Skip to content
News

Category: Newsletter

Newsletter category to parent each newsletter number

Canvas Access Policy

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:

Learning MS Excel

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.

Why is it not working?

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.

Support for Accessible Learning Documents and Videos

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.

Looking for Open Education Resources at UW?

Pressbooks Webinars

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

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:

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

Protecting information privacy while working from home

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

Winter Enrollment Report

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.

Remote Support Options

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!

Course Design for Digital Accessibility

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