ITS intends to provide an institutional service for online Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) evaluations in time for the April 2008 course evaluations. This service will be a full, flexible service, integrated with PAWS, with good reporting capability and will provide a consistent student interface for all the course evaluations students are asked to complete online.

The SEEQ survey instrument was used by the Integrated Planning Office in a pilot project in fall 2006 and spring 2007. At its June 14, 2007, meeting University Council endorsed recommendations from the Instructional Development Committee designating SEEQ as an approved, validated instructor/course evaluation instrument at the U of S and encouraging its use in an online format.

For evaluations at the end of Term 1, those involved with the pilot project will be able to use the online SEEQ evaluations. Other colleges and departments should continue to use their current course evaluation processes.

Visit the Course Evaluations section of the website for more information.

Posted by sjh125 at 08:41 AM | Permalink

In order to improve the security of the institutional IT services, ITS is implementing a monthly downtime to apply security and related patches to all systems (applications, databases, and servers) that ITS operates. To minimize the impact of service outages, we will coordinate these with other existing scheduled outages (monthly patching of Windows Servers, weekly downtimes of SiRIUS and Unifi) so there is only one scheduled service outage per month.

Monthly outages, occurring on the second Wednesday of the month between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., will begin Wednesday October 10. All IT services provided through ITS, except those listed below, will be unavailable during that time. There will be rare occurrences when the outage will be rescheduled to the third Wednesday of the month and these changes to the schedule will be announced one month in advance.

Services that will be available are:

1. About-Us (HR system)
2. Network
3. Voicemail

Services that will NOT be available are:

1. PAWS
2. SiRIUS
3. UniFi
4. U-Who
5. U-friend
6. File Services (Cabinet, Folder, Jade)
7. Web Services (www, homepage)
8. Print Services (CPAS, Green)
9. Database Hosting (SQL server & Oracle)
10. E-mail, including Webmail
11. Blackboard/WebCT
12. MITS

Posted by sjh125 at 10:50 AM | Permalink