Dear colleagues,

We in the CTE, CDIL, and ITS continue in our commitment to supporting you as you prepare to begin remote instruction this Thursday. Given recommendations regarding social distancing, we are now moving all drop-in sessions and other trainings to remote formats. 

We will still have staff in the CTE, but we ask that you reach out to us via phone or email whenever possible, rather than coming into the office. And given the high volume of requests coming in, we are expanding our remote training opportunities in the coming week.

Departmental Trainings: We are in the process of coordinating with your department chairs to schedule remote instruction training sessions for all those currently teaching in your department. These hour-long sessions will be held remotely over Zoom and will cover basic principles of remote instruction, along with introductions to the digital tools available to you. You can expect to hear from your department soon about when your session will be scheduled.

Remote Drop-In Sessions: In addition, we are also organizing remote drop-in sessions for the next two weeks, which will go into more depth about various digital tools (e.g., Zoom, Panopto, Canvas, Perusall, and Proctorio) and teaching questions (e.g. assessment approaches, asynchronous collaboration, etc.). The drop-in schedule is still in development, so please check our COVID-19 Preparations page for the latest schedule.

Recording Lectures in Classrooms: We’ve heard from a number of faculty who are interested in utilizing the lecture capture cameras in their classrooms to record lectures for their students. Classrooms will be open next week; however, the scheduling system is currently not set up to allow faculty to schedule recordings for times other than their scheduled class time. We are working to introduce more flexibility into the system, but for now we ask that you plan to record lectures only during your normally-scheduled class time. 

In the meantime, to help us gauge demand for classroom recordings, please fill out this brief form if you are interested in using a classroom to record lectures.

Proctorio Access: We also know that many of you are interested in using Proctorio to administer exams. The University has expanded its Proctorio license so that all faculty who need to use Proctorio will have access to it. We are in the process of scheduling remote training sessions on Proctorio within the next two weeks.

Thank you for all the determination and creativity you’re bringing to this challenge. All of us in the CTE, CDIL, and ITS are incredibly grateful for your collegial spirit during this stressful time.

Best,

Stacy Grooters