Skip to content
News

News

Support for Accessible Learning Documents and Videos

Our College is leading efforts to improve accessibility of educational materials and the Help Desk is here to help! During the past months we have been offering our help to check accessibility of reading materials, and we think we are now ready to expand this services to include Video Captioning Review.

Many of the available video streaming tools, like Panopto, Microsoft Stream, and recorded Zoom sessions are capable of generating some form of automated captions. These are a great first step, but most of the times need a human to review the captions for accuracy.  This year our goal is to extend our support to include review of automated captions and we are preparing our team to receive your recordings. As you may have experienced, reviewing captions is a time consuming task so please open a ticket as early as possible.

Looking for Open Education Resources at UW?

Pressbooks Webinars

New to Pressbooks? Need a refresher? Sign up for upcoming monthly trainings available to all UW Pressbooks users:

New: Pressbooks Directory!

We’re also happy to share the release of the Pressbooks Directory, where you can search, discover and use public books created on the PressbooksEDU platform (including those created at UW)! Books with complete metadata will now be eligible for a forthcoming “Recommended” tag. Let us know if you’d like more information on how to do this, or have any other questions about Pressbooks.

Check out these new featured titles in our Pressbooks catalog, including:

More information? Lauren Ray, Open Education Librarian, olray@uw.edu

Cycle 126

2/8/2021 – 3/5/2021

Work Complete

Applicant Review

  • (Complete) Build applicant list specifically for Undergraduate programs. There are different application / student properties that are operationally important for our Undergraduate programs, from Graduate programs. This report view automatically applies Undergrad as scope and includes meaningful fields in page view and spreadsheet download.
  • (Complete) Delete option for locally uploaded attachments. Application attachments that were added locally by Student Services can be deleted by administrators. This already worked for attachments to “Materials”, now it works for Transcripts and Recommendation attachments.

Budgets

  • (Complete) Budget search looks in the “Administrative PI / Director” field. This field is local college metadata entered by our fiscal team. Previously we only searched PI in the official UW data for Grant Principle Investigator.

NARF

  • (Complete) Added maintenance that deletes Workers with no appointment requests. If a Worker record is more than 1 day old and has no Appointment Requests it gets deleted. These records generally show up when a user starts a request and changes their mind. This reduces HR/P teams work in cleaning up duplicate Worker records.

Recruitment

  • (Complete) Update email editor tool. This project was using a 3rd party tool for WYSIWG email editing that was no longer supported and was displaying warning messages in the system. We’ve updated it to use the same version as Applicant Review.

TREQ

  • (Complete) Clarify the interface for budget searches. To search TREQ orders by Budget Nbr you have to pick a budget from the budget suggestion tool. The search form now lets you know if no budget is selected.

Long Term Projects

Faculty Effort

(90% Complete) Faculty Effort is a new feature for the college Budgets Database that will facilitate planning faculty effort across budgets.

  • Continue processing feedback from broader Fiscal Team testing. Largely updates to arrangement and labels.
  • Add email notifications for report approvals.

Institutional Research Data Warehouse (IRDW)

(10% Complete) IRDW is a new resource in development for the college’s Office of Institutional Research to provide a reporting data set optimized to answer you questions. It will house a combination of UW official data, College Database records, and subject specific metadata.

  • Design a record for Application data and do initial import.

On Course

(20% Complete) On Course is an in-development project to substantially upgrade our college’s Courses Database. On Course will provide a more modern interface, better optimized for the work you do, with an improved data model that will address many long-term limitations of Courses.

  • Implement a Course Section detail page. This page has the same purpose as the “Offering Detail” page in Courses, it shows you all the known attributes of one specific section. The new version is arranged to emphasize important fields and help describe the structure of the system better. The old “Tabs” UI is replaced with collapsible sections, this means you can view multiple sub-sections at one time. The entire page has a responsive layout that lets it make good use of large desktop screens and rearranges nicely on small mobile screens.

Protecting information privacy while working from home

As part of this socially distanced realty we have migrated our traditional environments and adapted our living spaces to accommodate the demands of our work-from-home needs. During the past couple of weeks, I have seen professional organizations opening new conversations regarding issues associated with privacy and security of student information contained in home printed materials, audio, video conversations and other activities happening at home.

I have included some links  in case you are interested in learning more about available resources and recommendations.

  1. UW IT Third Party Software Recommendations
  2. US Department of Education FERPA & VIRTUAL LEARNING DURING COVID-19 presentation
  3. EDUCAUSE Post-Pandemic Future: Implications for Privacy

Winter Enrollment Report

The 2021 Winter Enrollment Report has been released and includes data on COE demographics, student credits hours, etc. Find it and previous enrollment reports on the OIR website at education.uw.edu/coeir/reports/enrollment-reports.

Working with the Washington State Education Research and Data Center (ERDC) to validate the 2020 Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) data submission, which maintains accreditation for our teacher education programs.

Working on the annual Title II data report for our teacher preparation programs as part of the Higher Education Act. National and state data can be found at title2.ed.gov/Public/Home.aspx.

Remote Support Options

As we continue serving our socially distanced community , we wanted to remind you that our virtual doors remain open. We have previously shared news about the new ticketing system, which enable us to quickly respond to your requests. As always, you can email us at edhelp@uw.edu, visit our website or our support portal. If you are looking for quick answers or how-to articles, we keep adding content to our new “Solutions” portal.

We are also offering virtual office hours for you to join our zoom room (Visit our Trumba calendar for more information)

Online Teaching and Learning Hours: Bring your course design ideas, Canvas, Zoom, or Panopto questions, accessibility support requests, CoE online course template questions, or any other online teaching topic to these drop-in hours. General Support Hours: Bring your computer software, UW systems questions, or other computing questions to an open office hour at the helpdesk.

If you just want to quickly ask something, you can still give us a call, or chat with us using Teams! Whatever you need or preference we are here to support you!

Course Design for Digital Accessibility

Quality Matters (QM) is a longstanding organization dedicated to the development of a methodology for the evaluation of online education, broadly known by its QM rubric. They have recently published a series of articles looking at Digital Accessibility. The second white paper summarizes the findings of a benchmarking survey answered by sample of 273 higher ed institutions. The survey looks at the use of different accessibility practices across organizations, and level of effort demanded by them.

Overall, we have seen increased interest and efforts to improve the quality of our courses, but there is still room for improvement for multimedia and video where caption/transcription or the use of multiple/alternative content formats are technically challenging and not seen as cost effective.

Download full article

Password Management: LastPass

LastPass is a great tool for teams interested in having a safe way of saving, managing and sharing passwords. Besides this, you can also share other protected team information assets, like account numbers, private notes, etc. The app works with your internet browser in most platforms and devices.

This tool is available for free for UW employees through UW IT (IT Connect site)

Student Mid Quarter Evaluation Report

There is a new Autumn Mid Quarter Course Evaluation report. This report highlights student perceptions regarding their online course experience across UW. For our College, even though sample size may be limited, it is interesting how it suggests the improvements in course organization have been well received by our students. It also shows persistent emotional overwhelm. If you are interested in reading more about the survey findings, you can find the full report and more at the Report website.