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Faculty Technology Showcase – Call for Proposals Now Open

The 11th Annual Faculty Technology Showcase will be held on Friday, February 28, 2020 on the second floor of the Gordon Palmer Hall Annex. The call for proposals is now open. Please submit proposals by December 9, 2019.

The goal of the Faculty Technology Showcase is to provide an opportunity for our community to share how technology is used across campus. The Center for Instructional Technology, along with the Teaching and Learning Committee, invites administrators, faculty, staff, and graduate students who use technology in both innovative and practical ways to present and demonstrate. These uses of technology may enhance teaching and learning, assist with research, and/or increase professional productivity.

The Faculty Technology Showcase follows a digital poster presentation format, with several presenters stationed around a room, and multiple 50-minute time slots. Presentations are conversational and interactive, with opportunities for questions, networking, and demonstrations. This is a come-and-go event, so attendees may drop by for an hour or stay for the whole thing. Programs and pictures from previous showcases can be found at https://cit.ua.edu/news/faculty-technology-showcase/

Please share this information widely. We look forward to reading this year’s proposals.

For questions regarding the Faculty Technology Showcase, contact Mo Fiorella at CIT:
cit@ua.edu
205-348-3532

 

Resolved: Box – Uploads & Downloads Issue. Blackboard Box View and cloud upload included.

Box Engineering Teams continue to investigate the issue impacting uploads, downloads, and previews. We have amended this status post to include impact to additional endpoints including Box Sync, Box Drive, and our API.View Box status at https://status.box.com/.

This issue is also affecting Box View and the Box integration in Blackboard.

Update: Box reports that services have been restored as of 11:52 am CST. https://status.box.com/incidents/7w9jcjzm3s8z

Mac OS 10.15 Catalina Compatibility Issues

OIT encourages Mac users to not upgrade to Catalina at this time. If you have any questions, please contact the IT Service Desk at 205-348-5555.

OIT has discovered several enterprise-wide incompatibilities with the Mac OS Catalina. One of these instances is that 32-bit applications cannot run on Catalina. This includes Endnote, McAfee, OIT’s remote support tool, and several other applications. Tegrity is experiencing compatibility issues as well.

Blackboard Learn Outage

UPDATE, 5:49 pm cst: Blackboard Learn is now available.Outage Details will be posted at status.blackboard.com when available.

Original: Blackboard Learn is currently unavailable. The outage appears to be widespread, impacting many Blackboard Learn customers. We will provide updates as we get them from Blackboard.

Resolved: MyBama Blackboard Learn Channel

Users are encountering various issues accessing or viewing courses in the Blackboard Learn channel in MyBama. While this issue is being resolved, click on the “Access all of your Blackboard Learn Courses” link or go directly to Blackboard: ualearn.blackboard.com

Edit: Channel now displays courses for the three most recent semesters, as intended.

Microsoft Office Update Causes Turning Point and PowerPoint Conflict

A recent Microsoft Office update causes Turning Point and PowerPoint to conflict with each other. If TurningPoint gives you the following error message “TurningPoint has detected an open version of PowerPoint. You must close out of PowerPoint before proceeding into ‘PowerPoint Polling,’” please follow these steps:

  1. Uninstall Windows Update KB4464577
  2. Use the Microsoft tool linked below to block that update: http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/2/F22D5FDB-59CD-4275-8C95-1BE17BF70B21/wushowhide.diagcab

Welcome to Fall 2019!

Hello and welcome to fall semester 2019! The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT), formerly the Faculty Resource Center, is here to support your use of The University of Alabama’s enterprise-wide instructional technologies. For Fall 2019, there are some notable changes to our supported technologies:

Blackboard Learn

  • You may get a Privacy User Agreement checkbox when logging into Blackboard Learn for the first time since our May 2019 upgrade. This user agreement is Blackboard’s notification of compliance with the GDPR privacy regulations.https://cit.ua.edu/blackboard-learn-privacy-notice-2/
  • UA’s Blackboard theme/color scheme was recently updated, so some colors may display differently for you. If some of your course text is less legible, visithttps://cit.ua.edu/black-course-menu-text/

Tegrity Lecture Capture

  • McGraw Hill, Tegrity’s parent company, has announced that they will discontinue support for Tegrity in 2020.  Panopto (https://cit.ua.edu/technologies/panopto/) has been chosen to replace Tegrity as UA’s primary lecture capture solution.  Fall 2019 is the last semester that Tegrity will be available. Panopto is available now in most of our multimedia classrooms. The workflow for Panopto is similar to Tegrity and it offers new features as well. Instructors can download the Panopto recorder to make recordings on their office or home computers. We will migrate some frequently used and newly created Tegrity content into Panopto this Fall.  Users will have an opportunity to request that recordings be transferred into Panopto. If you have any questions about this transition, contactcit@ua.edu.

Turning Technologies Clickers

  • We have updated the Turning Technologies clicker connection with Blackboard to make the tools synch more successfully. Instructors MUST click on the clicker registration link in their Blackboard course BEFORE using clickers in class. Please see the updated tutorials on our website to view the new process for downloading a course list and other changes. https://cit.ua.edu/technologies/turning-technologies/

Campus WIFI

  • This summer, the wireless network WPA2 was decommissioned. Eduroam is now the official wireless internet network at UA. Connect with your mybamausername@ua.edu email address and myBama password. More information is available at https://oit.ua.edu/service/wifi/

Adobe Creative Cloud in Labs

  • Adobe has changed how it licenses its software. Now all students, faculty and staff that access Adobe products in a computer lab will be required to login with an AdobeID. Faculty and staff will login with an Enterprise Adobe ID provided by UA. To create this ID, visit https://oit.ua.edu/adobe/. Students will login with a free Adobe ID. To create this ID, students can visit https://www.adobe.com/.  More information is available at https://oit.ua.edu/adobe/

The CIT also supports the technologies that integrate with Blackboard – Box, Turnitin, Collaborate, TurningPoint (clickers), and VoiceThread, to name a few. Please visit cit.ua.edu and accessibility.ua.edu to explore our instructional technology and accessibility support offerings. We have a full schedule of workshops and webinars for the Fall semester, as well as our tutorials, on our website. We can also assist you with setting up your professional website via people.ua.edu. Visit the People site to request a website and schedule a workshop. To check on the status of our technologies, visit our Known Issues page at https://cit.ua.edu/category/known-issues/.

Contact us via email at cit@ua.edu.

Have a great semester!

 

 

Black Course Menu Text

After our August 2019 update of UA’s Blackboard Learn system, we have noticed some instances of course menus with black text, which renders it virtually unreadable.

The fix for this issue is to go to the Course Management menu, then

  1. Customization > Teaching Style
  2. Scroll to check settings, the text under “Menu Style” shows it’s blue (following the previously applied colorful theme).
  3. Click the chevron next to Text Color, and enter FFFFFF (white) for the Color Value, press Apply, then Submit at the bottom of the page.
  4. The menu text should return to the default white color.