DoIT and the Faculty Development Center will be offering the Hybrid Course Redesign Workshop on January 18, 2013 from 10:00 am to 3:30 pm in ENGR 023 on UMBC's Main Campus. In the morning participants will learn the principles of good course design, including designing assignments and assessments that help students achieve the goals for their learning. Lunch will be provided and participants will hear from a panel of faculty experienced in teaching hybrid courses. In the afternoon faculty will apply the principles of good course design from the morning session to planning a hybrid course (part-online, part face-to face), and gain hands-on experience with some of the technology tools that are effective in online teaching. This workshop is open to all full or part time UMBC faculty and is limited to 14 participants. To register, please go to this event on the myUMBC Training site.

The workshop will also help meet the requirements for a one-time course-redesign stipend through the Alternate Delivery program (ADP), which is sponsored by both the Office of the Provost, and the Office of Summer, Winter and Special Programs (OSWSP).

In accordance with the Blackboard Course Retention Policy, all Blackboard courses older than Fall 2006 will be deleted. DoIT has scheduled this removal for Friday, August 24, 2012.

Instructors are encouraged to download and keep a copy of the Grade Center for any affected courses. Instructors may also archive an entire course, and keep a local copy for their records. Be aware though that only DoIT system administrators can "restore" an archived course on the UMBC Blackboard production server.

Blackboard has posted the following announcement regarding maintenance of their plagiarism detection utility: The SafeAssign service will be unavailable on Saturday, August 4th, 2012 from 12:01 AM US Eastern (GMT-4) to 9:00 AM US Eastern. SafeAssign is being taken offline for capacity expansion and proactive maintenance in preparation for the upcoming academic term. End-users will not be able to submit papers through SafeAssign during the planned downtime and will receive an error message if they attempt to do so. SafeAssign Originality Reports will not be available to Instructors or Students during the planned downtime, nor will instructors be able to access SafeAssign DirectSubmit. Please make end-users aware of these limitations. Use of SafeAssign can continue as normal after the planned downtime is complete.

Bb course shells for FA 2012 were created on July 5, and will continue to be updated daily. Bb shells are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there was an instructor of record listed. The addition of new course sections and instructors will result in new Bb shells being automatically generated each morning. Student enrollment in Bb will continue to mirror the official registration in SA, and will update hourly.

If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your departmental scheduling coordinator to get that issue resolved.

Additionally in situations where one instructor is teaching multiple sections of the same course, by default all sections will be combined into one Bb course shell. If you want to have separate shells for different sections, or if you need a shell for for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request or submit an RT ticket with your request.