January 2016 Archives

Rutgers Camden will hold the 3rd annual Faculty eLearning Conference on Thursday, April 7, 2016. 

Faculty and instructors at Rutgers Camden and participating community colleges can find more information at the Engaged eLearning Conference web page. 
http://elearning.camden.rutgers.edu

New for Spring 2016, instructors will be able to add their own individualized questions to their Student Instructional Rating Surveys (in addition to the standard SIRS and any department-wide questions). 

In order to use this new feature, CTAAR must know the instructor's Rutgers NetID prior to setting up the surveys. We have added a "NetID" column to the spreadsheet that we will send to each department, so departments can fill in that information if they would like to enable this feature for their faculty (without the NetID, the SIRS will continue to work as it has previously). 

To better explain the process, we have scheduled two workshops for department administrators ("SIRS Liaisons") and interested faculty. We will discuss the new feature, as well as answers questions that Liaisons may have about the administrative process, filling out the spreadsheets, access to the archive, Sakai dropboxes, etc. 

• Tuesday, February 9, 2016, 11:30 a.m., College Avenue (Register for Feb 9) 
• Thursday, February 25, 2016, 11:00 a.m., Busch Campus (Register for Feb 25)
• For Camden and Newark, please email us if you are interested (depending on interest, we may schedule workshops on either campus or use videoconferencing). 

For more information and instructions, please see our web page on adding questions to SIRS. 

CTAAR offices are open today (Monday, January 25) but anyone driving into New Brunswick should be aware that many of the roads are impassible. As of this morning, the main roadways are partially clear but some intersections along Easton Avenue are completely or partially blocked,  thick snow is causing people to get stuck on side roads between Easton and College Ave, and  parking lots are not fully plowed.

Rutgers Center for Online and Hybrid Learning (COHLIT) is running the 7th annual Rutgers Online Learning Conference Mid-Atlantic Region on January 11-12, 2016, in New Brunswick.  This year, Rutgers has partnered with University Professional and Continuing Education Association - Mid-Atlantic Chapter (UPCEA), and is excited to continue working with NJEDge, to include two full days of presentations and workshops on a wide variety of topics. 

Keynote speakers include:
Jeffrey Selingo - Author of College (Un)bound
Deb Adair - Managing Director and Chief Planning Officer of Quality Matters
Ray Schroeder - Founding Director of the Center for Online Leadership at the University Continuing and Professional Education Association (UPCEA).
Joan Bouillon - Director of Regulatory Compliance
Kenneth Ronkowitz - Senior Designer at New Jersey Institute of Technology

The full schedule and conference registration can be found at the Rutgers Online Learning Conference web site.

Sakai may not be available from time to time during winter break - there are two causes.

• External internet problems (possibly caused by another network attack). This results in a temporary and unpredictable inability to connect to Sakai from off-campus  networks, but on-campus users are unaffected. OIRT recommends using the Rutgers VPN to bypass the problem and access Sakai. 
  https://oit.rutgers.edu/vpn 
  Using the Rutgers VPN is very similar to using the "RUWireless" network; if you are familiar with using RUWireless you should not have any difficulty using the VPN.
• Planned Sakai Updates: OIRT often uses the break to do a software update to Sakai. Should this require temporarily disabling access to Sakai, OIRT will put advance notice on the Sakai front page. More likely, you will be able to access Sakai during the update, but you may find that you need to log back in to Sakai unexpectedly.

Please see the RutgersIT announcements for more information about the network attacks https://rutgersit.rutgers.edu .