As you prepare your Autumn courses, don’t forget that the CoE Technology Center can help you make your course materials more accessible for all students! If you will be uploading readings, sharing PowerPoint slides, or including videos in your materials, our group can remediate documents and caption Panopto videos so they are accessible to students who rely on alternatives to audio or visual content. For example, remediated PDFs are accessible to students who use assistive technologies like screen readers, and they’re also beneficial because any student can use Canvas to download an audio version! Note that some PDFs have accessible, full-text HTML versions via our library; however, scanned chapters, or PDFs of articles without an available full-text version online, need to be remediated in order to be screen-readable. If you are interested in this service, please email edhelp@uw.edu with your request! Due to the time-consuming nature of remediation and captioning, the turnaround time is usually several weeks, but we are happy to get started early on Autumn quarter course materials.

If you’re thinking about the practices from this past year of online learning that you’d like to take with you into your in-person and hybrid classrooms, a new article from Educause offers some great ideas. Improved Student Engagement in Higher Education’s New Normal outlines five teaching enhancements that can increase and sustain student engagement across multiple modes of instruction.

Their suggestions include:

1. Collaborative technologies for sense-making, including the use of collaborative documents and slides, shared notes, digital whiteboards, discussion boards, and social annotation tools. The activities  of these tools fosters connections between students and the content and students and their classmates, and by making student thinking visible, offers instructors opportunities for feedback and guidance in the moment.
2. Student experts for learning and technology support, a practice that recognizes students’ expertise in the digital space, and involves them as leaders. This could range from asking a student leader to facilitate the Zoom chat in a synchronous online session or asking for student input on video editing tools.
3. Back channels for informal communication, like Zoom’s chat feature, Microsoft Teams, or Slack, that allow for lower-stakes participation, immediate feedback, and a record of student questions and responses, all of which can foster learning and build community when used in the context of inclusive and respectful communication norms.
4. Digital breakout rooms for collaborative learning, which can be used in online sessions, or in a socially-distanced classroom, to allow small groups of students to work together in a structured way, supported by any of the collaborative technologies referenced above.
5. Supplemental recording for expanded learning space, which involves recording the class session, whether it happened online or in person, and then sharing it with students, either for students who couldn’t attend, or for “repeat engagement with course content.”

We have been using Two Factor Authentication (2FA) to enhance the security of our web apps (like Workday) for several years. This technology adds a layer of security by asking you to confirm your login attempt by authorizing access in a secondary device (usually you phone). This year, UW IT is expanding its use by making it the default login mechanism for all staff using any UW web app using SSO (Single Sign On). Most of our staff should already have this properly setup, but if you need to check some instructions, please visit the  2FA opt-in page. To learn more about this technology, please visit this 2FA website.

Eduroam is the secure and preferred encrypted WiFi service at UW (Read the longer. UW-IT has been working to improve our network’s security during this summer and some of these improvements will require for us to re-onboard our devices once we return to campus.

For detailed instructions in how to proceed, please visit the Eduroam Onboarding Guides page at IT-Connect. The instructions on this page will help existing and/or new users of this encrypted WiFi network.

The UW Privacy Office keeps developing guidelines, policies and orientation materials to help us understand how to align our projects with current privacy practice. One of these is the idea of “Privacy by Design”, which underscores the importance of minimizing the risk of exposing data throughout the information lifecycle. As part of this effort, the Privacy Office recently published a short video to highlight  humanitarian, ethical, and legal obligations when it comes to individuals’ privacy.

Please visit the UW Privacy office website To learn more bout these principles.

Poll Everywhere is web based software to conduct synchronous and asynchronous polls. It can also be integrated in PowerPoint presentations, where polls can be complete using any kind of mobile device. Last month, there were some changes to the web interface to make it more user friendly and to help poll authors to organize their polls. Existing users should have received an email from UW-IT with details about these changes.

If you want to learn more about this free tool, please visit the IT-Connect/Poll Everywhere website or contact us if you need any help with your project.