Category Archives: For Students

Canvas Update (05/16/2020)

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On Saturday, May 16, 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.

UW-Whitewater Updates

D2L Retirement is progressing.  All information you would like to keep must be exported out of D2L before June 1st, 2020. Whether it’s an old for-credit based course, or an ongoing course – make sure all material is backed up. Once our access is removed, we will not have any way to obtain this data. For more information check out the Desire2Learn Retirement Planning post.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Canvas Update (04/18/2020)

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On Saturday, April 14, 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.

Instructure has moved to a “Ready Release” method of weekly updates to address pressing issues during the sudden shift to online. The full list of ready release notes are available. We have included what we believe to be the two most notable updates here.

UW-Whitewater Updates

D2L Retirement is progressing.  All information you would like to keep must be exported out of D2L before June 1st, 2020. Whether it’s an old for-credit based course, or an ongoing course – make sure all material is backed up. Once our access is removed, we will not have any way to obtain this data. For more information check out the Desire2Learn Retirement Planning post.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Streaming.uww.edu (Vbrick Rev) Planned Outage – February 8th

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COMPLETE: Sunday 4:30 PM – The upgrade is complete and videos are once again viewable. Thank you for your patience during the extended upgrade outage.

Update: Saturday 7:15 PM – Due to unforeseen circumstances, the outage window has been extended until 8 PM on Sunday, February 9th. We are aware of the impact this may have on your course work. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Update: Saturday 3 PM – The planned outage is taking longer than expected and we’ll be extending the outage window until 8 PM. We’ll update this message once the maintenance is complete.

On Saturday, February 8th 2020 between 9 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 your assignments and classwork accordingly.

How do I know if my video is hosted on VBrick Rev (streaming.uww.edu)?

Take a look at the two examples below. Note the differences in the bottom player control bar and the play button.

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

Canvas Update (1/18/2020)

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Vendor Updates

On Saturday, January 18, 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.

  • Direct Share Course-Level Features: Instructors can copy individual course items to another course and share individual items with other users.
  • Personal Pronoun feature description: Users can select pronouns to associate with their account in Canvas. The initial set of options will be: He/His, She/Hers, They/Theirs.
  • Postable Submission Comments: Assignments with the “Manual” Posting Policy will now be able to have Comments posted for students to see before entering a grade.
  • New Quizzes – Answer Shuffling: Instructors using the “New Quizzes” tool will now be able to shuffle answers on multiple choice, multiple answer, and matching quiz questions.
    • Please note that “New Quizzes” is still in Beta and UW-Whitewater recommends the use of the standard quizzing tool.
  • Rich Content Editor Update: Instructors can start using the Rich Content Editor update early by enabling it in their settings area. Instructure plans to make the updates on by default in a future update.

UW-Whitewater Updates

Winterim 2020 grades are due 4:00pm, Tuesday January 21. Directions for eGrading are available for instructors who wish to use this process.

Remember to Publish your courses. Spring 2020 courses start Tuesday January 21. It is important to remember that students will be unable to enter the course, and instructors will be unable to us the Inbox to message students until the course is published.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Join a discussion about adaptive and personalized learning on campus!

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Since 2018, the Learning Technology Center has been exploring adaptive and personalized learning. The LTC would like to invite any UW-Whitewater faculty, staff, or student interested in adaptive and personalized learning to discuss the state of adaptive and personalized learning on campus.

Come join the discussion on adaptive and personalized learning!

These are open discussions. Registration is suggested but not required. There are two meetings this spring 2020 semester. Please feel free to attend either or both:

Friday, February 21, 2020 10:00 AM

Tuesday, April 21, 2020 2:00 PM

Remote attendance for these meetings is possible as well (please just contact icit-techpilots@uww.edu after registering to receive a Webex link to join virtually). If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact the Learning Technology Center.

[RESOLVED] Respondus Monitor Slowdown

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On Monday, December 9th, 2019, between 9:15 AM and 10:20 AM CDT, Respondus Monitor experienced a slowdown due to a database issue. This was causing intermittent connectivity issues for instructors accessing the LockDown Browser dashboard. It was also causing slowdowns or errors for students trying to start a Respondus Monitor session.  Everything was operating normally as of 10:20 AM CDT.

Please contact Canvas 24/7/365 Support with any questions or concerns.

What is Respondus Monitor?

Respondus Monitor is an additional product that works with Respondus LockDown Browser to use the student’s webcam to utilize video to further prevent cheating during online quizzes.  It is currently licensed only for use by specific courses in the College of Business and Economics.

Are you still using Desire2Learn?

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Are you still logging into Desire2Learn to get course material or using it for your department or organization?  If yes – please reach out to the instructor of that course and inform that that they will need to move to Canvas!

D2L will be flipped into “read-only” mode on January 17th, 2020. Users will still be able to login to save and export content, but they will not be able to create any new content or participate in any courses.

Please contact UW-W Desire2Learn Support with any questions around the retirement of the service.

[RESOLVED] LinkedIn Learning Access Issues

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Resolved December 3rd, 6:42 PM. The issue has been resolved and new users are now able to access LinkedIn Learning.

Beginning on December 1st, users who have not previously logged into LinkedIn Learning are receiving an error message when trying to create an account. Users who have logged in prior to December 1st are not impacted. ICIT is working with LinkedIn to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Updates will be posted to this message as they are received.

If you have specific questions about this outage, please reach out to the UW-W TSC Helpdesk.

Come join the LTC for a discussion on adaptive learning on campus!

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If you missed our September meeting, or attended that meeting and would like to talk more about the status of adaptive learning on campus, the LTC is hosting one more meeting on adaptive and personalized learning this fall.

The meeting takes place next Friday, October 25th from 9:30 to 10:15 am in McGraw 19A. All UW-Whitewater faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend. No registration is necessary.

Adaptive learning facilitates personalized pathways for learners.

If you have any questions about this meeting, or would like to attend virtually via Webex, please contact icit-techpilots@uww.edu

You are invited to discuss adaptive learning on campus!

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You are invited to join the Learning Technology Center for a conversation about adaptive learning on campus. The meeting takes place next Friday, September 27th, from 9:30 to 10:15 am in McGraw 19A. All UW-Whitewater faculty, staff, and students are welcome to join this discussion. No registration is necessary to join the meeting, so please feel free to join us!

The UW-Whitewater Learning Technology Center Mission Statement

If you are interested in learning more about adaptive learning, EDUCAUSE has a short (less than five minute) video on “3 Reasons to Try Adaptive Learning Courseware.”

If you have any questions about this meeting, or would like to attend virtually via Webex, please contact the UW-W Learning Technology Center.