March Madness - April 10, 2020 Newsletter

Bytes

Date: Tuesday, April 28
Time: 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. 
Location: Bytes Team
Topic: FRC & OIT: Helping you Work/Learn Remotely
Bring your questions for this joint session, or post them to the channel ahead of time!

uccs.info

In an effort to reduce the emails that OIT sends to campus, starting September 1st, 2020, all maintenance communications will only be posted at uccs.info. We will continue to send campus email notifications about events, outages, and campus-wide projects. You may provide feedback on this change or any other OIT services at the OIT Feedback Link.

OIT Status Page

Having an issue with any OIT Service? Before calling the Help Desk, check out the OIT Status Page for the most up-to-date information on OIT Services.

Comings

We are excited to welcome the following team member: 

Zoe Hyatt began her position as LMS Administrator on April 6th. 

While Microsoft Teams is the collaboration tool of choice and supported by the Cabinet, sometimes MS Teams does not quite “fit the bill” for collaboration needs. Webex is UCCS' other collaboration tool and will be available to campus for another three years.  

Next week there will be two unique opportunities for users to better understand Webex. The first opportunity will be for anyone who is interested in learning more about Webex in a general overview. The second will be for more experienced users and will be more of a "train the trainer" type session.  Both dates and times can be found below and can be added to your calendar by following the link.  

The sessions are approximately 45 minutes long and there will be time allotted for Q&A. These sessions are open for anyone who is interested in learning more about Webex and how it may fit the needs of your department/service population when MS Teams falls short.

• Monday, April 13th, 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. - General Session
• Tuesday, April 14th, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. - Train the Trainer Session

The Help Desk has seen a substantial uptick in tickets since the implementation of remote working/learning/teaching. A staff of eight student employees, two full-time staff and three additional OIT employees who are assisting continue to diligently work through requests submitted via chat, phone, and email from our campus community. All requests are tracked through Cherwell, OIT's ticketing platform. By doing so, the team is able to provide consistent customer service and track reoccurring themes. The public dashboard shows March statistics and was created with the help of the Business Intelligence Team. 

Now more than ever, communication and collaboration have proved to be important and essential. Both of the collaboration platforms (MS Teams and Webex) saw an exponentially increased use, especially the second half of March, as demonstrated in the tables below. 

A dashboard of Unified Communications for January to March 31, 2020, may be found online.  

On the first day of online-only instruction (March 16, 2020), Canvas saw an increase of 44 new active courses. As of April 8, we have seen 82 new courses made active on Canvas. Before March 16, the highest page view count in Canvas was 345,083 on January 27, 2020. The highest page view count since then has been  429,895 views on March 30.

The LMS team added new tools such as a new Teams integration to Canvas (this tool was released during our first online-only week).  We worked with Respondus to make Respondus Lockdown Browser available on UCCS Chromebooks. We also worked with Admissions to allow select groups of users without UCCS accounts to access a new Canvas orientation course for UCCS parents.