Wednesday marks the official start of fall quarter. This weekend was move-in for the dorms. Students are here and settling in already, and our labs are bumping as students grab course materials and handle all the online-only pre-class bureaucracy.
This year's major new IT stuff is actually a short list, but it is important:
Printing is always a pain at the start of the quarter, that isn't new. Last year we had one student who managed to blow through their entire free-printing quota in the space of 5 hours, as they printed off what looked to be whole chapters of a textbook. Some students still dilligently print out instructor-provided PDFs. The good thing about that this year is that we now have a way for students to refill their quota with a paid quota; that system was still broken at the start of the quarter last year. Hooray!
This week is always fun.
This year's major new IT stuff is actually a short list, but it is important:
- A majority of our Computer Labs are now running Windows 7.
- Blackboard has been upgraded from 7.something to 9.1, a very significant upgrade
Printing is always a pain at the start of the quarter, that isn't new. Last year we had one student who managed to blow through their entire free-printing quota in the space of 5 hours, as they printed off what looked to be whole chapters of a textbook. Some students still dilligently print out instructor-provided PDFs. The good thing about that this year is that we now have a way for students to refill their quota with a paid quota; that system was still broken at the start of the quarter last year. Hooray!
This week is always fun.