As the winter holiday season approaches, it is essential to be vigilant against various scams that can manifest through email, text, phone, and social media messages. These scams target university communities with tactics like phishing, gift card scams, fraudulent holiday invitations, and job offers.
Users are advised to exercise caution with email links and attachments, use strong passwords, and report suspected email scams to security@uw.edu. In case of victimization, contacting local law enforcement, such as UW Police, is recommended.
UW-IT has recently made Qualtrics available for faculty and staff at UW. This new service will add some functionality (Stats iQ and Crosstabs iQ) and save our college the yearly cost of subscription.
In order to use this service, we will need to migrate all our surveys. We understand this may be a complex process and we want to learn about your account migration needs. Our current brand hosts thousands of surveys with more than two hundred active users, making this a complex transition, but the long-term savings make it the right choice.
In the coming months, we will reach out to active users to define a timeline for this process. Please complete the linked survey to learn more about your current use of Qualtrics and what you would need to migrate to your new account.
Courses created in Canvas before Summer 2018 will be deleted on December 18 of this year. If you would like to preserve any course content from this period, you can create a course archive by exporting your Canvas content ahead of December 18th. If you need assistance with this process, please submit a request to edhelp@uw.edu and we will help you create this export package.
How to check your Course’s Expiration Date
You can easily check course expiration dates on your All Courses page using the following steps:
Once you’re logged in, click Courses on the Canvas global navigation bar on the lefthand side of the page.
A flyout menu will open on the lefthand side of the page. Scroll to the bottom and click All Courses.
When the page opens, to the far righthand side page there is a column that is labeled Expires and any dates listed in red are the courses that are set to expire and be deleted at the upcoming retention deadline.
Panopto Recordings
Beginning December 18, 2023, recordings created or last edited five or more years ago that haven’t been viewed in the last year will be deleted and will not be recoverable. Recordings not viewed in the last 18 months* will be archived.
The next set of courses to expire, from academic year 2018-2019, will be deleted June 30, 2024, and we will send additional reminders as that deadline approaches.
We are here to help! If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to us at edhelp@uw.edu and we can create a retention plan for your course’s specific needs.
We wanted to send a note because Winter quarter is just around the corner! You’ll note Winter and Spring Canvas sites are already available to start working on in Canvas. You can locate them on your Canvas dashboard in the Unpublished Courses section.
If you would like assistance with prepping your Canvas sites, now is the time to submit your request by sending us an email at edhelp@uw.edu.
For those that would like us to import your content into your Winter or Spring course site, please make sure to include a link to the previous Canvas course you would like to have imported.
For those who would like us to adjust the due dates in your course site(s), please make sure to include your course schedule/syllabus for and we will make sure everything is appropriately in place with updated dates.
For our DIYer’s we’ve included some helpful guides below to consider while setting up your course sites:
We recommend using the selective import option to bring over only the materials you need but excluding items you may not want to reuse such as Announcements.
We recommend only having the areas that are being actively used by students in the course showing on the course navigation menu bar. Typically, this would include Announcements; Syllabus; Modules; Assignments; Discussions; People; Grades; UW Libraries; UW Resources; & Ally Course Accessibility Report.
When you add Modules in your course, they are unpublished by default. It’s important you remember to publish those modules when you want students to access them because even if the items within a module are published, if the module itself is unpublished, students won’t be able to access those items.
If you want to set a paced schedule of module availability during the quarter, you can set unlock dates on the modules that will release the content to students on a set date and time. Keep in mind that modules need to be published for the lock dates to auto-release the content at the set date and time.
This tool is super handy when checking for broken links throughout your course site!
If this is the first time you’ve run the validator it will include any unpublished content. If everything in the course is updated with new dates, check the option to exclude unpublished content and re-run the validator.
Also, important to note, if you use materials that are behind login portal or pay-wall, these items may be flagged as unreachable by the validator. If you click these links on the report and they function as normal than you are all set.
Remember that Canvas courses are automatically set to unpublished status. Once you have everything in place and you want to release it to students, make sure to publish the course so students can access it.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about your upcoming course sites, Canvas or how you can apply instructional design best practices to your course, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for help!
Beginning July 2024, UW Google Shared Drives will transition to a fee-based service. Shared Drives will be available to UW employees at no charge for a subsidized tier of up to 100GB (subject to annual review), and for-fee service tiers for usage above that level.
Estimated Pricing for 2024/2025
Google Shared Drive Size
Price / year
100 GB
Subsidized by UW-IT
200 GB
$19.44
300 GB
$38.88
400 GB
$58.32
500 GB
$77.76
600 GB
$97.20
700 GB
$116.64
800 GB
$136.08
900 GB
$155.52
1 TB
$174.96
Custom (Over 1 TB)
Via UW Connect service request, cost of storage + $148.13 setup fee