Author: ajb40

It’s a brand new year, and we have some exciting new changes for instructors in Springboard! As a result of our first Springboard Faculty Steering Committee meeting, two changes were approved –

1.      The listing of semesters in the My Courses widget has been reversed – the current semester will appear on top, while Ongoing and courses with no semester listed will appear on the bottom.

2.      The Course Offering Information page has been revamped – we’ve reworded some settings that were unclear, removed settings that were not needed by instructors, and moved more important settings to the top.

In addition to streamlining the Course Offering Information page, we have also created a link in the default course Navigation bar that makes it easier to reach! Instructors can simply click the ACTIVATE Course (Faculty Only) link in the navbar. Please note that if you have made any changes to the navbar in your course, the Activate link will not appear. However, you can still add the link to your navbar – when adding links, select Custom Links from the View By dropdown menu, and the Activate course link will appear in the list.

The ZipSupport Call Center will be closed beginning 12/24/2010 and will resume operations on 1/3/2011. However, you can still submit requests for Springboard support during that time by sending a message to springboardhelp@uakron.edu. Support requests should receive a response within 24 hours, and will be escalated as needed.

Self-help guides are also available for Springboard for both instructors and students. Instructor guides can be found here, and student guides can be found here. Thank you,  and have a great holiday break!

Can you believe that the it’s almost the end of the semester? Here is a checklist to help you complete some end-of-semester tasks in Springboard –

• Calculate Final Grades – Ensure that final grades are up-to-date and released to your students.
• Export Gradebook Copy – Save a copy of your gradebook for backup purposes.
• Compile Discussion – Export a copy of a discussion topic for archival purposes or to grade offline.
• Copy Course Components – Migrate course materials to your Spring 2011 courses.

For additional assistance, please contact the ZipSupport Center at 330.972.6888 or by email at support@uakron.edu.

With the holidays fast approaching, the Spring 2011 semester will be upon us before we know it! Instructors – now would be a great time to request that your Spring 2011 courses be combined. You can request that your courses be combined by sending an email to springboardhelp@uakron.edu. Please be sure to include the course number (1234:567-890, for example) for each course that you would like to have combined.

On Sunday, November 7, we will be performing minor maintenance on Springboard. This maintenance includes several bug fixes and minor product enhancements, including the following:

• Desire2Learn2Go – access Content, News, Bookmarks, Grades, and Calendar tools from your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android smartphone.
• Option to subscribe to email notifications for Discussions.
• Accessibility improvements in My Courses widget and Quizzes.
• Notification area message improvements – “Saved Successfully” and other status messages appear in lower right-hand corner of the screen.
• Insert Stuff – easily embed media, such as YouTube or Flickr videos.

In order to perform this maintenance, Springboard will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours beginning at 8 am on Sunday, November 7.  We will post more details here on the Springboard blog when the maintenance is complete.

The faculty survey for Springboard closes end of day Friday, October 22. If you haven’t already, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on Springboard training, support, communication, and Springboard in general. The survey can be accessed here: https://survey2.uakron.edu/sbfacultyfall2010.aspx. For those that have responded, we appreciate your feedback!

The intermittent issue with viewing the Classlist by groups has been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, and we thank you for your patience.

We are experiencing an intermittent issue when trying to view the Classlist by group in Springboard. We are currently working with Desire2Learn to correct this issue. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we will provide updates when we receive additional information.