UW IT is getting ready to broadly implement the access policy for Canvas on Thursday, June 17, 2021. Under this policy, the ability to sign in to Canvas is restricted generally to current employees and faculty, as well as current and recent former students. Employees and retirees will lose the ability to sign in to the UW Canvas LMS when they separate from the UW, in parallel with other IT services. 

Who will be impacted by this change

• Separating employees and retirees lose access when they leave the University. 
• People with sponsored UW NetIDs, such as guest instructors. 

Who will not be impacted by this change, and continue to have access to Canvas

• A faculty member who has an academic appointment in Workday.
• Current instructors, faculty, staff, and students.
• New and returning employees will be able to access Canvas on their official start date.

 Review details about who has access to Canvas and for how long. 

Remember

If you support any of the above groups, please:

• Provision access to the Canvas LMS for guest instructors or other affiliates as needed. This access lasts for one year and must be renewed annually by a current UW employee. Learn more about provisioning access to Canvas and the responsibilities that go along with provisioning access. 

The Foster School of Business has been organizing a series of MS Office 365 training online sessions. If you are interested in improving your MS Excel, this week they will be holding an advanced session (Friday March 19 at 3:30PM). Join the session here.

Previous sessions have covered Word, PowerPoint, MS Teams, SharePoint, etc. Recordings for these sessions are available in the FosterConnection website.

We increasingly rely on web based applications and services. Unfortunately, sometimes these can start misbehaving and we don’t know if is something we are doing wrong or if there is some other problem. If you are in need of a quick view on the health of Canvas, Zoom, etc., this new list of System Status pages will give you access to the latest information.

Our College is leading efforts to improve accessibility of educational materials and the Help Desk is here to help! During the past months we have been offering our help to check accessibility of reading materials, and we think we are now ready to expand this services to include Video Captioning Review.

Many of the available video streaming tools, like Panopto, Microsoft Stream, and recorded Zoom sessions are capable of generating some form of automated captions. These are a great first step, but most of the times need a human to review the captions for accuracy.  This year our goal is to extend our support to include review of automated captions and we are preparing our team to receive your recordings. As you may have experienced, reviewing captions is a time consuming task so please open a ticket as early as possible.

UW-IT is piloting three online discussion tools and their integrations with Canvas during spring quarter. The pilot enables instructors to use the tool in their course with their students and provide feedback. If you or an instructor you support would like to try Harmonize, Ed Discussion or Hypothes.is in a  course, please visit this web page to learn more about the tools and submit a request to join the pilot.

Pressbooks Webinars

New to Pressbooks? Need a refresher? Sign up for upcoming monthly trainings available to all UW Pressbooks users:

• Getting started with PressbooksEDU Webinar:  March 10 & April 7
• Advanced PressbooksEDU Webinar:  March 16 & April 19

New: Pressbooks Directory!

We’re also happy to share the release of the Pressbooks Directory, where you can search, discover and use public books created on the PressbooksEDU platform (including those created at UW)! Books with complete metadata will now be eligible for a forthcoming “Recommended” tag. Let us know if you’d like more information on how to do this, or have any other questions about Pressbooks.

Check out these new featured titles in our Pressbooks catalog, including:

• The Creative Process, by Timea Tihanyi’s Fall 2020 ART 480 Honors class at the Seattle campus.
• Black Lives Matter Collective Storytelling Project,  A UW Tacoma cross-course collaboration between TSOC 265 and TCOM 347 courses.
• Building a Greener Future: A UW Research Report into Seattle’s Climate Justice Movement, by Matthew Hitchman’s Autumn 2020 English 121 class at the Seattle campus.

More information? Lauren Ray, Open Education Librarian, olray@uw.edu

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