Today, Jan. 7, OIT will be enabling the new Box user interface for all UA users. The new interface features a sleek design and provides users with the ability to better organize content. Learn more on the Box Website.
Blackboard Operations will be performing data center maintenance Friday, Dec. 25 from 1am – 5am. A 30-minute outage is expected for UA’s instance of Blackboard Learn at some point during the maintenance window.
On December 22, 2020 at 8:00am CST, VoiceThread will be making a low-risk change to the Content Delivery Network configuration. This should not have any impact on VoiceThread availability or service speed, but we are letting you know in the unlikely event that you do experience some slowness of media loading at that time.
Date: December 22, 2020
Time: 8:00am CST
Impact: No impact expected
Panopto Cloud will be updated with new features and improvements on Saturday, Dec. 19. Panopto will be unavailable from 8pm – 11pm during the maintenance window.
Blackboard Learn will undergo a 24-hour upgrade beginning Thursday, Jan. 7 at 5pm through Friday, Jan. 8 at 5pm.
Blackboard Collaborate Ultra will undergo scheduled maintenance Nov. 6 and Nov. 12 from 1:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m. Collaborate Ultra users will experience intermittent availability of the service during the scheduled maintenance window.
Join us for an online workshop Tues. Sept. 29 from 1pm – 2pm, to learn how instructors use Gradescope! The workshop will offer guidance on how to deliver assessments remotely and outline various assessment options to meet your immediate needs, including:
We will also cover the grading and rubric-building workflow on Gradescope and walk attendees through both the instructor and student interface for creating and submitting assignments and viewing feedback.
Tuesday, September 29, 1pm – 2pm
The workshop is free; however, registration is required: https://info.gradescope.com/alabama-workshop.
A recording of the session will be shared with all registrants. So please feel free to register even if you can’t make it to the live session!
Gradescope is a feedback and assessment tool that dramatically reduces the pain and time associated with grading exams, homework, and other assignments. Gradescope is widely used for delivering assessments remotely. It enables instructors and graders to give better and more timely feedback, resulting in improved learning outcomes. Dynamic rubrics help streamline the tedious parts of grading while increasing grading consistency. AI-assisted Grading allows instructors to automatically group similar answers and grade all the answers in each group at once. Gradescope also helps with grading programming assignments at scale and can automatically grade printed bubble sheets. You can learn more and create an account at www.gradescope.com. The Gradescope team is happy to help, so please let them know if you have any questions at help@gradescope.com.
VoiceThread will be unavailable Saturday, Oct. 10 from 4am – 6am during a VoiceThread database upgrade.
On Saturday, Sept. 19, myBama will be unavailable from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. for scheduled database maintenance. Banner, Blackboard, DegreeWorks and other applications will remain available. More information is available on the OIT Status Page.
Beginning Sept. 27, Zoom will require that all meetings have a passcode or a waiting room enabled. Meetings that do not have a passcode or waiting room enabled will automatically be applied a waiting room. Waiting rooms can be customized to fit the need and audience for your meeting. For more information, visit the Zoom Support website.
