This email was sent on August 03, 2016 to all fall instructors.
Many exciting changes occurred over the summer including the beginning of the Wheeler Renewal Project, a new classrooms resources system, and the introduction of SuiteC to bCourses. Start your semester off right, and get the information you need before classes start.
Beginning with the fall 2016 semester, courses utilizing ETS’s Course Capture service to record and publish their classes will benefit from an enhanced security feature which will limit content access to users with a CalNet identity. Thanks to the extension of our Berkeley domain identities (CalNet login) to the YouTube interface, we can now limit access to course videos to those users logged in with their Berkeley ID. These security enhancements are being added to help address privacy and security requests across the campus community.
ETS is pleased to announce the introduction of a new set of tools for bCourses and partner schools using Canvas. SuiteC currently offers three tools that provide new user-friendly ways to increase and track student engagement with course materials by enabling students to contribute, discuss, and remix a wide variety of course-relevant content in new ways.
Earlier this year, UC Berkeley hosted the first cross-UC “Learning Analytics” summit. This two-day event brought together leadership, teaching pedagogy experts, learning technology experts, and more to discuss the emerging teaching concept of learning analytics and what it means to UC schools.
Course Evaluations is excited to announce this summer we are adding both the Boalt School of Law and the College of Engineering to our list of participating departments. By fall 2016, the Blue Course Evaluations system will reach 65% of all student enrollments on campus across 35 academic units.
Berkeley Audio Visual (Berkeley AV) and Berkeley Video have had an eventful year shining the spotlight on UC Berkeley. Over the last 12 months, nearly 500 events were supported and more than 600 hours of video content were created for 150 unique campus and off-campus organizations.
The Collabosphere Project/SuiteC was nominated for a Global Learning Impact Award in late May 2016 for its work towards developing teaching and learning tools. Recognized in the category of “Blended Learning Optimization Products”, the nominations included groups across the world.
The Canvas Operations team has implemented a solution to restore performance, see http://status.instructure.com/.
Full access to bCourses has been restored. Please reach out to the bCourses support team (bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu) with any questions or concerns.
On May 20, bCourses was updated to offer new features to the UC Berkeley campus, along with a new interface and logo:
On the morning of Tuesday, May 24 from midnight-12:30am, bCourses will be completely offline due to scheduled maintenance by the vendor. Users attempting to access bCourses during this half-hour will see a message informing them of this outage.
After access to bCourses is restored at 12:30am, the following bCourses tools will remain unavailable until 7am, Tuesday May 24:
Between 3pm and 6pm on Monday May 16, the following tools were unavailable due to an unscheduled outage:
The issue causing this outage has now been resolved, and access to these tools has been restored. Please reach out to the bCourses team (bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu) if you have any questions.
In Fall 2015, the bCourses team released bCourses Mailing Lists, which allow instructors to create an email address that can be used to send messages to all students enrolled in a bCourses site. This feature was developed using the bConnected Calmail Mailing Lists technology, which will reach its end of life in December 2016.
During Spring 2016, ETS has been working with stakeholders including the Academic Senate and our departmental Executive Steering Group to begin planning the implementation of new policies about content retention and policy in bCourses and other ETS platforms. These proposed policies include:
During Summer 2016, two campus services will be integrated with bCourses:
At the same time as the release of the New UI in bCourses (https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/news/may-20-new-user-interface-bcourses), two new tools for teaching and learning will be enabled in all bCourses sites:
