December 16, 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,
Thanks for all your efforts during this Fall quarter! As we wind down finals week, the Instructional Support Team has some new updates and a few reminders.
HelpDesk Support Hours During Winter Break - The helpdesk will be available from 10am-4pm all weekdays except December 24th, 25th, 31st and January 1st.
Remote Learning Webinar, Fall 2020: Results and Resources to Help you Prepare to Teach in Winter Quarter
The Remote Learning Webinar resources folder has a document that includes links to a checklist for remote teaching, a new webpage on how to build community, welcome message sample videos, weekly patterns, student resources, and a recording of the webinar on student responses to the remote learning survey.
GauchoCast (Panopto) Scheduled Downtime for Maintenance and Upgrade: On Saturday, December 19th, our Panopto Cloud site will be upgraded to the latest release. This upgrade will occur from 09:00 PM to 12:00 AM (next day) EST (06:00 PM to 09:00 PM PST). We expect up to 3 hours of viewer downtime beginning at the start of the maintenance window. For more information on what's new in the latest Panopto Cloud release, please refer to the release notes here: http://panop.to/3nip053
GauchoSpace Update for Winter Quarter
The next major update to GauchoSpace, updating the core code to Moodle 3.9, will take place on Monday, December 28, 2020. GauchoSpace will be unavailable that day from 8am to noon. Overview workshops are available now and can be scheduled here. Documentation of new features added to GauchoSpace from the Winter Quarter update can be found here.
Network Outages for Core Router Migration Work
ETS will perform code updates to the network core routers on December 21, 2020, between 12:01 and 6 a.m. This work will cause multiple 10-minute network outages.
iClicker Cloud Training: UCSB is securing a campus-wide license for i>clicker Cloud, making the technology FREE for all students (and instructors) to use. Single-Sign On with UCSB NetID will be enabled December 21, 2020. LTI integration with GauchoSpace has been enabled and is in testing. If you missed the synchronous training sessions this week: Asynchronous training resources for iClicker Cloud are available at: https://go.oncehub.com/
Winter quarter reminders!
1. Please let students know how about your course BEFORE they (and you) might take some much-needed down time during the break.
You can (and should!) use the “Welcome message” feature in GauchoSpace for this purpose. Remember that welcoming students to the course starts with this very first contact! Here’s a sample message (from an actual course) that you can adapt, adopt, or use as a model. You can enable the Welcome message *before* the term begins by checking the box underneath the text edit screen. If your GauchoSpace site isn’t quite ready by the time the message goes out, that’s okay! Let students know that you will make it visible to them by January 4.
2. Make your life easier by enabling GauchoSpace course crashing
Enabling course crashing means that students on the course waiting list can keep up with class readings and activities on your GauchoSpace site until they become officially enrolled, at which time they are automatically kept in your GauchoSpace site.
We’ll be back with a final 2020 message next week. In the meantime, we hope that everyone has some planned down time of your own coming up.
The Instructional Support Team