Support for online teaching delivery during Coronavirus

Dear Colleagues

As we adjust to our new reality both in our work and our personal lives, I wanted to get in touch with information about what CTIL is doing to support instructors as you transition to online delivery. Let me start of by off by offering my best wishes to you all – in CTIL we have been keen to ensure that health and happiness takes precedent and if there is anything we can do to help at this time, do let us know.

 

Drop-ins 

Our #1 mechanism for supporting you is through our twice-daily online drop-ins, using Collaborate

• 10:30 –11:30 & 14:30-15:30, every weekday
• Access through our Organisation, eLearning Support for Instructors, on My Dundee or directly through this guest URL within the appropriate times.

Please come along to any of these sessions to ask questions, discuss challenges and make suggestions about what more CTIL could be doing. You can drop-in at any time during the hour and you’re welcome to come along just to say hello – we’re a friendly bunch 🙂

School Liaison

We’re delighted that each School has nominated a ‘digital champion’ to serve as be the main conduit between us and the Schools. We will be contacting our digital champions in the coming days to establish a 2-way conversation about your school’s needs and what CTIL can offer in response.

Information and Support

There are three main channels you can go to for up-to-date information about online delivery support and resources:

• Support for online teaching delivery: On the main website guides area, this page will be updated with high level information such as found in this email.
• My Dundee: We will be updating the landing page of My Dundee with targeted information for staff and students. We have also set up an organisation called eLearning support for instructors where you can find resources, access the drop-ins and engage with us and the community through the discussion board.
• The My Dundee Blog: We’ll be posting various content and news to our blog. We suggest you subscribe to the site to get up notifications of new posts as they’re published.

All technical, administrative issues and service requests should go through Help4u where they will be routed to the appropriate people, including Laura on our own helpdesk.

 

Guides

 

We’ve made the decision to change the way we produce and deliver guides. All CTIL guides and service descriptions, for staff and students, will start to be delivered through the web team’s new Guides area on the University website as a matter of urgency. We’ll notify the school digital champions as we publish so they can share as appropriate. We’ve also started working in partnership with other elements within the Library and ASC to start coordinating the production of guides so that staff and students can easily access the content they need irrespective of the department that produces it.

 

We have limited resource to produce everything we’d like to but will be prioritising the top activities required in the current situation, with online assessment being a high priority.

 

Online Training

We’re currently planning online training for specific activities with colleagues from other support departments and will release information soon. In the meantime the best place to go for personal support is to join one of our twice daily drop-ins.

 

Blackboard, the company that supplies My Dundee have been putting on a number of helpful online training for various aspects of online learning delivery. I can very much recommend taking a look at their new webinar series: Accelerate Your Transition to Remote Instruction. They have also made two of their online training courses free to enrol on for a period of time.

 

Assessment Support

We’re viewing assessment as the biggest challenge to our new way of working. CTIL has extensive experience of supporting digital assessment but never on this scale. We have received the school action plans and will be processing these to ensure we are ready to support the creation and delivery of online assessment.

 

Additional Services

A final thing we are pursuing is the identification of additional services that can support the sudden move to online only teaching delivery. We are engaging with senior management to consider what the priorities are and what budget may be available.

 

Best tools for the job

 

Just one final note to re-enforce that for online video communication, we have two tried and tested solution that are working very well across the university:

• Collaborate Ultra: Virtual classrooms for live lectures, tutorials and group work
• Yuja: Video recording, editing, publishing, large scale live streaming and collection management platform

We are working closely with the vendors to ensure we have the server resources required and these will be our priority for support.

Sorry for the long email but we wanted to ensure that you have the information you need. Let me again offer the best wishes from all of us in CTIL to you and your loved ones. We’re here to support you and your students in any way we can.

 

Kind Regards

 

Hamish Loveday

Digital Education Services Manager, Centre for Technology and Innovation in Education (CTIL)

The University of Dundee is a Scottish Registered Charity, No. SC015096. © University of Dundee.