On December 29th, IT Teaching and Learning Services made a change to the mapping of eCampus and Brightspace user roles that will allow URI to better protect our students and their data.

No roles were removed in this effort, simply mapping changes between eCampus and Brightspace. Users who are added to eCampus with the role of “Teaching Assistant” will continue to be added to the appropriate Brightspace courses, only they will now be added with “TA” access. Teaching assistants who require more specialized access can be promoted by the instructor to a “TA Plus”.

Please follow the Knowledge Base guides below for additional information.

eCampus and Brightspace Role Mapping – https://uriprod.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0010127
Changing existing user’s enrollment role in Brightspace –https://uriprod.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0010053

As educational technology becomes more prevalent in the classroom, collaboration and communication between IT subject matter experts and Faculty is more important than it has ever been. To help facilitate these interactions, IT Teaching and Learning Services, in collaboration with the IT Governance Committee, founded the Educational Technology Advisory Council (ETAC) in October 2023.

ETAC is an interdisciplinary group of URI faculty and IT experts who meet monthly to provide guidance on matters related to Brightspace and other technologies. It seeks to build a bridge between technology users and technology experts so that the entire URI community is better served.

Some ongoing areas of focus include the review of new Brightspace Integrations and requests for system changes. For the latest information, please visit our website, https://its.uri.edu/tls/educational-technology-advisory-council-etac/.

Options to create interactive and engaging digital content at URI are expanding…Sign up for pilots starting soon.

‘Interactive’ and ‘engage’ are two hot topics in higher education, and rightly so. They address the neurodiverse needs and active learning our students need. But there seem to be so many choices.
Camtasia has been available at URI for a number of years. It offers a user friendly interface with the capability to manipulate and augment videos utilizing features such as area blurring, musical overlays and pop up messages in your videos.

A few more robust content creation programs the IT TLS department is recruiting faculty for participants include:

Lumi Education – Building digital interactive elearning resources and use a SCORM package in your brightspace course for automatic grading. Click and drag words into fill in the blank paragraphs, create picture sequencing, and use a SCORM package in your brightspace course for automatic grading.

Student interacting with virtual molecules

Softchalk – Build digital case studies, content and assessments with this powerful content creation tool. This tool allows for custom designs and building your content for creativity; the limits are mostly your imagination. Use a SCORM package in your brightspace course to enable the interactivity of the created content. We are recruiting and working on a training for opportunities later this semester.

TLS department is also recruiting faculty in the following Pilot Program: Digital posters or projects by students – work with our team and your students to explore creation of digital posters for interactive presentations through apps such as Canva or Prezi. ****Submit your interest for the pilots by submitting a ticket to ask for more information and a consultation about joining a pilot.

Man sitting on a chair, looking at a laptop, imagining things he can learn.

Seminars. Lectures. Community learning. The University of Rhode Island’s reach extends far beyond our home in the Ocean State. Share your expertise, your research, and your knowledge with the world through URI’s public facing Learning Management System, Engage.

Engage gives the URI community the ability to offer for-profit learning opportunities to learners outside the URI student body. It is used today by programs such as the URI Master Gardeners, Wastewater Treatment, and Food Recovery.

Interested in learning how you can expand your reach and Engage with Rhode Islanders and beyond? Learn more by contacting:

Kevin Gray: IT Project Lead, Teaching and Learning Services
Michelle Rogers: Director of Teaching and Learning Services

Faculty often teach multiple identical course sections, which can be merged into one Brightspace course shell for convenience. This merging process consolidates students from different sections into a single Brightspace course shell. Keep in mind that if your course content significantly varies, merging may not be suitable.

Merging two or more sections into a single Brightspace class centralizes your course management, increases content consistency, and eliminates the need to juggle multiple classes. The primary objective behind section merging in Brightspace is to reduce redundancy, saving valuable time and minimizing the potential for errors.

In most cases, instructors will be responsible for merging their own course sections. To initiate the merge, you must be the course instructor or the admin of record for all the courses you wish to combine. Please only build course content in the section you intend to keep, as any content in the other sections will be lost after the merge.

It’s important to note that even though sections are merged immediately in Brightspace, individual student enrollment data may take up to 24 hours to synchronize and show up in your merged Brightspace course. Once the merge is complete, faculty are able to access the combined classlist and can use filtering tools to easily restrict the classlist to one section or the other. Faculty can also assign Teaching Assistants to specific sections as necessary.

When conducting course merges, it’s essential to consider the constraints set by academic regulations and student privacy laws, allowing you to make informed choices regarding the optimal utilization of this functionality within your courses. It’s important to note that sections instructed by different faculty members cannot be combined. This limitation is in place to protect the rights and privacy of both students and faculty. Additionally, it is suggested that instructors avoid merging sections when external tools are in use, as this may lead to issues.

The process of merging course sections can be more complex than expected. In such scenarios, faculty can always seek assistance from the Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) team through a Support Desk ticket via IT Service Portal at https://uriprod.service-now.com/sp.

Merges conducted by TLS may require up to two business days to finalize. While this process is underway, your course may not appear as active in the system for students.

Note:

In the event you require the addition of a second faculty member to your course, you have a few options. You may request your department chair to include them as a second faculty member or designate them as an ‘admin of record’ for the specific course section within e-Campus. Alternatively, you can manually include them in your course as a ‘collaborator’ with content editing privileges or assign them a ‘guest’ role, providing read-only access.
Course section merging should not be confused with copying course content. To copy content from one section to another, such as from a previous semester to an upcoming one, faculty can use the Import/Export/Copy tool in Brightspace. Refer to this tutorial for detailed instructions on copying course content. View the guide on copying content in Brightspace.

URI faculty have free access to the Adobe Firefly AI image generator bot. Here is how to sign up.

All faculty and staff at URI have a full Adobe suite account. After you log into your Adobe account you’ll be able to use Firefly for free.

Logging In

Option 1: The most direct way to connect is to use your URI SSO to login here: https://firefly.adobe.com/
———————————–

Option 2: You may also reach Firefly via your URI Adobe Creative Cloud homepage, as follows:

Step 1: Click here and sign into your work Adobe account using your URI SSO credentials: https://creativecloud.adobe.com

Step 2: Click on the ‘waffle’ grid in the upper right-hand of the screen and then click on ‘All Apps’

Step 3: On the left-side menu of the ‘All Apps’ page you’ll find Firefly in the menu:

Use Prompt to Enter Keywords

On the Firefly homepage you’ll see a variety of options for different creative tasks you can do.

Step 1: Click on the one that says ‘Text to Image’ (this is what Midjourney and Bing AI both do too).

Step 2: Then type in your prompt.

Adobe Firefly Text Prompt Ideas

Prompt:

logo concept, butterfly, no shadows, flat icon, bright colors, flat, with word Fly Fast, graphic, clear, incorporate butterfly into the design

Idea from here

Prompt:

A serene Japanese garden in autumn: Expect beautiful fall colors, a traditional temple, and a pond, illustrating a mix of natural and architectural elements. Illustrated.

Idea from here

Prompt:

Fuzzy psychedelic cat sitting on a rock

Idea from here

Resources

AI Image generation ideas:
- https://www.makeuseof.com/adobe-firefly-ai-font-generation-ideas/
How to create AI Art with Firefly:
- https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/design/adobe-firefly
How to use ChatGPT to write image prompts for Firefly:
- https://www.downloadsource.net/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-write-prompts-prompt-templates-for-adobe-firefly-midjourney/n/22511/
Prompt Generator – create the text here and input it at Firefly to get the image:
1. https://flowgpt.com/p/adobe-firefly-prompt-generator
Comparison of prompts given to Adobe Firefly and also Midjourney to compare the output of the two different AI Image Generators:
1. https://medium.com/@jarimh1984/transforming-visual-imagination-adobe-firefly-vs-midjourney-v5-a-comprehensive-comparison-of-661babcc0739

Join us for the annual ed tech innovation day for faculty, with multiple virtual tracks, and attend case studies, best practices, ideas, solutions, technology curriculum design, and emerging educational technology innovations.

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The New Quiz Creation Experience will become the permanent quiz interface in Brightspace in July 2023. Available as an opt-in feature at URI since December 2022, the experience is designed to provide an intuitive quiz workflow and bring consistent interface to users for creating and editing quizzes as assignments.

Note: For the many of you who opted in when the new experience was introduced last year, you will see no change after it goes into full effect. To help those who have not yet opted in, we have made arrangements to make the opt in screen available again, so you can more easily switch between the new and old experiences during the remaining months of the transition.

Using the New Quiz Creation Experience

Simplified Panel Layout – The redesigned create and edit screen in Quizzing has the same layout as the Assignments module, making it familiar and easy to learn.

The primary panel on the left of the screen contains common, frequently used fields that are always displayed. These fields are most relevant to learners and are core to quiz creation.

The right-hand panel organizes additional, more advanced options such as start and end dates, release conditions, and special access. These options follow the same logical groupings as found in Assignments.

Streamlined Settings – The new quiz creation panel layout allows you to view and edit your quiz settings in one place. When the right-hand panel groupings are collapsed, summary text provides details about which settings are applied.

Screenshot for Availability Dates & Conditions and TIming & Display.

Simplified Submission Views – Users can now confidently prepare what the learner sees once a quiz is submitted with a redesigned Submission Views workflow now called Quiz Results Display. Simply choose from a list of common configurations or customize the display to meet your exact needs.

Updated Page Break Workflow– Instructors can now intuitively apply question paging rules to Brightspace quizzes. Paging configurations, such as “displaying all questions together” or “one question per page”, are quick and easy to set. You can also choose to customize your paging settings by adding page breaks after each section of your quiz.

Auto Publish and Sync to Gradebook– Newly created quizzes by default will auto-publish attempt results to learners and the grade book (if the quiz is connected to the grade book).

For more information, see D2L’s article Welcome to the New Quiz Creation Experience.

Do you have questions about ChatGPT and want to explore it more in depth? Come to this hands-on and drop-in workshop to learn and become more familiar with the tool.
Download Flyer

Date: Thursday, April 20, 2023
Time: 10:30 AM-12:30 PM
Location: Hardge Forum, URI Multicultural Student Services Center
Register for the Workshop

Six topic-based tables will be available for faculty or graduate teaching assistants to visit, explore aspects of ChatGPT, and engage in conversation around ethical considerations and prompting principles. Plan to bring your laptop or similar device and either work within your own ChatGPT account or work within a facilitator’s account. You may stay at a topic table for as long as you would like and/or switch tables.

Topics available are as follows:

Academic Integrity
Work Efficiency (emails, letters of recommendation, planning)
Course Prep (creating assignments, materials, and syllabi)
In-Class Activity Planning
Grading (feedback, rubrics, grading)
Scholarship (research, papers, grants)

Co-sponsored by ATL Faculty Development and IT Teaching and Learning Services.

Brightspace New Accommodations Feature

Brightspace now has a new accommodation feature that works with both the Quizzes and Assignments tools. It enables instructors to assign learners specific accommodations conveniently through the Classlist tool.