Category Archives: For Instructors

Self-Paced Online and Blended Teaching Institute

Posted on by

The UW-Whitewater Learning Technology Center (LTC) is pleased to announce registration is now available for a self-paced asynchronous version of our Online and Blended Teaching Institute (OBTI) for Spring 2023.

OBTI aligns quality Canvas course design with best practices for teaching in a variety of modalities.  Upon completion of OBTI, faculty and instructors will be well-prepared to design and develop their own courses, prepared with tips to continue the iterative process for future academic terms. This course is most useful for people thinking about teaching in the summer or fall.

Online and Blended Teaching Institute
Online and Blended Teaching Institute now available in a self-paced format.

The Online and Blended Teaching Institute offers an independent, online, self-paced experience combined with full support and contact with the Learning Technology Center.  It showcases the work of Whitewater instructors and staff, allowing participants an opportunity to explore what has worked for their colleagues.   After an initial consultation, participants will complete a series of short online assignments, be provided a sandbox to design content, and develop objectives and activities to serve as an exemplar module.  This course will take an estimated 30 hours to complete during the Spring semester.

For more information or to enroll in this exciting training, contact Ted Witt at wittt@uww.edu. 

Canvas Update (11/19/2023)

Posted on by


On Saturday November 19, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.

  • Outcomes – Outcome Alignment Summary Tab:  Instructors can quickly view a summary of alignments to the Outcomes in their course. Additionally, instructors can use a filter to view all Outcomes, view only those with alignments or those without alignments. 
  • Pages – Schedule Page Publication: The Schedule Page Publication default status has been updated. Instructors can delay pages for publication on a specific date and time. Scheduled pages remain invisible to students until the publish date and time.
  • SpeedGrader – Multi-File Submission Display as Single Submission for Third Party Tools: When using third-party tools to upload assignments, multiple files submitted together will display as a single submission in Speedgrader. This update allows instructors to view submissions with multiple files together in SpeedGrader.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, or even just curious about how they can help you, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Kaltura “Webcam Recorder” Unavailable (Known Issue)

Posted on by
Add new and webcam recorder selected

On Friday, October 7th, 2022 the UW-System Digital Learning Environment (DLE) team temporarily disabled the “Webcam Recorder” function of Kaltura within Canvas.

The Webcam Recording with Kaltura Capture feature can be used as an alternative recording option.  This does require you to download and install Kaltura Capture on your computer.

Additional details are available at: Kaltura “Webcam Recorder” Unavailable (Known Issue).

[RESOLVED] Canvas Unplanned Outage (09/21/2022)

Posted on by

RESOLVED: Between 1:00 PM and 1:45 PM on Wednesday, September 21st users may have had issues accessing Canvas. The issue has been resolved. Please reach out to Canvas 24/7 support for any additional issues.

Beginning at roughly 1:00PM on Wednesday, September 21st users may have started receiving timeout and gateway errors when accessing Canvas. The vendor was aware of the issue and promptly began investigating.

Resolved: 1:45PM the issue was resolved, and service was restored.

Self-Paced Online and Blended Teaching Institute (OBTI)

Posted on by

The UW-Whitewater Learning Technology Center (LTC) is pleased to announce registration is now available for a self-paced asynchronous version of our Online and Blended Teaching Institute (OBTI) for Spring 2023…or for the ambitious, you can still enroll and complete the Fall 2022 iteration!

OBTI aligns quality Canvas course design with best practices for teaching in a variety of modalities.  Upon completion of OBTI, faculty and instructors will be well-prepared to design and develop their own courses, prepared with tips to continue the iterative process for future academic terms.

Online and Blended Teaching Institute
Online and Blended Teaching Institute now available in a self-paced format.

The Online and Blended Teaching Institute offers an independent, online, self-paced experience combined with full support and contact with the Learning Technology Center.  It showcases the work of Whitewater instructors and staff, allowing participants an opportunity to explore what has worked for their colleagues.   After an initial consultation, participants will complete a series of short online assignments, be provided a sandbox to design content, and develop objectives and activities to serve as an exemplar module for future courses.  This course will take an estimated 30 hours to complete during the fall semester.

This Winterim, we’ll again offer our traditional cohort model OBTI with online synchronous workshops that include a live student panel and peer review. Moving forward we anticipate offering both synchronous and asynchronous options on a regular basis.

For more information or to enroll in this exciting training, contact Ted Witt at wittt@uww.edu. 

Honoring Campus Innovators

Posted on by

On May 18, the campus community gathered at the Celebrating Teaching and Learning Conference to celebrate innovative teaching and learning initiatives at UW-Whitewater. The Learning Technology Center, LEARN Center, and Office of Academic Assessment proudly hosted this engaging professional development opportunity. Many thanks to those wo were able to attend and to those who worked behind the scenes!

Two of the afternoon sessions showcased the technological innovations by Steven Girard, associate professor of chemistry and Lama Bergstrand Othman, associate professor of special education, finalists for the 2022 Cisco/Presidio Teaching with Technology Innovator Honorarium.

Steven Girard’s presentation “Technologies to Improve Student Accessibility” described assembling/coauthoring free and fully open-source educational resource (OER) textbooks for use in his chemistry courses, and designing an augmented reality (AR) app with his colleague Fred Leighton, assistant professor of media arts and game development.

Lama Bergstrand Othman outlined how the SAMR and TPACK frameworks inform her teaching, how she models them for future teachers, and how she encourages students to employ them in their work in her presentation “Future Teachers and Digital Classrooms.”

The conference concluded with the announcement of this year’s Cisco/Presidio “Teaching with Technology Innovator” honorarium, awarded to Steven Girard.

The Cisco/Presidio Teaching with Technology Innovator Honorarium recognizes an instructor who displays an outstanding commitment to leveraging learning technologies to solve common teaching challenges related to creating rich learning experiences to increase student success. This award is sponsored by Presidio and Cisco Systems in conjunction with ICIT and the LTC. Presidio and Cisco are proud of their work with institutions of higher education to inspire learning and connect campuses to enhance student outcomes. ICIT and the LTC are dedicated to working with instructors to understand teaching challenges, explore solutions, implement strategies, and evaluate their effectiveness.

Congratulations to each of this year’s finalists, your innovative approaches in the classroom are much to be celebrated!

Streaming.uww.edu (Vbrick Rev) Service Update (5/19)

Posted on by

On Thursday, May 19th the streaming.uww.edu (VBrick Rev) service was updated to the latest version of the software. This date was chosen to limit disruption to instruction during the spring semester and to be completed prior to the start of the summer term.

In this latest update, the following fixes and enhancements will be included:

  • Basic Settings and Advanced Settings have now been combined under a new “Details” button to combine video settings into a single area.
  • Rev Teams have been renamed to Channels. Channels function in the same way as Rev Teams, and can be used to restrict video to only individuals registered for your current semester course.
  • Additional options are available for linked and embedded videos.
    • Embedded videos may be displayed as an in-line video (current behavior) or display an image which will open a new window with the video when clicked.
    • Linked videos may display a full video page (current behavior) or display the video only.
  • Video Editor has a more intuitive layout and improved tools.
    • New Scale and Position controls replace the zoom function.
    • The playback bar now has a more precise time stamp reading and the ability to directly type in a timestamp for quick locating.
    • Edited videos now have the option to be saved as a new video.
  • Enhanced Video Analytics Reports
    • Date range filters.
    • Sorting and filtering ability.
    • Ability to export by date range.
  • The Video Pulse Tab offers a new interactive video experience. Subtitle files are required to use this feature.
    • Shows tagged users in a filmstrip view.
    • Ability to search through the video subtitles for key words.
  • SRT and VTT now be added as Subtitle formats for closed captioning.
  • Flash has reached its End of Life. Rev will no longer provide Flash playback URLs.

If you have any questions or concerns about this update, please contact the Learning Technology Center.

Streaming.uww.edu (Vbrick Rev) Planned Outage – May 19th

Posted on by
Screenshot of Rev video

On Thursday, May 19th 2022 between 7 AM and 5 PM VBrick Rev (http://streaming.uww.edu) will be unavailable for scheduled maintenance. During this outage, we will be deploying the latest version of VBrick Rev.

Videos hosted on Rev will be unavailable during this outage. Please plan accordingly.

If you have any questions or concerns about this outage, please contact the Learning Technology Center.

Registration Open! Celebrating Teaching and Learning Conference May 18

Posted on by

The Learning Technology Center, LEARN Center and Office of Academic Assessment invite you to register for the Celebrating Teaching and Learning Conference on Wednesday, May 18, in the University Center.

The conference features a great keynote speaker and showcases 16 concurrent sessions full of interesting teaching and learning initiatives that are active at UW-Whitewater.

The event is FREE, and includes breakfast, lunch and snacks.

Don’t delay, register today! Registration ends May 10.