19 March 2020 - Update for ucisa members - school exam cancellations, highlights from yesterday’s Teams and LMS integration Microsoft session, recording available for Jisc online briefing
ucisa support – school exam cancellations
Yesterday it was announced that school exams would be cancelled. ucisa will work closely with UCAS and Universities UK to ensure that institutional and corporate members are kept up to date as proposals emerge.
Universities UK have issued about the role of universities in supporting students, saying “The government understands that universities must continue some essential services and cannot fully be locked down given students living on many campuses and some areas of research that cannot be left unmonitored. Universities are particularly mindful of international students who are separated from friends and family and may be unable to travel because of the pandemic. UUK added, “students should not lose out on the opportunity to go on to university this year because of the challenges posed by the pandemic.” Full statement here.
Highlights from yesterday’s Microsoft Teams meeting for ucisa members - LMS and Microsoft Teams Meetings integration
Microsoft demonstrated the recent integration with Canvas. Information is available here. Whilst the demonstration was for one LMS (Canvas) the principles of integration apply to all, and delegates on the call were encouraged to lobby their corporate supplier where relevant. To note: institutions make the LMS the entry point (rather than Teams), and so for Canvas you would schedule in the Canvas calendar but paste a meeting link in rather than adding students to a Team. (The gotcha here is remembering that you won’t be synching back to Outlook).
A brief discussion followed on standard and targeted release for Office 365. The meeting closed with a brief discussion on Microsoft’s School Data Synch which matches module records from student record systems to Office 365 (that this would not be desired by some institutions was acknowledged).
We hope to receive the recording soon. In the meantime, if you are thinking about doing an integration you can see which institution has the same VLE as you by accessing the ucisa Corporate Information Systems Group’s annual survey.
Recording available for Jisc’s Planning for … online briefing; second webinar in the series is 23 March at 14:00-15:00
A recording is available for the Planning for … online briefing webinar that took place on 16 March. The second briefing is scheduled for 23 March at 14:00-15:00. (This is not a repeat of the briefing that took place on 16 March).
