I am pleased to announce that Dr. Susan Biro has accepted UMBC’s Online Learning Coordinator position in the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). She will start full-time on Wednesday, May 8, and serve as the primary point of contact for DoIT’s collaboration with the Division of Professional Studies (DPS) in developing hybrid and online applied master’s programs as part of the new, strategic investment in instructional technology.

With more than 17 years of experience in distance education, Susan brings expertise in many facets of designing, developing, implementing, and administering online programs. In her most recent position as Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies at Prince George’s Community College, she was responsible for planning and coordinating the eLearning and technology training teams in their support of online/hybrid courses. Prior to that role, Dr. Biro served as the Director of Distance Education at Carroll Community College where she was responsible for not only ensuring effective use of the learning management system in developing and delivering online, hybrid, and onsite courses, but also ensuring comprehensive administrative services were in place to support online faculty and students. Finally, as Dean of the Online Campus at Berkeley College of New York and New Jersey, Susan served as the chief academic officer for online programs where she mentored full time and adjunct online faculty, managed the planning and creation of programs to enhance online student retention, and assisted in creating institutional standards for credit-for-prior-learning and portfolio development.

Susan earned both her Doctor of Education with a specialization in Leadership in Higher Education and her Master of Education in Adult Education from Widener University and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Delaware State University.

Please join us in welcoming Susan into the UMBC family. We look forward to her future contributions to UMBC.

Sincerely,

Sherri Braxton

Senior Director

Instructional Technology

UMBC Division of Information Technology

Earlier this week the Provost and Deans agreed to a DoIT proposal to go forward with a broad investment in instructional technology support staff, software tools and training stipends for faculty. As part of this effort, DoIT will also be delaying the date for moving all courses to Blackboard Ultra, originally announced and planned for the start of Fall 2019, and extending to Fall 2021.

Specifically, DoIT and the Division of Professional Studies (DPS) are investing in four instructional technology positions to be on board by the start of summer, and recently purchased Blackboard’s Ally software for improving accessibility. Also, DoIT will increase the number of Blackboard Ultra ambassadors from 15 to 32, and provide more opportunities for on-site and online training workshops, including “lessons learned” from colleagues who’ve already switched. Finally, DoIT and the Provost’s Office are partnering to offer one-time, $100 stipends to all faculty who 1) attend or participate in any Ultra training, and 2) complete the process of migrating their existing course(s) by the new phased rollout summarized below, based on the “Blackboard Use by College” report (requires myUMBC login with ad\ before username):

To be clear, any faculty member from any college, school, department or division can switch to Ultra now -- as 145 courses have done this term already and since we piloted Ultra in Spring 2018. But within each organization above, DoIT will also focus on supporting each instructor based on a course’s “archetype” of prior Blackboard usage at UMBC, which we’ve seen is different from most institutions Blackboard hosts on its “cloud” or Software as a Service (SaaS) system. Note: UMBC moved to the Blackboard cloud in 2017.

“The move to Blackboard Ultra presents a real opportunity for DoIT to work with faculty to improve overall course design, accessibility and effective practice,” says Jack Suess, Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer. “In some departments, this is working with faculty to provide training to develop online or hybrid courses, especially in collaboration with applied graduate programs. In other departments, faculty may be interested in deepening student engagement or outcomes.”

As part of the broader e-Learning strategy, DoIT will continue or expand support for the following:

Course Design: DoIT first introduced Quality Matters and online/blended teaching workshops to the campus through the DPS-supported Alternate Delivery Program (ADP) for summer & winter programs. Drawing on more than a dozen years of experience working with over 75 faculty, DoIT refined the ADP model in 2015 to include skill builder, course designer and quality booster workshops (and stipends) to participating faculty teaching in Fall and Spring courses, too.

Accessibility: DoIT is now supporting Ally, a new tool by Blackboard designed to identify and help address inaccessible course content. Currently, it is only available for Ultra courses.

Assessment & Academic Integrity: We’ll continue to offer training and support in effective practices with Adaptive Release, which DoIT has found is associated with higher use of course content by students, as well as SafeAssign and Respondus Lockdown Browser.

Learning Analytics & Student Success: We’ll continue to leverage analytics to help identify historically high-enrollment courses that have also reduced high DFW rates, to perhaps reverse-engineer effective practices that could be used in other courses.

Academic Continuity: We’ll encourage all faculty to become familiar with and use core Bb functions (e.g., announcements, gradebook, discussions, Collaborate video conferencing) that can support academic continuity in the event campus is closed for an extended period of time.

While there have been delays in some functionality not yet available in Blackboard Ultra (e.g., group management, specific publisher integrations, some gradebook calculation options, etc.), recent reviews by UMBC faculty also suggest Blackboard is heading in the right direction overall. For many reasons, including a more streamlined user interface, responsive design to support mobile device usage, and enhancements to improve content accessibility, Ultra is an improvement over the core 9.1 version release of Blackboard we’ve been using since 2012.

DoIT appreciates all of the good will and effort by faculty who have switched to Ultra as well as the feedback we’ve received over the last year. In addition to contacting anyone on the DoIT Instructional Technology staff, if there are questions, concerns or suggestions, we encourage people to also contact UMBC’s Bb Ultra Ambassadors, the Bb Faculty Advisory Group or Faculty Senate Computer Policy Committee (CPC).

To support UMBC’s ongoing commitment to a more inclusive campus, DoIT is pleased to introduce a new tool called Ally into Ultra courses to help improve the accessibility of course content in Blackboard.

Ally automatically scans course content and performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Faculty who use Ultra courses will notice color gauges next to course files. Click on the Ally indicator to read detailed feedback about what the accessibility issues are with the file, why they matter, and how to fix them. Ally will not change how anything works in an existing course, and it won’t affect any course files. These Ally indicators are not visible to students.

Improving the accessibility of your course content will not only help ensure students with different abilities can access your materials, but it will also improve the learning experience for students who use mobile devices as well as those who want to engage with the material in a different way. Ally automatically generates alternative formats of your course files, and makes them available to you and your students. The alternative formats do not affect your original file, but they do allow students to access an HTML version for their phone, an ePub version for their tablet, an MP3 version for audio, and electronic braille for braille readers.

Both Instructional Technology staff and the Office of Accessibility & Disability Services (ADS) staff have been trained to support Ally questions. ADS is also available to assist in document remediation and other accessibility questions. Finally, the Ally FAQ collection is available for reference.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection

• New Features | Known Issues | Updates & Fixes

• About the Ultra Experience | What’s new in Ultra?

• Open a ticket via RT

• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

On Friday, March 1, 2019, DoIT's Instructional Technology Team held its 4th annual TechFest.  As part of TechFest, participants were asked to complete evaluation surveys for each of the three presentation sessions and the escape room and a final survey evaluating the event as a whole. For each completed survey, participants were automatically entered into a raffle. We are pleased to announce the winners of the TechFest raffles:

1. Session A Winner: Deborah P. Webb, Assistant Director of Supplemental Instruction, Learning Resources Center - Amazon Echo Dot

2. Session B Winner: Stephanie Lazarus, Accessibility Manager & ADA Coordinator - Amazon Echo Dot

3. Session C Winner: Jessica McMurtrie, Program Management Specialist, Human Resources - Amazon Echo Dot

4. Escape Room Winner: Aieda Solomon, Senior - Amazon Echo Dot

5. Deep Dive Evaluation Winner: Cassie Hoddinott, LRC Director, Learning Resources Center - Amazon Echo Dot

Blackboard Ultra Early Adopter Raffle

Since the beginning of the Fall 2018 term, faculty have had the option to adopt the Blackboard Ultra Experience for their courses. All faculty who opted into the Ultra course interface in the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 terms were automatically entered into a raffle for an Amazon Fire HD Tablet. The winner of the Early Adopter raffle is Mariajose Castellanos, Lecturer and Undergraduate Program Director in Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering!

Congratulations to all of our winners!

Early adoption is growing at UMBC as more than 100 faculty opted to use the new Ultra Course View during the SP2019 semester. An additional 25 faculty tried Ultra using the sandbox shells created for exploring the new course interface.