Information Technology Updates
Information Technology (IT) has expanded outdoor WiFi service to include the Noehren Hall Parking lot. This work was in an effort to offer drive up WiFi service for those that would prefer to stay in their vehicle because of social distancing. The outdoor WiFi service map as been updated to include this new location.
In the world of remote instruction and learning, there are many considerations to take into account when deciding on methods and tools that you might use for your specific course. One thing faculty and instructors should take into account is the Internet bandwidth capabilities of their homes and those of their students. Not all of us live in areas with access to reliable, high-speed internet.
Keeping this in mind, Information Technology (IT) has published some guidelines and recommendations for using the various tools available to UNI faculty under different bandwidth constraints. Here's also a workshop done in collaboration between the CETL and IT-ETMS called "Remote Possibilities: Considering your Students' Bandwidth".
As always, if you have questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out by opening a Service Hub ticket.
Some Verizon wireless customers may be experiencing intermittent issues when attempting to call UNI campus phone numbers. Callers will generally received a message that states "All circuits busy". We believe this issue is caused by Verizon network outages.
The unofficial report of Verizon outages may be tracked here.
Information Technology will be upgrading VPN hardware in the datacenter on Sunday morning 3/22 from 5:30am - 6:30am. Expect a 30 minute outage of VPN services. This upgraded hardware will provide a better experience for faculty and staff that are using the VPN to connect to campus while working remotely.
Information Technology (IT) has been working directly with Adobe to acquire additional licensing for students at the University. On March 19th, 2020, that licensing was obtained and deployed. This licensing is temporary, but allows students to install these important programs on their personal computers. This temporary license will expire on May 31st, 2020.
Please visit our support article for instructions on how you can access and download these applications to your personally-owned device.
Information Technology is providing faculty and staff a number of options for voice services when working remotely. Please see this page for a comparison and instructions regarding how to get started.
Cedar Falls Utilities will perform maintenance on UNI's secondary Internet connection to increase performance and reliability if our secondary connection is needed. No outage to our primary Internet connection is expected.
Maintenance will take place on Wednesday, March 18th from 8:00am - 9:00am.
There are many fake sites and apps out there trying to take advantage of everyone's concern about the covid-19 threat. It's impossible to list all of them, but these are a couple examples. In general, seek news and information from known safe sources of information.
- A malicious website pretending to host a map of Coronavirus cases around the world (corona-virus-map [dot] com) actually contains the AZORult Trojan that will steal information, including sensitive data.
- A malicious android app that pretends to be a “Coronavirus Tracking App” which is ransomware that will infect the phone and lock it until payment is received. The malicious app is downloaded at (coronavirusapp [dot] site).
Information Technology (IT) has updated its training and workshop schedule to include multiple instances of several courses over the next month. These courses include but are not limited to:
- Bb01 - Getting Started with your Blackboard course
- Panopto video content management
- Zoom cloud video conferencing for meetings and course collaboration
For a schedule of all upcoming faculty workshops, visit the Faculty/Staff workshops calendar.
You can also visit the online training course registration page to get registered.
For help deciding which courses are right for you, visit our getting started page.
As fears and anxiety continue to rise over the spread of the corona virus across the world, so do email phishing attempts. Those with malicious intent are known to capitalize on periods of rising fear by conducting phishing campaigns that utilize techniques taking advantage of that very fear.
Information Technology urges the campus community to continue its vigilance when deciding whether to trust an email communication and click on any links held within. The IT Phishing Education website highlights several examples sent out to the university community over the past year and explains in each case why the message was a fake, and potentially, a phishing attempt.
As always, if you have concerns about a certain email message that you've received, you can forward it to security@uni.edu to receive help and guidance on whether or not the message is real.
Pages
- ITTC 36
- (319) 273-5555
