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Closing the Digication Chapter: UVA’s Learning Tech Transition

The ePortfolio tool Digication will be removed from the Learning Tech catalog in July 2025. At that time, students will no longer be able to access the tool; instructors will retain access through July 1, 2026. Given their impact, any changes to the catalog require careful consideration and review of the relevant data. Michael Palmer, the Barbara Fried Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and co-chair of the University Teaching and Learning Technology Committee (UTLT), joined us to discuss some aspects of this important process.

Q: What is UTLT?

Michael: The UTLT committee is tasked with establishing and nurturing a vibrant digital teaching and learning ecosystem guided by data-informed decision-making. UTLT oversees research, identification, piloting, acquisition, and integration of new learning technology; assessment and periodic review of existing learning technologies; and eventual sunsetting of tools. UTLT also oversees the development of Learning Tech, the University’s gateway to all licensed, third-party learning technologies residing outside of the learning management system.

Q: What is the process for adding new centrally funded tools to the UVA digital ecosystem?

Michael: There are five criteria that guide acquisition of new, centrally-funded learning technologies:

      • Tools must fill a functional need not present elsewhere in the digital ecosystem.
      • Tools must clear all required approvals, which include a pedagogical review, security and privacy reviews, and an accessibility review.
      • Interest in tools must be widespread (i.e., across multiple schools) and expansive (i.e., interest from many instructors).
      • Tools must be cost-effective, either on a per-instructor or per-student basis.
      • Funding must be sufficient to renew licenses for at least three years.

Q: What is the process for retiring a centrally funded tool like Digication?

Michael: All tools go through periodic review. This involves the Learning Technology Advisory Board (LTAB), which is responsible for making recommendations on the renewal, discontinuation, integration, and adoption of third-party (non-LMS), institutionally-licensed learning technologies based on materials presented on data usage, cost, tool concerns, changes and a recommendation from the Assistant Director of Learning Technology management. Retirement is considered for tools that no longer meet 2-3 of the five original acquisition criteria.

Q: What were the reasons behind the retirement of Digication from the UVA digital ecosystem?

Michael: Digication has been in the UVA digital ecosystem for nearly a decade and supports instructors who use e-portfolios to help assess their students’ learning. Interest in the tool has declined steadily over the years and usage in the past year was limited to only a few departments in one school. In addition, Digication has an unusually high cost per instructor (and per student) compared to other tools. Because other licensed tools in our ecosystem can replicate most of Digication’s functionality—e.g., WordPress combined with the textual annotation tool, Hypothesis—UTLT made the decision to sunset Digication.

What resources are available to help with the retirement of Digication?

We recognize that changes such as losing access to a tool can be challenging for the UVA teaching community. To help instructors with the transition, we’ve compiled a set of  resources.

  • To preserve your work:
    • Export ePortfolios: Digication allows users to export their ePortfolios as PDFs or HTML files. This feature can be accessed through the ePortfolio’s settings. Instructions on downloading ePortfolios.
    • Backup Files: Ensure all media, documents, and other files uploaded to Digication are backed up on your local storage or cloud services. 
    • For more information, refer to Digication’s Help Desk.
  • FAQ for Students
  • FAQ for Faculty & Staff
  • Coming soon: Alternative tools to use in lieu of Digication

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News/Announcements

Unlocking Knowledge: The Power of Global Search within the CTE Ecosystem 

In today’s academic environment, finding the right resources related to using learning technology quickly and efficiently can be easier said than done. That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new global search feature on Learning Tech that’s designed to streamline the search experience, making it easier for faculty, staff, and students to access the wealth of information available. 

The global search feature is a powerful tool that not only searches Learning Tech; it also aggregates content from other sources within the CTE ecosystem, including Teaching Hub and the main CTE website. In doing so, you’re able to quickly find what you’re looking for, while also discovering something new. 

To access the global search, select the search bar in the middle of the homepage or the orange magnifying glass icon in the top right. (If you prefer keyboard shortcuts, Control-K (Ctrl+K) works, too.) Then you’ll get a search popover, seen below, where you can enter a keyword and view some featured content such as an upcoming event or new tool. Enter a keyword and explore the results.

Screenshot of the search popover that appears when searching Learning Tech

What Does This Look Like for Learning Tech?

When you search Learning Tech for a specific tool, you’ll find not only the link to that tool’s page, but also related events, Teaching Hub collections, and other resources—all conveniently located in one place. For example, if you search Canvas, you’ll find the following:

  • Canvas tool page  
  • Tools that integrate with Canvas 
  • Upcoming Canvas training events 
  • Relevant CTE workshops 
  • Teaching Hub curated collections of Canvas resources, and other helpful materials
Screenshot of the search results on Learning Tech when entering Canvas as the keyword

Key Benefits

We think you’ll enjoy using the new global search and appreciate its: 

  • Efficiency: The global search feature saves you time by providing quick access to a wide range of resources. Whether you’re looking for teaching strategies, upcoming events, or instructional materials, the search tool brings everything to your fingertips.
  • Discovery: The new global search allows you to find what you’re looking for and also discover something new in the process. By pulling content from various sources, it offers a more complete picture of available resources, meaning you won’t miss out on valuable information that might be located on a different part of the site.
  • User-Friendly Interface: The search tool is designed with the user in mind. It offers optional filters to narrow down your results by source and/or type. Plus, you can view the content in a list, table, or grid—whichever you prefer.

By providing a centralized location for all resources, including tool pages, guides, related events, and Teaching Hub collections, it streamlines the search process and enhances the user experience. Whether you’re looking for specific tools like Canvas or exploring new teaching strategies, the global search ensures you have all the relevant information at your fingertips, making it easier than ever to find what you need and something new within the UVA CTE community. Questions? Email us at learningtech@virginia.edu.

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News/Announcements

Otter.ai Pro Licensing: Ceasing Central Funding

UVA is significantly reducing the number of Otter Pro licenses available to the University community through central funding beginning August 1, 2023. After this date, licenses will be available for accommodations and special circumstances only. License requests will be approved by the Student Disability Access Center for students or the Coordinator for Academic Accessibility for instructors and staff members. Email Lori Kressin, the Coordinator for Academic Accessibility, at lorik@virginia.edu with questions.

Alternatives

There are a few alternative options and tools that you can explore:

  • Downgrade to Otter’s Free Basic Plan, which allows you 300 minutes/month. We encourage you to review Otter’s Pricing & Feature Changes FAQs to understand the features of the Basic plan and what will happen to your recordings when you downgrade.
  • Purchase your own Otter Pro plan to maintain your current service.
  • Ava is a tool that uses professional captioners and artificial intelligence to provide live captioning for any meeting—both large and small, in person and online, scheduled or last minute. There is a free plan with limited features.
  • Descript is a tool that allows users to write, record, transcribe, edit, collaborate, and share videos and podcasts. There is a free plan with limited features.
  • Zoom has built-in features for captioning and transcription.
  • Use the built-in dictation/recording features on your operating system (i.e., iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows).

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News/Announcements, Tool Announcements

Three upcoming sessions for Anthology Ally

Anthology Ally, a helpful tool for identifying and addressing common accessibility issues, is now available in UVACanvas and Darden’s Canvas system.

Several sessions have been scheduled to help Instructors and administrators learn more about the tool and how it can be used at the course, departmental, and institutional levels:

Introduction to Ally

Tuesday, February 14, 9:00-10:30 AM

The Ally team will provide a detailed introduction to the tool, and demonstrate how it can be used to easily improve accessibility for a wide variety of course content.

Join

Reporting in Ally

Tuesday, February 14, 2:00-3:00 PM

In a special session for instructional designers, the Ally team will discuss the tool’s reporting features, and how support staff can use them to identify and address areas of need.

Join

Ally Instructor Workshop

Friday, March 3, 9:00-11:00 AM

The Ally team will provide an in-depth exploration of the tool from the instructor perspective.

Join

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News/Announcements

Tech Bytes: Updates from Gradescope, Hypothesis, VoiceThread, and more

This week’s byte-sized updates:

  • Gradescope has introduced a number of new features, including course duplication to facilitate the transfer of assignments from one course to another; anonymous grading and rubric integration to promote more equitable and transparent feedback; additional flexibility for extensions; and a detailed tool status page. More information and resources related to these features are available on the Turnitin Blog.
  • Following an external review conducted by the Inclusive Design Research Centre, the LMS integration for Hypothesis has been certified as fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard. The AA standard is the benchmark for many accessibility guidelines and requirements, and includes requirements such as appropriate color contrast; consistent navigational elements; adherence to proper text spacing and sizing; and correct labels and alt text for form fields and images, respectively. More information on the certification is available on the Hypothesis Blog.
  • VoiceThread has introduced a new option to prevent Doodles from fading while onscreen, and has reformatted closed captions to appear at the bottom of the slide, with each speaker identified. An updated design for the setup page that appears while building activities in the LMS will be released on February 26.

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Tech Bytes, Tool Announcements, Tool Features

Requesting collaborative teams and graduate student access in Poll Everywhere

Since its arrival at UVA in August 2020, Poll Everywhere has become one of the university’s most widely used learning technologies, with more than 11,000 activities generating more than 374,000 submitted responses. Two of the most common requests from faculty, staff, and students using Poll Everywhere are for collaborative teams to allow presenters to share activities with one another, and for graduate students to become presenters and create and use activities. (Poll Everywhere uses an individual’s primary role in the university’s information system to determine whether to identify them as presenters or participants. Graduate students are identified as participants by default.)

Thanks to a handy new form, you can submit requests for both of these items quickly and easily. Here’s how to do so:

  1. Visit the Poll Everywhere requests form, sign in with NetBadge, and select your desired option. If you select the I’m a graduate student… option and then select the Next button, no further action is required. Your request will be directed to the Learning Tech team, and once it’s been fulfilled, you’ll receive an email invitation to join the university’s Poll Everywhere account as a presenter. Requests are typically fulfilled in one business day or less.

    If you select the I’d like to request a Poll Everywhere team… option and then select the Next button, you’ll be directed to a page to enter the information for your team.
An illustration of the first page of the Poll Everywhere requests form, with the first option selected.
  1. Enter your preferred name if desired, select your school or department from the list, and enter a name for your team.
  2. Enter the names and computing IDs of the collaborators in your team. Select the Add (plus sign) icon below the table to add more collaborators. If any collaborators are graduate students (for example, teaching assistants leading discussion sections or labs), select the checkbox so that the Learning Tech team can invite them to join the university’s account as presenters.
  3. Select the Submit Team Request button to submit your request. Requests are typically fulfilled in one business day or less.
An illustration of the Poll Everywhere teams request form, with collaborators listed in the table.

That’s all there is to it! Visit the Poll Everywhere requests form to get started, and contact the Learning Tech team with any questions.

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Tool Announcements, Tool Features

A few belated gifts from Learning Tech!

Your holiday decorations are probably long gone at this point, but the Learning Tech team has a few final presents for you as we prepare for a new semester. The latest round of features and updates include the ability to easily search for tools and related content, browse and search recorded workshops, review system requirements, and schedule one-on-one consultations.

Select an item below to learn more, or scroll through the list to explore them all:

With the innovative, powerful spotlight search option, you can simplify your navigation throughout Learning Tech and quickly connect with specific tools and related content. Select the Search (magnifying glass) icon in the top right corner of the page to open the search window, or use the command + k (Mac)/control + k (Windows) keyboard commands. Enter a tool name into the search box; matching tools, and any workshops, blog articles, and course trailers associated with them, will be included in the results.

An image of Learning Tech's new spotlight search feature.

Workshops page

Tech Week, a series of interactive workshops featuring UVA faculty and support staff sharing their experiences and recommendations for more than a dozen different tools, debuted last fall. Recordings of these sessions are available on the searchable Workshops page, with more to come.

An image of Learning Tech's Workshops page with video recordings.

Remaining license information

For tools available in limited quantities, such as EquatIO and Otter Voice Notes, the numbers of remaining licenses are prominently displayed in banners on the tool cards on the catalog page, and as part of the license information on the respective tool pages. This allows you to see exactly what’s available—and is a helpful reminder to request a license before they’re gone!

An image showing the number of remaining licenses for Otter Voice Notes.

Enhanced system requirements information

Basic information on system requirements for each of the tools in the Learning Tech catalog was added in a previous update. This information has been significantly expanded to display supported browsers and browser versions for Mac and Windows, and supported operating system versions for iOS and Android.

If you’re using a mobile device and the tool offers a mobile app, a device-specific Install App button will be displayed, allowing you to add the app with just two taps, instead of searching through an app store.

An image of a tool page displaying system requirements.

Consultation scheduling

Several tools, including Digication, Hypothesis, iClicker Cloud, and Peerceptiv, offer opportunities for instructors to meet with support staff directly to share specific questions and obtain personal assistance. These consultations can be scheduled from their respective pages in the Learning Tech catalog by selecting the Schedule Consultation option, which will direct you to the appropriate scheduling service automatically.

An image of the Schedule Consultation option available on select tool pages.

Newsletter archive

Looking for a previous message from the Learning Tech team? Look no further! Web versions of previous messages are available in the Newsletter Archive, which is linked in the footer at the bottom of the page.

An image of Learning Tech's Newsletter page archiving communications.

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News/Announcements

Annotating OneNote documents in Collab and Canvas with Hypothesis

Update: Due to UVA’s security settings, links to OneDrive documents connected with Hypothesis will expire seven days after their creation. Once the links have expired, the document will no longer be visible in Hypothesis, although the comments will remain visible.

You can reactivate expired links by following the steps in the reactivation section below.

Hypothesis is a powerful tool accessible through Collab and the School of Education and Human Development’s instance of Canvas that allows readers to add multiple types of annotations to digital texts. Thanks to a valuable new feature, instructors can link documents stored in their OneDrive accounts to their course sites in Collab or Canvas for annotation with Hypothesis. This allows instructors and students to annotate materials without making them publicly available, respecting copyright and privacy guidelines.

The steps below outline the process to add Hypothesis and connect documents in Collab; the process in Canvas is fairly similar. Instructors using Canvas can contact the School of Education Canvas Support team for assistance.

  1. Visit the Lessons tool in a course or collaboration site, select the Add Content tab or one of the Add (plus sign) icons on the page, then select the Add External Tool link. (If the Lessons tool isn’t already included in the site, you can add it quickly and easily.)
An image of the Add Content menu in the Lessons tool, with the Add External Tool option highlighted.
  1. Select the Annotations (Hypothesis) link in the list of available external tools.
  2. Enter a title for the linked document in the Tool Title and Button Text fields, modify the default description in the Tool description field if desired, then select the Save button.
An image of the Configure External Tool page, with text entered in the Tool description, Tool Title, and Button Text fields.
  1. The link to Hypothesis will be added to the Lessons page. Select the link to edit the link and connect your document.
An image of the link to Hypothesis on the Lessons page, with the link highlighted.
  1. If prompted, select the Press to continue to external tool button, then select the Select PDF from OneDrive button. Enter your UVA email address and NetBadge password to sign into your OneDrive account.
  2. A list of your OneNote documents will be displayed in a new window. Select the desired document, then select the Open button to connect it to Hypothesis and allow participants to annotate it.
An image of the OneDrive document selection window.
  1. The document is now connected, and participants can annotate it by selecting any portion of the included text and selecting the Annotate option.
An image of an annotated document in Hypothesis.

Reactivating expired links

Links to OneDrive documents connected with Hypothesis will expire seven days after their creation. You can reactivate expired links to allow students to view the document alongside the comments by doing the following:

  1. Sign into OneDrive with your UVA email address and NetBadge password.
  2. Locate the file connected with Hypothesis, select the checkbox to the left of the file, then select the Share link in the menu at the top of the page.
  1. In the share window, select the Shared Link (chain links) icon in the Shared with: list at the bottom of the window.
  1. Select the More Options (three dots) icon to the right of the link.
  1. In the Expires box, select a date up to seven days in the future, then select the Save button.

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Tool Announcements, Tool Features

Tech Bytes: A website for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, O365 Q&A, and Scholars’ Lab fellowships

This week’s byte-sized updates:

A portion of the inner wall of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers

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Tech Bytes

Tech Bytes: Captioning data, a request for Miro, O365 accounts for students, and more

This week’s byte-sized updates:

  • In recent surveys, 80 percent of UVA students indicated that captions are or would be helpful to them in some way; 78 percent of students have used captions with recorded materials such as lectures; and 70 percent of students have used captions in Zoom meetings. Numerous advantages of captions were cited, including as a tool for improved comprehension, as an aid for content review, and as an alternative to poor audio quality. The Student Disability Access Center (SDAC) has prepared a helpful captioning infographic that includes these and other helpful statistics and notes. Instructors with questions about captioning can contact SDAC or the Learning Tech team.
An excerpt from SDAC’s captioning infographic
  • Following a request from the School of Architecture, Miro is being reviewed as a potential addition to UVA’s suite of learning technologies. This process includes assessing the tool’s capabilities in a variety of areas, including pedagogical value, accessibility, security and data protection, and financial and other costs. Instructors, staff members, and students interested in Miro are invited to visit the request page in Learning Tech and selecting the Join This Request button to indicate their support and subscribe to receive updates on the review process. Significant support can help the request move forward, so don’t be shy!
An excerpt from the Miro request page
  • Currently, most UVA students use university-provided Google accounts for services such as email, contacts, calendars, and document storage and collaboration. However, the ITS department has announced a project to migrate these accounts from Google to Office 365, which is used by instructors and staff members. Most accounts will be migrated next summer, with the goal that all instructors, staff members, and students will be in Office 365 before the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester. Anyone with questions about this project can contact the Office 365 team at office365project@virginia.edu.
  • The latest update for the Zoom app is now available for download on desktop and mobile devices. The update includes presentation slide control, polling enhancements, and functionality for chatting with waiting room participants.

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Tech Bytes, Tool Announcements