March 27, 2020

A message from Linda Adler-Kassner, Faculty Director, Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL).

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Today’s Instructional Support Team update focuses on learning technologies.

Extended Technology Help Hours - 7 am — 7 pm for Weeks 1 and 2
Email either help@collaborate.ucsb.edu or help@id.ucsb.edu, or create a new help ticket at: UCSB Support Desk Collaboration. All three methods go to the same place and allow us to direct your question to the most appropriate person to address it the most quickly.

GauchoCast
The GauchoCast server migration is complete and GauchoCast went back online at 12:00 noon Thursday. Access to the service was restricted while GauchoSpace was down for maintenance, and people were not able to log in with their GauchoSpace credentials. That situation was resolved by 1:00 pm when GauchoSpace came back online. GauchoCast viewing capacity is substantially increased and processing of new content should be much faster. While the site is up and all content and metadata has successfully transferred, there will be a period from Thursday afternoon through Friday afternoon while the final synchronization of the database data and the video file stores completes.  If one of your videos appears to be missing during this period, do not worry, it will reappear. There will still be some lag time for newly recorded and uploaded video to complete processing due to the extremely high volume of material already queued up. We will halt processing of film uploads that were requested for 24 hours to prioritize processing of faculty developed content to help speed the ingest.

GauchoCast Block in GauchoSpace sites
If you already added the GauchoCast Block to your course site, you may see an error in red that says “Error retrieving GauchoCast course folder”. This is because the address of the server has changed with the migration to the cloud. This is easy to fix. Illustrated step-by-step directions are available HERE.

Direct Links To or Embedded GauchoCast Videos
If you linked, or embedded, GauchoCast videos prior to the migration, you may need to update the links. The hostname for GauchoCast was “gauchocast.ucsb.edu” before the migration. The new hostname is “gauchocast.hosted.panopto.com”.  The GauchoSpace team is investigating if they can do a global search and replace to change the hostnames in all links in the GauchoSpace database. If that is possible, no action on your part will be required. If that is not possible, There are two ways to fix the links or embeds.  The first is just to edit the url directly and change “gauchocast.ucsb.edu” to “gauchocast.hosted.panopto.com”. The second is to replace the old link altogether with a new link from the “Sharing” setting in GauchoCast, as you did originally. The same applies to embedded videos.

Remote Teaching Survey
There is a new survey template in GauchoSpace that instructors can use to get a sense of how prepared their students are for remote learning. The survey is accessible from the GauchoSpace banner and can easily be customized. The link in the banner takes you to a page with implementation and customization instructions.

Upcoming Gradescope Training Webinars
The Gradescope support staff will be offering two online webinars on using Gradescope next week:

New Users: Get Started with Gradescope for Remote Assessments

  • This webinar will introduce Gradescope, help you set up a course, build an assignment, grade work and provide feedback, and share tips on how to conduct assessments remotely.
  • Tuesday, March 31, 10am PDT / 1pm EDT
  • Register Here

Existing Users: Delivering Assessments Remotely

  • This webinar will go into detail on the above workflows to meet your immediate needs for remote assessments.
  • Monday, March 30, 10am PDT / 1pm EDT
  • Register Here

There is also information on using Gradescope on the Instructional Continuity Site at: https://instructional-continuity.id.ucsb.edu/?page_id=51

The IS Team hopes everyone takes a bit of downtime this weekend. We’ll be back with you on Monday!