Hyflex Classroom Update for August 17-18

Dear Faculty and Staff:

Highlights of today's update:

• Sign up to practice in a hyflex classroom
• Camera delivery update!
• How to find the classrooms where you are teaching AND determine whether it is Hyflex equipped.
• What other tech do you need?

Hyflex practice rooms

Six of the backup cameras have been installed in classrooms throughout campus for you to try them out. These will be the cameras we are using in the classrooms until the Owls arrive. These classrooms are:

• CC104
• JC107
• Silk Auditorium (MH101)
• MH107
• MH307
• RH208

We also have the one Owl camera in MH207 and the Kandao camera in SB2. If you would like to practice your classroom set ups in one of these rooms, reserve an hour timeslot using this appointment calendar link:

SIGN UP for an appointment to try out a Hyflex classroom (requires sign in).
Tip: Try the "day" view button in the top right corner so that you can see all which appointment slots go with which rooms.

You can alternately reach out to the Help Desk and make an appointment via email helpdesk AT malone.edu , via the web at http://www.malone.edu/helpdesk or by phone at 330.471.8428.

Be sure to hit the "Help" or "Help Desk" button on the room control panel if you need assistance. We encourage you to visit/practice/train in the classroom in groups. IT will not be present in the room with you. If you want us to be, please invite us to the Zoom or Google Meet meeting you set up for your session. 

Camera Delivery Update

Good news! Our backup cameras are on their way and should arrive this Wednesday (19 August) or Thursday at the latest. This means that all classrooms slated for Hyflex equipment will be ready for class start on Monday.

Is my classroom Hyflex equipped?

Probably! The Registrar's office has published the locations for each of your classrooms. Course room assignments are visible in the Courselist on Xpress.  

To see whether your classroom is Hyflex equipped (as well as its current installation status), you can check this spreadsheet (sign in with a malone.edu account required). Let us know right away if you have questions about your particular classroom[s].

Help! I have a special technology need so that I can teach online

Please let the Information Technologies team know right away if you need access to special tech. Here are a couple examples:

1. A student is hearing impaired.
   Response: As a start, use Google Meet with the closed captioning activated.
2. A faculty member needs to prerecord examples or perform an experiment live in a synchronous meeting.
   Response: use either an existing document camera (we have several on campus) or a smartphone mounted overhead to record the video. iPads are also available for checkout from the IT Help Desk which have articulated tripods

We are sure there are other examples of activities that need translation into an online (or semi-online) experience. Please let us know so we can make recommendations that will help you meet your teaching objectives!

Zoom licensing is now available to teaching Faculty

Dear Faculty and Staff:

The organization license for Zoom has now been set up. You can single-sign-on [SSO] to Zoom by going to https://userid.malone.edu and clicking the link for Zoom. You can alternatively bookmark and/or visit: https://malone-edu.zoom.us/

Teaching faculty versus staff versus students

While any student, faculty, or staff member can sign into Zoom using SSO, only instructors for a current or future course will be granted a license to use advanced features of Zoom. All others who sign into the system will be granted a free/unlicensed account. This means that only teaching faculty will have access to features such as recording in the cloud, breakout rooms, etc. 

Zoom for non-teaching purposes

There is likely some margin in our org license to allow non-teaching community members to use a licensed copy of Zoom. We have set up a mechanism where we can add additional non-teaching accounts. Teaching faculty have first right of access. If we exceed our current site license, non-teaching users' departments will be asked to pay for their own licenses. It will still be much less expensive for the University if you are added to our organization account, about 30% the cost of a personal account

We will monitor our license count carefully and notify non-teaching users if we need to pay for additional licenses. A reminder that Google meet is licensed for ALL students, faculty, and staff in the organization.

Please have your department manager/chair contact the Information Technologies Help Desk if you are interested in using Zoom for non-teaching purposes. We will need a list of malone.edu email addresses who you would like to add to the license as well as an account number to charge if we ever surpass our current license count.

Converting from a personal account

Several faculty may already have a personal account (free or paid) set up tied to their malone.edu email addresses. If this is the case, you will need to convert from a personal account to a member of our organization account. Follow the prompts on the screen to confirm that you want to switch. It will send you an email to confirm which you must click through to complete the process. More guidance on this process is available in IT Help Desk FAQ 392

Cloud recording of meetings

It is recommended that you record your class meetings for consumption by your asynchronous students as well as for review for your synchronous and in-person students. We do NOT recommend recording locally to classroom machines; record to the Zoom cloud. 

Cloud storage for Zoom meetings is a shared resource and should be managed carefully by each individual licensed user. We recommend that you download and delete recordings from the Zoom cloud on a daily basis. Those files can then be uploaded to Moodle or to other cloud storage for sharing with your students. Please limit the amount of storage you consume in the Zoom cloud to one day's worth or less than five hours of recordings, whichever is more.

Similar to licensing, we will monitor cloud storage to make sure that it is being managed well.

Please contact the IT Help Desk if you have any questions or issues. We can be reached via the web at http://www.malone.edu/helpdesk or by phone at 330.471.8428.

HyFlex Classroom Update for August 6-7

Dear Faculty and Staff:

Please see the following updates for the Fall 2020 Hyflex classrooms.

Department Training

We have heard from several departments and have scheduled training during your department retreats. If you need to schedule either a department training or would like to receive individual training, please reach out to the IT Help Desk or specifically to Michael Garwood. Contact information for the IT Help Desk can be found in FAQ130.

A special "Hyflex for Discussion-Based Pedagogy" training will be held on Monday 10 August at 2pm in MH207

Please RSVP (whether you're coming in person or attending remotely) at the following link: https://malone-edu.zoom.us/j/98643561896?pwd=RWJxRDNTcDlFbWhVSE1yUGZxYjVZdz09

Delays in Camera Hardware Delivery

The bad news: Despite our best efforts, we do not expect to receive shipment of the Owl Pro cameras until the second week of the semester. The Owl cameras are a key piece of hardware that will allow remote synchronous students to attend classes.

The good news: We are working with our hardware vendor to source alternate temporary hardware that will be in place for the beginning of class that will work almost as well. They have agreed to allow us to return that hardware to them once the Owls are in place.

Zoom and Google Meet

Based on the survey results (thank you to the eighty of you who completed the survey), we have acquired a site license that will allow all teaching faculty access to both platforms for the 2020-2021 academic year. Zoom was chosen as the preferred platform 2:1. 

Zoom set up and security updates 

We are currently configuring Zoom for Single Sign On. Any faculty who purchased zoom on their own in the spring or who are maintaining their own accounts will want to cancel their personal subscriptions.

We will send out an update to all faculty and staff when the service is ready for use.

Starting 27 September, Zoom will require that all meetings have a Passcode or a Waiting Room enabled for all paid accounts. Read the following article for more information: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360045009111

Google Meet

Google Meet is completely configured and ready to go. We will retain access to the recording and advanced functions for the 2020-21 academic year. Additional features of Google meet (breakout rooms and waiting rooms, etc.) are slated for release in late September. This article outlines those changes: https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/new-meet-features-for-edu

Zoom and Google Meet Recording Sharing

The amount of space for storing video on the Zoom platform will need to be managed on a faculty-by faculty basis. For posting recordings of your class times for asynchronous students as well as for review by in-person and synchronous students, please do not retain them in Zoom cloud storage and instead export then upload those files into Moodle or elsewhere. Doing the math on our combined storage, each faculty will have about three hours of storage apiece to manage. Recordings should be offloaded/exported from Zoom cloud and uploaded to Moodle on a daily basis.

Google Meet storage is unlimited and recordings are automatically shared to all meeting invitees. Remember to either give students instructions for accessing the class recordings or upload copies of the recordings into Moodle.

Jamboard Virtual Whiteboards

The whiteboards will not be usable when the class is meeting via Zoom or Meet. The camera cannot adequately pick up any writing on the board. There will be a touchscreen Chromebook with a stylus in each Hyflex classroom that you can use to connect to the Google Jamboard web service.

We recommend that anyone who intends to use the "whiteboard" begin familiarizing yourself with Jamboard as soon as possible. Single sign into Jamboard at: https://jamboard.google.com 

You can even begin to set up "jams" ahead of time for your classes and share those by adding the file to your meeting invite or invites. Google will prompt you to share the jam with either read only or edit access to all of the invitees on the event (your students in the case of a class meeting).

A call to faculty who depend heavily upon the whiteboard for teaching. Please reach out to us to talk options. There is a hardware version of the Jamboard. We have one installed in the CL224 tutoring room in the newly renovated Timken Center for Study and Testing in the library. We are considering the addition of one or two of these boards in key classrooms, but need feedback from faculty before investing in the technology further.

Courses (R) drive is going away for fall 2020

Dear Faculty and Staff:

We have a combination of factors which are pushing us to eliminate the legacy service of the "Courses" drive. This service will NOT be available for use in delivering course material this fall. We have been talking about deprecating this service for a couple years now. With the sudden appearance of factor 1 (below) in the last week of July, we cannot commit to it being available for students this fall.

Factor 1: A problem with remote.malone.edu

The service which allows students, faculty, and staff to access remote drives is malfunctioning. IT is working on a complete replacement of the system, but we do not know whether we will have it in place before school starts. The timing of the problem is unfortunate to say the least.

Factor 2: Outragious Consistency

As part of the effort for "outrageous consistency," all faculty have been directed to use Moodle for the delivery of course materials, for taking attendance, and for keeping grade books. Your students are taking up to five or more courses. Let us allow them to concentrate on the content of your course rather than how to obtain access to that content.

What is the "Courses" drive?

If you don't know, then don't worry about it :-) But this used to be the way that we distributed electronic files to students who are taking a class. Each faculty member had a folder which belonged to him or her. Then they would post files to that folder for each of their courses.

Help! I love the courses drive!

There are several departments and faculty on campus who have utilized the courses drive to great success. We recommend that any faculty who need assistance in onboarding to the Moodle system sign up and attend one of the Moodle trainings. 

The contents of the Courses drive will remain in place to give time for faculty who have been using it to offload its contents into an alternate location.

Please contact the IT Help Desk if you have any questions or issues. We can be reached via the web at http://www.malone.edu/helpdesk or by phone at 330.471.8428.

Malone University Classrooms - Google Meet versus Zoom

Hello Faculty and Staff:

We need your help to plan for fall. For your students who will be connecting synchronously or asynchronously to your classroom, we have offered you access to two lecture capture and meeting platforms, Google Meet and Zoom. Here are some important details about choosing which platform you will use and some things to consider as you engage in what many of you will be a different way of delivering your courses. 

At the end of this post, I will ask you to fill out a survey to let us know which platform we will source for you. If nothing else, please skip over my wordy post and take the survey at the end.

Google Meet

Google Meet is the synchronous meeting platform that is provided as part of our being a GSuite school. It is directly integrated into our Calendaring system and Google Drive. This means that you can create a calendar invitation that repeats weekly at your scheduled meeting times and use the "Add Google Meet video conferencing" button to set up a virtual meeting room.

If you record your meetings, which we recommend that you do, those meetings will automatically be recorded AND SHARED with any invitees for the meeting. The recording will be labeled with the name of what you called your meeting as well as a timestamp. All "Guests" (your students) will be sent an email a couple hours after the recording is stopped letting them know they can access the recording.

Google is also promising a slew of new features to Meet. These include:

• tighter jamboard integration (more on that later), 
• attendance tracking, 
• breakout rooms, 
• knocking features to limit "zoom bombing", 
• a Q&A function, and 
• hand raising. 

The article announcing these additions is here. In speaking with Google, most of these added features are slated for availability at the end of September. As with any software feature that has not yet been released, IT DOESN'T EXIST UNTIL IT IS HERE AND YOU HAVE TESTED THAT IT WORKS THE WAY YOU THINK IT SHOULD. It is also known in IT circles as 'vaporware'. That being said, I am confident that Google will release the above features at some point in the near future; possibly earlier than September 30 and possibly later.

Zoom

Zoom is a more mature product. There is a reason that many people call tissues 'Kleenexes' and electronic interactive whiteboards [IWBs] 'Smartboards'. People often call online meetings 'Zoom meetings.' These are cases where a product or brand has become synonymous to the function it fulfills. I also used the term 'zoom bombing' earlier in this post. 'Zoom bombing' is when a bunch of random people (not invited) jump into an online meeting and disrupt it. 

Zoom has most of the features that Google meet is promising in its fall release already nicely integrated and I think I can confidently say its video compression and transmission quality is at least slightly better than what Google Meet's current capabilities. Zoom is also only available at additional cost. 

Providing a consistent UX [user experience] to our students

Whichever platform you choose (you will be able to choose either Meet or Zoom), it is VERY important that you deliver access to your synchronous meetings in manner consistent with the other classes that a student is taking. This is not the time "to go and do your own thing" that is completely different from other faculty. I cannot emphasize enough the need to bring uniformity to as many factors as possible for our students in a time when it seems that everything has been upended and there is no shoreline in sight.

I cannot emphasize enough the need to bring uniformity to as many factors as possible for our students in a time when it seems that everything has been upended and there is no shoreline in sight. 

Here are some ways that we - as the body of educators [and believers] at Malone University - can deliver a consistent and welcoming student experience through the technologies available at the University:

• Use of Moodle for delivering course content (not using courses drive or Google Classroom or some alternate LMS)
• Use of Moodle for taking attendance its gradebook for delivering grades (not a Google Spreadsheet)
• Leverage the campus calendar AND Moodle to give the student links to class meetings and scheduling of office hours
• Cross-post any course announcements in Moodle; better yet do ALL course communications via Moodle.

One example of how the University is doing this for faculty is the approach we are taking with our classrooms. For the Hyflex classrooms, a key design decision is "outrageous consistency". We want you to be able to walk into any Hyflex room on campus and have a similar -let's say outrageously consistent - experience. 

Using the Campus Calendar

I plan to dedicate an entire post specifically to the use of the campus calendar in the near future, but the short version is that its use will allow for a consistent UX for our students, a way that students can know when they need to be in class, and facilitate connection information and the sharing of other content to the students. We are implementing meeting and common space calendaring across campus in addition to your using the calendar to schedule your course times.

Whether you use Google OR Zoom, please do the following items in our campus Google calendar.

1. Post all Course Meetings in Google Calendar. If using Google Meet, use the one click button to add your meeting invite to the event. If using Zoom, be sure to copy and paste the Zoom room meeting connection information into the Event(s).
2. Invite all of your students to the event(s). 
3. Attach files relevant to each meeting using the paperclip.
4. Post other relevant information into the event (location, description, etc.)

You should also make the final step of copy or crossposting the meeting information into Moodle. One method of doing this is to copy a link to the calendar event into Moodle.

1. Click "More actions"
   
2. Click "Publish Event" to publish the whole series (repeating/recurring events) OR click "Publish this instance of the event" to get a link to the specific meeting.
   
3. Copy the link to the event and paste/post that link into Moodle. This way your students can access the meeting either through the Moodle course page OR their calendar!
   

We need your help! Choose this day which platform you shall use!

Google Meet: Easier to record and share meetings with no additional cost to Malone and our students

Zoom: More mature conferencing product with existing breakout room features and better overall feature set.

Please fill out this survey to let us know. If you do NOT fill out the survey, you will be opted into Google Meet. You must be signed in with your malone.edu account to answer the survey.

Choose your delivery platform

Thank you!

Adam Klemann

** M. Adam Klemann, M.S. **
** Chief Information Officer **
** Information Technologies **
** Division of Finance & Business Affairs - Malone University **
** email: aklemann@malone.edu **
** help desk: 330.471.8428 - my phone: 330.471.8308 **
** Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adamklemann **
** Follow Malone Information Technologies on Twitter at http://twitter.com/maloneit **

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