Early next week, the week of 3/8/21, the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, will receive an upgrade enabling all features contained in the Webex meetings app. This change makes for a more simple user experience and means that many campus users will no longer need to run a second Webex Meetings software.

For the last year much of the campus community has needed to run both the Webex Meetings and the Webex (Teams) software in order to have complete functionality for calling, asynchronous communication and in-meeting experiences. In the next week Webex users will be able to upgrade their Webex application to include all in-meeting features previously available only in the Webex Meetings software. This includes in-meeting chat, breakout rooms, emojis, grid views and more.

In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.   In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.

Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.  

The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform.  Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.  

At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.  

This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time. 

Post by Susan Biro, Acting Manager of Online Learning, DoIT

In a survey of more than 900 students from fall 2020 who completed courses that utilized no-cost or low-cost Open Educational Resources (OER), UMBC students said they appreciated saving money on instructional materials and would recommend an OER course to others.

Nearly 90% of students said the quality of the OER course materials was of similar or higher quality than non-OER course materials. In the surveyed courses, faculty replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools. Forty-five percent of students who completed the survey said they would be fairly likely or very likely to enroll in an OER course again, while 53% said they would recommend an OER course to others.

Instructors Sarah Bass (CHEM 101), Tara Carpenter (CHEM 102), and Maria Manni (SPAN 101/103) replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools. 

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium (digital or otherwise) that are released under an open license that permits no-cost or low-cost access, use, adaptation, or redistribution (UNESCO, 2002). OER can include textbooks, syllabi, supplementary materials, quizzes, assessment rubrics, homework, or labs.

About 60 comments were provided about students' experience with OERs. The majority of written feedback focused on positive engagement with the digital resources and homework tools that supported students' ability to practice problems or equations and learn vocabulary. 

Students offered additional comments about how they would use money saved from OER toward paying tuition or other fees (64%), covering personal expenses (55%), buying textbooks or materials for other classes (46%), or taking an additional course (19%). Some expressed challenges with the materials themselves, such as relevance to course content, impact on learning style, or ability to annotate online content vs. printed material. 

Additional observations: 

• 61% of students reported spending between $51 - $150 on textbooks or other course materials in a typical semester. 
• 55% of students said they usually purchase online or digital textbooks. 
• 80% of students reported having fairly reliable or extremely reliable internet access, with 19% reporting neutral or somewhat reliable access. 

A total of 551 students completed the survey from the 917 invited to participate. The survey was distributed to students using Blackboard's native Enterprise Survey tool. 

Explore how you can adopt OERs for your course:

• Follow the Open Educational Resources group on myUMBC 
• Check out the OER research guide

Attend upcoming virtual events:

• How to get started with Open Educational Resources - March 3, 12 noon - 1 p.m.
• M.O.S.T. State Summit, Using OER to Advance Equity and Inclusion - April 8-9

Contact OER co-chairs Erin Durham (edurham@umbc.edu) or Susan Biro (sbiro@umbc.edu) for more information on OER at UMBC.