October 14, 2020
This message is distributed to All-Instructors, Academic-Assistant-Deans, and Academic-Department-Managers.
The following is being sent on behalf of the Instructional Support Team
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Dear Colleagues,
This week, the Instructional Support Team brings you some technology updates and a teaching idea.
Technology Updates
GauchoSpace Maintenance - On Friday, October 16 from 7:00 am to 7:30 am PDT, GauchoSpace will perform maintenance that may result in a brief outage. The GauchoSpace team is migrating the application caching server to separate it from the web server.
Upcoming Core Router Upgrade Work: On Thursday, October 22, 2020, from 12:01 to 5:30 a.m., ETS will perform updates to the campus core routers. They anticipate six disruptions of the campus network of up to 10 minutes each. These updates address software defects discovered during the core network upgrade. They will continue to update the campus community via email, at it.ucsb.edu, status.ucsb.
Teaching Idea
Thank you for all you are investing in teaching! Now that the quarter is underway, we want to let you know how you might use analytics data from GauchoSpace (and/or other technologies, if used) to provide light touch feedback to students that lets them know that you’re invested and care about their work.
Light touch feedback involves: 1) determining features important for course success; 2) setting different levels of interaction/achievement with those features; and 3) tailoring short, helpful messages to students based on 1&2. Now, in week 2, you might use GauchoSpace access as your primary tailoring metric. You can find this information by using the Analytics Graphs tool in the course Administration block on your GauchoSpace course site. Information on this tool can be found here.
The Hits Distribution report will breakdown information on how often each student has accessed the course as well as a graph for each student’s access by week. Students can also be emailed from this page by clicking on their entry.
The Content Access report allows you to see a graph of how many students have or have not accessed a given activity or resource on the course page and gives the option to email the students who have not accessed a given activity or resource. You also can email groups of students (who will receive the message as a “blind copy” (i.e., they won’t know who else is receiving the message) via Peachmail.
If you would like to see sample text that instructors have sent to students in different “access bands,” you can find that here.
Remember that if you’d like to talk about teaching, you can contact any of the following:
Linda Adler-Kassner (ladler@ucsb.edu)
Lisa Berry (lisa_berry@ucsb.edu)
Mindy Colin (mcolin@ucsb.edu)
Maggie Safronova (m_safronova@ucsb.edu)