As part of this socially distanced realty we have migrated our traditional environments and adapted our living spaces to accommodate the demands of our work-from-home needs. During the past couple of weeks, I have seen professional organizations opening new conversations regarding issues associated with privacy and security of student information contained in home printed materials, audio, video conversations and other activities happening at home.

I have included some links  in case you are interested in learning more about available resources and recommendations.

1. UW IT Third Party Software Recommendations
2. US Department of Education FERPA & VIRTUAL LEARNING DURING COVID-19 presentation
3. EDUCAUSE Post-Pandemic Future: Implications for Privacy

The 2021 Winter Enrollment Report has been released and includes data on COE demographics, student credits hours, etc. Find it and previous enrollment reports on the OIR website at education.uw.edu/coeir/reports/enrollment-reports.

Working with the Washington State Education Research and Data Center (ERDC) to validate the 2020 Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) data submission, which maintains accreditation for our teacher education programs.

Working on the annual Title II data report for our teacher preparation programs as part of the Higher Education Act. National and state data can be found at title2.ed.gov/Public/Home.aspx.

As we continue serving our socially distanced community , we wanted to remind you that our virtual doors remain open. We have previously shared news about the new ticketing system, which enable us to quickly respond to your requests. As always, you can email us at edhelp@uw.edu, visit our website or our support portal. If you are looking for quick answers or how-to articles, we keep adding content to our new “Solutions” portal.

We are also offering virtual office hours for you to join our zoom room (Visit our Trumba calendar for more information)

Online Teaching and Learning Hours: Bring your course design ideas, Canvas, Zoom, or Panopto questions, accessibility support requests, CoE online course template questions, or any other online teaching topic to these drop-in hours. General Support Hours: Bring your computer software, UW systems questions, or other computing questions to an open office hour at the helpdesk.

If you just want to quickly ask something, you can still give us a call, or chat with us using Teams! Whatever you need or preference we are here to support you!

Quality Matters (QM) is a longstanding organization dedicated to the development of a methodology for the evaluation of online education, broadly known by its QM rubric. They have recently published a series of articles looking at Digital Accessibility. The second white paper summarizes the findings of a benchmarking survey answered by sample of 273 higher ed institutions. The survey looks at the use of different accessibility practices across organizations, and level of effort demanded by them.

Overall, we have seen increased interest and efforts to improve the quality of our courses, but there is still room for improvement for multimedia and video where caption/transcription or the use of multiple/alternative content formats are technically challenging and not seen as cost effective.

Download full article

LastPass is a great tool for teams interested in having a safe way of saving, managing and sharing passwords. Besides this, you can also share other protected team information assets, like account numbers, private notes, etc. The app works with your internet browser in most platforms and devices.

This tool is available for free for UW employees through UW IT (IT Connect site)

There is a new Autumn Mid Quarter Course Evaluation report. This report highlights student perceptions regarding their online course experience across UW. For our College, even though sample size may be limited, it is interesting how it suggests the improvements in course organization have been well received by our students. It also shows persistent emotional overwhelm. If you are interested in reading more about the survey findings, you can find the full report and more at the Report website.

If you are a Qualtrics user and you are using old reports in your project, you should check if they were built using the “Classic” version of the Report builder. This older version of the tool will be turn off on March 31st.

If you don’t know if you have any “Classic Report”, you will need to open the [Reports] tab, and then the [Reports] section. You may see a different screen depending on your previous use of Reports for the project you are looking at (the links will take you to a short demo):

1. No previous use of Advanced Reports: You will see a prompt saying “There are no reports for this project”. Click the “View Classic Reports” button. A new tab will open and you will need to close the alert message announcing Classic Reports will be removed. After that, you can Select the “All” tab, and see if you have any Classic report you wish to save either as a printout or as a QRF file (to re-create as an Advanced Report).
2. Previously used Advanced Reports: You will see the report you are currently using, and if you click on the leftmost menu item (Report _Report Name_ (Details)), then select the bottom choice> “View Classic Reports”.  A new tab will open and you will need to close the alert message announcing Classic Reports will be removed. After that, you can Select the “All” tab, and see if you have any Classic report you wish to save either as a printout or as a QRF file (to re-create as an Advanced Report).

Please contact us if you need any help during this process