Intro
When I started my graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I didn’t know a lot about the instructional infrastructure outside of what I experienced as an undergraduate student. This led to a large role transition that involved on the spot learning. From teaching over the past two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I’ve compiled a quick list of useful instructional materials.
Instructional Materials
The list is broken down into four categories:
- General
- Mash of different “nice” to know about websites and services.
- Administrative
- Scheduling information, Grade Entry, and Academic Integrity.
- Learning Management Systems
- Possible systems to use to manage the course.
- Programming Resources
- Resources found around campus that are available for students to use without having a fee be assessed.
General
For those interested in teaching, these are website that I’ve found to be indispensable in preparing to teach or getting more information about the teaching environment at UIUC.
- Division of Management of Information (DMI)
- The class rosters report provides exportable student data such as e-mail address, major, year, degree, and enrollment data in an exportable .xls or .txt file that can be found under the roster section on self-service.
- Request a Space provides a direct line to scheduling with F&S for special events and/or makeup classes. Useful to avoid having to wait for office staff members to file the request and/or follow-up on space requests. Must be a faculty member.
- Technology Enhanced Classrooms and Classroom Capacity
- Provides images showing what the classroom looks like, the technology present, and capacity of the room.
- Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF)
- Allows for computer-based assessment using either PrairieLearn, RELATE, and LON-CAPA on computers running Linux (CentOS 7).
- Reources:
- Webstore.
- Free software for teaching and promotional material for training seminars run by Technology Services.
- Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL)
- Hosts teaching seminars, provides certifications for graduate students, and handles onboarding of online courses to Coursera.
Administrative
Here is my go-to list for understanding important events throughout the semester such as academic dates such as start and end of semester as well as final exam scheduling, grade entry, and academic integrity violations.
- Academic Calendars
- Contains information related to start and end of the term alongside any vacation days and so forth.
- Final Exam Scheduling Information
- Times when the final exams are scheduled. These times are based off of when a class meets. You must respect the time assigned.
- In particular, Article 3 Part 2 – 201 of the Student Code says:
- “If take-home final examinations are assigned, they are to be submitted at the time and date of the regularly scheduled final examination.”
- “If a conflict final examination has been scheduled for any of the courses, the student must take one or more of these conflict final examinations. If conflict final examinations are offered for more than one course, the student must take the conflict for the course that has the largest number of students.”
- UIUC Self-Service: Grade Entry under “Faculty” tab
- Grades must be taken from the LMS and entered into self-service to be the official grade of record.
- Grade Change Form
- After the initial grade submission, instructors are able to change students grade at anytime. Please note that this process is tedious and requires manual approval by the department and registrar for each grade. Double check your grades before submitting them.
- Course Schedules
- Listing of the course run times, co-teachers, and final exam information.
- Community of Care
- Resources and advice for instructors to address students who are in crisis.
- Faculty Academic Integrity Reporting (FAIR)
- University-wide system that handles academic integrity violations such as cheating, plagarism, fabrications, enabling infractions, and so on.
- Note: Any FAIR infraction will not be placed on a student’s transcript. These infractions rest inside of the student’s disciplinary file. Details can be found in Office of the Provost’s Quick Reference Guide to Academic Integrity.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
The campus view on learning tools is broken down to either professionally licensed software or homegrown software.
- Professional: Licensed software and maintained by technology organizations
- compass2g powered by Blackboard Learn
- The IT organization behind this is Technology Services.
- Learn@Illinois powered by Moodle
- The IT organization behind the moodle implementation is ATLAS-TLT
- LON-CAPA
- compass2g powered by Blackboard Learn
- Homegrown: Developed on campus by professors.
- PrairieLearn
- Project Lead: Matthew West
- Source: GitHub
- RELATE
- Project Lead: Andreas Kloeckner
- Source: GitHub
- PrairieLearn
Programming Resources
As I teach programming classes, I try to keep a list of resources that are available for use inside the classroom.
- Illinois Open Source Effort
- Systems for Office Hour queuing, repository generation, and attendance.
- Illinois Campus Cluster (ICC)
- Distributed computing resources that can be accessed and used in courses if the department is an investor on the platform.
- Azure Notebooks powered by Jupyter Notebooks
- Limited to 4GB of RAM and 1GB of storage, but it’s free as a preview right now, and UIUC has a Microsoft cloud contract
- Source: Azure Notebooks on GitHub
- GitHub@UIUC powered by GitHub Enterprise
- Pilot platform for using GitHub locally.
- GitLab@UIUC powered by GitLab Community Edition
- Pilot platform for using GitLab locally.
Fin
That’s all folks! If you feel like I missed something, please feel free to contact me.