News

The UC Davis Keep Teaching website, a collection of ideas and resources that emerged almost overnight last March to help faculty and TAs shift quickly to remote instruction, now offers a clearer path through its offerings.

On July 2, the site released a major update to the site’s Teaching section to make key resources easier to find, feature peer-to-peer comments from faculty, and present seven pedagogical topics that instructors should consider as they teach remotely.

As you likely know from the news, cyber-attacks are a continuing threat in all areas of modern life. The risk is serious enough that we may have to deal with a cyber-security incident one day.

UC Davis is advising researchers to double-check some of their security settings in the wake of ransomware attacks at UC San Francisco and two other universities.

UC Davis faculty, students, and staff need to upgrade to version 5.0 of Zoom before May 30 in order to continue participating in classes or other online sessions that use the videoconferencing tool.

Zoom released version 5.0 on April 27, and will not allow older versions of the tool to be used starting May 30. The new version, a major upgrade, includes security improvements and other enhancements.

The coronavirus is disrupting campus services, but the IT Express Service Desk is keeping a steady beat.

The campus tech service desk, with its analysts working remotely, continues to answer questions and requests for assistance on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. It will also observe those hours during spring break.

You don’t need to be on campus to enlist their help. If you’re a UC Davis faculty member, student, or employee, they’re open for you.

The campus is presenting four webinars for faculty daily today through Friday, March 13, on how to use Canvas to hold quizzes or exams online, communicate with students, or distribute video lectures.

Each webinar, presented by an instructional technologist in Information and Educational Technology, lasts one hour. The topics:

The campus has created a new website, Keep Teaching, for faculty thinking about moving at least some of their instruction online because of COVID-19.

No campus quarantines or closures have been announced, and any UC Davis information along those lines would be posted at the UC Davis coronavirus page. Instead, the new site offers faculty resources to:

For cybersecurity to keep pace with the fast spread of technology, the field needs students of every interest to think of it as a good potential career. This includes students from computer science, art, sociology, the economy, culture, ethics—you name it. Cybersecurity needs them.

A lunchtime get-together for UC Davis students this winter helped put that point across, and might even have inspired a new career path or two.

UC Davis faculty curious about new approaches to grading might want to read this recent post in The Wheel. In it, instructors from different fields explain why they use Gradescope, a relatively new grading app on campus. Their answers are positive and varied.

One says Gradescope’s rubrics “allow for quick, clear grading” for questions “ranging from a few sentences to a full page of writing.” Another uses the app to “evaluate and improve my exam questions and structure.”

It’s mid-February. In Davis, you’ll see blossoms on trees, later sunsets, warmer afternoons—and maybe deceitful emails about taxes, too, as hackers rev up their springtime scams for tax season.

Heads up if you use eduroam, the UC Davis wireless network.

The campus will install a new electronic security certificate on eduroam at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 5. This means you might see a prompt on your phone or other wireless device sometime after then, asking you to accept the new certificate.

The campus and IBM are inviting students to a free lunchtime event on the future of cybersecurity, and students of the liberal arts or engineering are just as welcome as future computer scientists.

As are future economists, communicators, psychologists—you get the idea. Cybersecurity will require contributions from people with a sweeping range of interests, and leaders in the field are throwing open the doors.

The latest list of instructional tech events for UC Davis faculty, now available, includes topics as varied as the ethical uses of technology and collaborating internationally via virtual exchanges.

The lineup also includes a segment on Gradescope, a new assessment tool at UC Davis.

Two events occurring in campus tech security this coming week are important enough to deserve reminders.

It’s time to remove Windows 7 operating system (OS) software from any computer you use, especially at UC Davis.

On Jan. 14, 2020, Microsoft will stop supplying updates and security patches for the 10-year-old software, which will render Windows 7 too risky to use. Unsupported software is a prime target for hackers. By policy, unsupported OS and apps must not be used on computers or other devices that connect to the UC Davis network.