Month: February 2017

iThenticate

Are you looking for a way to screen your manuscripts and other scholarly works for content that may be too similar to other published material?  OSU subscribes to iThenticate, a service similar to TurnItIn that is built specifically for research and other documents that faculty and staff might create. Avoid accidental plagiarism by running your documents through this service provided by the Office of Responsible Research Practices (ORRP).  Read more from the ORRP and log in to iThenticate.

Training materials: http://www.ithenticate.com/training

FAQ: http://www.ithenticate.com/products/faqs#ithenticate

Old Carmen is Going Away May 14, 2017

Old Carmen (D2L) will not be accessible as of May 14 (one week after the grade posting deadline). This truly is the last call to move any content, including course content, student records, or anything else you may need from old Carmen as soon as possible. During the summer of 2017, ODEE staff will have limited read-only access to D2L. After that, the Ohio State instance of D2L will be dismantled.

If you’re teaching in old Carmen this spring 2017 semester, you may want to mark your calendar with a reminder to export your grades and student submissions used for grading at the end of the term. 

If you haven’t already, submit a request to have your old Carmen course moved into Canvas now at http://go.osu.edu/movemycourse.  Keep in mind that exporting your course content from old Carmen (D2L) does not include student course submissions.  If you need to archive grades or student course work submissions, you will want to export them separately.  See this ODEE article for more information regarding records retention. The main thing to keep in mind is that student submissions used to determine their course grade need to be kept only for two terms after the term in which they were submitted.

Need to export grades from an old Carmen (D2L) course?  Use these steps.

Need to export Dropbox submissions? Use these steps.

Need to export Discussion Board postings?  Use these steps.

Media and Your Classroom: Know Your Resources

Many instructors in the College of Nursing like to make multimedia resources available to students, whether it is through openly available online resources or password-restricted resources on the CON Nucleus server.  Some instructors may have noticed, however, that students have difficulty accessing certain resources, especially as more and more students choose to access the internet through tablets and phones.  We reached out to the Health Services Library (HSL) and the Office of Distance Education and eLearning (ODEE) to learn about what other resources may be available for instructors to use in their classes.
Nursing Education sure has changed through the years!

  • Procedures Consult: The HSL has access to procedure videos with associated text and images through ClinicalKey. You can browse the available Procedures Consult videos at the link above.
  • Films on Demand is run by the HSL and has a selection of over 3,000 videos on medicine and health topics.
  •  Adding New Purchases to HSL: When the Health Services library buys resources, physical copies will be available for checkout from the library and streaming video would be licensed for all of OSU.  If you have suggestions for resources that could be purchased and made available, you can contact Joe Payne or Kerry Dhakal.
  • ODEE Secured Media Library:  ODEE also offers a Secured Media Library where students can access and watch videos online.  To find out how to add a new title to the Secured Media Library, see the article on adding to the Secured Media Library here. To give students access to view an existing title in the Secured Media Library, an instructor must create a playlist and assign a specific video to a class for the students to have access to view it.  It’s a quick and easy procedure, but students will not have access to view videos on the Secured Media Library unless an instructor in their course (1) creates a playlist,  (2) adds a video to it, and (3) assigns a course and all of its sections to view the video.
  •  Issues with Nucleus:  If you or your students have problems watching videos on the Nucleus server, inquiries can be sent to CON-InformationTechnology@osu.edu.

Images found at the following web pages:

 

Cybersecurity Part 2: External Threats

In our previous cybersecurity post, we discussed internal threats and what you can do to avoid them.  This post will focus on external threats, and how the College of Nursing IT department is working to keep our network safe.

An external threat is an attack or attempted attack by an outsider trying to gain access to a network.  There are several levels of external threats, including:

  • Basic: These usually take the form of scripts that automatically search the internet for vulnerabilities. They are not usually aimed at specific people or networks.
  • Advanced: These are attackers actively trying to access a network from the outside.
  • Advanced Persistent: These are often hackers who are state-sponsored or may even come from inside foreign governments.  They have the time, money, resources, and motivation to get into a network and they will continue trying new attacks.  Attacks of this nature are often the ones you hear about on the evening news.

We asked Erik Yarberry, network administrator for the College of Nursing, what we are doing to mitigate threats from both external and internal attacks.  Here are a few things our network is equipped with:

  • A Firewall, or a system that uses certain rules to control traffic into and out of the network.  The CON has two firewalls– one that protects all networks inside the CON (including Nursing_WiFi) from the outside, and then another one that keeps Nursing_WiFi separate from the wired network.
  • A Virtual Private Network (VPN) which encrypts internet connections to network resources that are not available to the public
  • Splunk, a program which exports all of the network’s system logs and allows network administrators to search those logs using sophisticated techniques
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Software which protects all of the network’s data from exposure or being compromised.
  • Various alerts about possible “ransomware” attacks, compromised accounts, too many login attempts, etc

With all of these programs and defense mechanisms in place, our network runs every day while fending off potential attacks from the outside.  In our next and final entry for this series, we will discuss more ways that you can protect your information and keep the CON network secure.

 

View Example Courses in Carmen Canvas

Did you know that Canvas has sample courses for you to view and download as templates?

ODEE has developed two courses you can peruse and download as templates if you wish.  One course is for resource-heavy supplements to face-to-face courses, and the other is a fully online course. Take a look here.

The Canvas community (operated by Instructure) also has sample course templates that you can look through and download if you are interested. Find those here.

It’s great to see what others are doing.  Comment below or email us at CON-InformationTechnology@osu.edu if you have questions or want to share your experience with course templates.