Gradebook History" tool, which will allow this tool to be accessed in large courses. The legacy "Grading History" feature was limited to courses with under 2000 gradebook entries, making it unavailable in courses with a large number of students and/or graded assignments.
October 9, 2017
Berkeley One IT News
ETS and One IT Partners have made improvements to the IT Knowledge Base to help campus get the info they need faster.