Distributed via email to faculty on 4-3-2020.
We each have our individual challenges working from home- such as Annabelle who lives with a Rice OIT staff member. We hope you will find these resources helpful.
We Are Here For You
The Office of Information Technology is committed to supporting you as you adjust to teaching and working remotely. Prior to the start of remote teaching, Learning Environments (LE) partnered with Rice Online Learning and the Center for Teaching Excellence to offer individual workshops for each school as well as a number of one-on-one training sessions. There were 500 attendees at the school sessions while another 400 watched the recorded videos. LE held close to 100 one-on-one training sessions as well. We will continue to be here to support your teaching needs.
Support
Learning Environments staff are available by phone at 713-348-4989 to help you troubleshoot and answer problems while you are teaching. Business hours are from 7:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Monday – Friday but support staff members are on call in the evenings.
Additionally, if you have questions on Canvas, Kaltura, Zoom or any other academic technology, you can submit a Help Desk ticket (via our online help formor email) and someone from Learning Environments will contact you. We are happy to set up one-on-one training sessions via Zoom to provide you the help you need.
For more general questions, you can also call the Help Desk staff from 7:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Monday – Friday at 713-348-HELP (4357). (Walk-in services have been suspended.) Or look for the answer to your question by searching our KnowledgeBase.
Remote Teaching Resources
A number of excellent resourceshave been created to help you with questions or step by step instructions on how to do something. The Remote Teaching Resourcesguide in Canvas offers steps for communicating with your students, creating a course in Canvas, using Zoom, securing Zoom for privacyand a number of additional functional tools, such as how to share documents, record a lecture, give a live lecture, create an assessment, and more.
Tools
Canvas
Rice’s learning management system, Canvas, is designed to manage your courses and student communications. You can find information on using Canvas in the Remote Teaching Resources modulewithin Canvas. You can also get 24/7 support via chat or phone from within Canvas. For details, log in to Canvas and click on the Help icon. For tips and tricks, follow the Teaching and Learning with Canvas blog.
Video Conferencing
Zoomis a collaboration and online meeting tool. Zoom License accounts (formerly called Pro accounts) are available to all Rice faculty, staff, and students. Zoom can also be used in Canvasto allow instructors to schedule online meetings within Canvas. Google Hangouts Meetis an alternate tool for virtual meetings and is accessible through the G Suite platform.
Recording Your Lectures/Lessons
There are a couple of options for recording your lessons for viewing offline or asynchronous delivery. Zoom allows for recordingand works well when you are presenting to a live audience. If you wish to record your lessons in advance, Kalturaworks well for this. Kaltura is a lecture capture tool and can receive multiple inputs (webcam, doc cam, etc.).
Software
Faculty are eligible for free and discounted software including Adobe Creative Cloud, Crashplan, Office 365, Matlab, Mathematica and more. Many of our vendors have extended the usage of our licenses to allow faculty and students to be able to download the software onto their personal computer at no cost to them. Check the software pageto see which software includes this feature.
Secure Connections
Additional software may be needed to securely connect to Rice resources. Using VPN(virtual private network) securely connects your computer to the Rice network. Duoprovides an extra authentication step and is required by some systems, such as VPN and Esther.
Home Network
One of the challenges of working remotely can be your home Internet service. If you are having issues, check out these helpful tips from Internet2 (Rice is a member of this collaborative research and education technology community.)
Tips for Troubleshooting Home Connectivity
Optimizing Your Home Network for Working and Learning
Research Computing
If you already use Rice research computing resources, access remains the same since using research computing resourcesis done remotely. If you are interested, the Center for Research Computingstaff welcomes the opportunity to support your research computing needs. CRC staff can offer advice and set up services from high-performance computing/high-throughput computing (HPC/HTC) to research virtual machines and cloud (ORION) to research data facility (RDF).
Security Reminder
Follow university guidelinesto protect your computer and Rice data. Keep your guard up against email scams designed to obtain your account information, especially during this crisis.