Committed to Your Informed Online Teaching Experience
Contents of this Faculty Update
Quick Tip - Assignment Due Dates
What's New with Webcourses@UCF
New Quizzes - Coming to Webcourses@UCF
Spotlight Video - 2021 Dziuban Award Winner
Renovated Faculty Multimedia Center - Now Open!
Design with Quality in Mind - Technical Support Information for Tools
UCF's Quality Course Designations
Affordability Counts Initiative - Saving Students Money
JoVE Subscription Renewed Through 2023
Knights Email Multi-Factor Authentication
Kelvin's Corner - The Power of Reflection
Quick Tip
Assignment Due Dates
Understand Your Options
Canvas provides three options for setting dates on assignments:
Due - The Due date indicates the date and time the assignment is due.
Available from - The Available from date determines when a student can first access the assignment.
Until - The Until date locks the assignment so that students can no longer submit their work.
Only assignments with due dates appear on the students’ calendar. All dates associated with an assignment are visible from the Assignment Index page
You also have the option to update due dates and availability dates for multiple assignments and assessments at one time. This is useful when you have copied your course from a previous semester and need to update all the assignment dates. From the Assignments page, click the Options icon and then select Edit Assignment Dates.
A new quizzing engine (New Quizzes) is coming to Webcourses@UCF! You can start exploring what New Quizzes has to offer beginning Summer 2022. To learn more about the new quizzing tool, important timelines, resources, and to enroll in a self-paced online introduction course, visit the New Quizzes Migration page. (Note: Your existing quizzes will not be affected at this time.)
Spotlight Video
2021 Dziuban Award
Recognizing Faculty Who Teach Exemplary Online Courses
Renovated Space and New Technology for Creating Content
The newly renovated Faculty Multimedia Center (FMC) is now open! The ribbon cutting was held on Monday, May 9, with Dr. Kelvin Thompson and Dr. Jana Jasinski hosting the ceremony. The FMC now features a training room, two collaboration rooms, three lightboard studios, a podcast recording station, AR/VR equipment, 3-D printing, portrait studio, and workstations for creating course content. Open weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Make a reservation now!
It is important to provide students information about where to turn for technical support for all technologies in an online course, including those that will be used outside the learning management system. Check out Provide Technical Support Information for Tools for tips on providing this information to students.
As you continue to look for ways to improve your online and blended courses, check out the other posts in Design with Quality in Mind, a growing collection of brief articles based on UCF’s Quality and High-Quality Course Reviews, that describe ways to support all students to succeed in your online courses.
UCF's Quality Course Designations
Recognizing Faculty with New Designations
We are pleased to recognize the December 2021 – April 2022 UCF faculty who have earned a Quality and/or High Quality designation for at least one of their online or blended courses. Faculty who have engaged in the course review process cite smoother navigation, less student confusion, and heightened accessibility of course materials as just a few benefits experienced.
Get Acknowledged for Keeping Course Material Costs Low
Be a part of the Affordability Counts initiative and get acknowledged for all the work you do to keep course material costs low for students. For additional information, email affordable@ucf.edu.
The Affordability Counts mission
...is to alleviate the debt and expense burden on students in the state of Florida by encouraging faculty to incorporate low cost course materials with recognition and direct peer-tested resources.
UCF renewed our JoVE Science Education subscription with unlimited features for the 2022-2023 academic year. This collection of STEM-based videos and demonstrations covers a range of topics from psychology, to engineering, to clinical skills. JoVE uploads over 1,200 videos yearly and includes over 12,000 brief video demonstrations of labs and experiments, all of which can be embedded into Webcourses@UCF.
Protecting myUCF, Enhancing Security, and Reducing Risks
Starting Monday, May 9th, all Knights Email accounts were enabled with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). If you need assistance, please contact the UCF Support Center at itsupport@ucf.edu or 407-823-5117 (option 9). This notice is provided by UCF's Information Security Office.
This past semester, Kelvin hosted a discussion group for the Small Teaching Online book. For those who were interested but couldn’t participate, Kelvin invites you to listen to this 33-minute Teaching in Higher Ed podcast with the author of the book, Flower Darby. In the Small Teaching Online episode, the host, Bonni Stachowiak and Flower Darby talk about how being authentic and empathetic in your online teaching helps with instructor presence and student engagement.
Oftentimes we see poor examples and we think that’s how it’s done.
Flower Darby
Kelvin Thompson is the Executive Director for the Center for Distributed Learning. He is always finding, sharing, recommending interesting and insightful resources about teaching and learning.
For questions about Webcourses@UCF, contact Webcourses@UCF Support.
