Blackboard Downtime Scheduled Sun. Morning, Aug 21st, 1-5 AM
Essential system updates & routine maintenance expected
Blackboard engineers will perform essential system updates and routine maintenance on Sunday morning, August 21, 2016, from 1 AM - 5 AM. Blackboard will be offline during this period.
In preparation for this downtime:
- Instructors: Please refrain from assigning any work that is due on Blackboard during this maintenance window. When the system is offline, students cannot submit their work.
- Students: Please be sure to save or submit any work before this time. Any unsaved or unsubmitted work will immediately be lost when the system shuts down.
The UMBC Blackboard team identified a time period that should have the least impact on our users. If our Blackboard site is down longer than expected due to unforeseen circumstances, updates will be posted to this news article.
Our next major downtime is planned for late December 2016 as part of the end-of-the-year upgrade. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve our systems to bring you a better Blackboard experience.
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Blackboard engineers will perform essential system updates and routine maintenance on Sunday morning, August 21, 2016, from 1 AM - 5 AM. Blackboard will be offline during this period. In...
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Mon, 22 Aug 2016 08:21:07 -0400
Email Survey / Mystery Shopper Scams
Once you wire the money to the thief, it's gone.
We have received multiple complaints about people receiving fraudulent job offer emails from con-artists. In some of the job offers, the con-artist offers to pay $200 for completing testing and survey assignments. Some of the fraudulent messages offer the job of "Detective/Undercover Mystery Shopper".
These job offers are a scam.
The way that the scam works is as follows:
- The con-artist will contact you via email and ask you if you are interested in participating in a survey or job assignment.
- If you reply that you are interested, the con-artist will mail you a check for an amount of money, ask you to deposit the money in your bank account, and immediately wire all but $200 of the money back to them.
- Once you wire the money out to the con-artist, the con-artist will have your money and you will no longer hear from them.
- A few days later, your bank will tell you that the check has bounced and take the money back. You are then left with the loss of the money that you wired out and no way to reach the con-artist.
If you have received one of these messages, do not wire the money to the con-artist. As soon as you wire the money to the con-artist, the money is gone. Just stop responding to the con-artist.
If you are a victim and have sent money to the con-artists, please file a criminal complaint with the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. They can be reached at the following web address: https://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx
Mark Cather / UMBC Chief Information Security Officer
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We have received multiple complaints about people receiving fraudulent job offer emails from con-artists. In some of the job offers, the con-artist offers to pay $200 for completing testing and...
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DoIT and VART Partner on Lynda.com License
Online tutorials to help free up faculty prep and class time
To help free up faculty time currently given to in-class software training or even home grown and self-curated online video demos, DoIT and Visual Arts (VART) have partnered to share a one-year, limited license to
Lynda.com, a leading provider of approximately 130,000 tutorials on the latest commercial software and effective business processes. The license is available now, and will allow all VART students, faculty and staff to
use their UMBC login to access Lynda.com during the academic year.
Note: Anyone can try Lynda.com free for 7 days and it is free to patrons of
Anne Arundel and
Howard County Libraries. If you are taking a visual arts class, you will also have access to Lynda.com.
Typically when it comes to teaching how to use software, faculty often create their own tutorials by using screen shots and assembling their own custom guides or they curate a variety of existing online videos and demos from YouTube and other sources. However, this creates a time-consuming production process that can compete with faculty course design or goals for student learning. With Lynda.com, the content itself is constantly updated to be current which helps provide the latest and greatest tutorials.
“Students will be the most avid users of Lynda.com because it will function much like a comprehensive textbook…”
Dr. Preminda Jacob, Chair and Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies in the Department of Visual Arts, was one of the main people involved with bringing Lynda.com to VART.
Dr. Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor and Chair for the Visual Arts Department, believes that both students and faculty will benefit immensely from the site. Jacob said, “...students will be the most avid users of Lynda.com because it will function much like a comprehensive textbook throughout their four years in training at UMBC.”
Faculty will be able to conduct part of the preparation for software programs in the classroom, but get students to learn the remaining sections in their own time. “This allows faculty to devote a larger percentage of class time to discussing the conceptual fundamentals of the course work instead of teaching students the mechanics of the software.” said Jacob.
“...a student can go there with a specific problem, use the search function, and usually get very good insights.”
Faculty are already excited with the prospects of online tutorials being widely available to everyone. Cathy Cooke, professor of Cinematic Arts, said “I also use Lynda.com to teach myself the ever-evolving technology changes that are happening rapidly, by the minute!”
Dan Bailey, professor of Animation, said “Lynda.com is good for tutorials, but it is also great for just "help"...a student can go there with a specific problem, use the search function, and usually get very good insights.”
Gary Rozanc, professor of Graphic Design, worked with Jacob on the initiative to bring the site to VART. Rozanc emphasizes how great the site will be for faculty to incorporate it into their research. “Print designers looking to learn more about interactive design can take courses on HTML/CSS or web developers can augment their toolbox with tutorials on programming for iOS and Android.” said Rozanc.
Welcome video to the course on Photoshop on lynda.com
Jacob estimates that her department will be able to leverage Lynda.com to teach students approximately 60 different art and media related software programs. These include but are not limited to tutorials on Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop. Apart from its ease of use, what distinguishes Lynda.com different from other sites is the consistent quality of its instructions and training design.
Although the Lynda.com license is only available to VART for next year, DoIT hopes to use the experience to gauge demand for a possible site license in the future.
“Unfortunately, we could not offer this to the whole campus this year, but we’re excited by VART’s willingness to partner on the Lynda.com license and use it to essentially ‘flip’ their classes,” says John Fritz, Assistant VP of Instructional Technology. “During the year, we will definitely be working with VART to identify and share their lessons learned using Lynda.com to support student learning.”
“Self motivated students can make themselves so much more valuable to employers…”
Rozanc recalled how one self motivated student used Lynda.com to position himself to be a valuable resource for a future employer. “I had a student completely teach himself front and back end web development from Lynda.com courses while earning a degree in Graphic Design and now is a senior designer/developer for Weebly," said Rozanc. "Self motivated students can make themselves so much more valuable to employers with Lynda.com as a resource.”
Screenshot of Lynda.com. Here you can see some of the top courses on the site, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
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Mon, 22 Aug 2016 15:37:39 -0400
New Communication Tower Being Built
DoIT is pleased to announce that in early August the new communications tower began construction. This comes after many years of work to replace the tower that is now behind courthouse. The original tower was built in 1981 to support instructional television broadcast amongst the University of Maryland System. Since the mid-90's, the tower has primarily served as cellular tower providing cellular service to the campus and surrounding community.
In 2005, the FCC updated the safety regulations on the amount of weight that towers could hold. UMBC was at limits for that tower and the cellular carriers were unable to add additional equipment to that tower to support the increasing demands of smart phones for cellular services. As a result, cellular service to the campus has been over subscribed, especially during peak hours when students have returned.
In 2012, DoIT worked closely with Administrative Affairs and facilities to get a construction loan to build a new tower and we have the spent the last two years working the FCC and the carriers on finalizing the details of new site. The original tower, required a large number of guide wires to stabilize the tower, thereby taking up a very large amount of land behind the courthouse. The new tower, while wider at the base, is a self-support tower that does not require guide wires. This new tower will be the same height as the existing tower but will be able to support significantly more weight.
We expect that the construction of the tower will be done by the end of August. Once the tower has been inspected and the ground work for the carriers has been completed, we will begin working with the cellular carriers to transition their equipment to the new tower. The original tower will be taken down in first half of 2017 once the carriers have transitioned all their equipment to the new tower.
For campus users, we expect that by late fall we will see dramatic improvements in cellular services, which are increasingly important as a campus safety resource for emergency notification.
Below is a picture of the tower going up as of August 2nd.
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DoIT is pleased to announce that in early August the new communications tower began construction. This comes after many years of work to replace the tower that is now behind courthouse. The...
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