Dear Faculty Colleagues,
As you move to conduct your courses remotely, we continue to identify ways to support you and your students in strengthening our new online experience. This includes making virtual instruction easier to conduct and more secure. This Fall, the university is introducing key technological upgrades and new tools that will provide you and your students an enhanced, engaging and experiential way to teach, learn, and create a connected Trojan community. This experience is known as the Digital Campus.
In addition, we want to protect against Zoom intrusions that can disrupt teaching and learning in very serious ways. We have strengthened our systems and we seek your partnership in preventing these troubling incidents.
What to Know
- A toolkit for faculty—located at keepteaching.usc.edu—is available to provide you with key training materials, videos, step-by-step procedures and FAQs on Blackboard, Zoom, Slack and other new technology related to assessments, grading, virtual lab software, remote access and classroom environments.
- There are a number of live training webinars on available tools.
- Similar resources were developed for your students in support of remote learning.
- Auto-generated Zoom links will be created for every class in Blackboard this Fall.
- These Zoom links are configured to protect against disruptive intruders and will be recorded to align with USC accessibility policies (e.g., transcriptions, asynchronous access, time zones, etc.).
- Auto-generated Zoom sessions are only available for the USC Zoom tenant (i.e., usc.zoom.us) and for classes taught in Blackboard.
- Faculty who use an alternative Learning Management System or log into Zoom via a school-based Zoom account will not be able to take advantage of this feature.
- Auto–generated Slack channels will be created for every course/section you have this Fall to support communication and collaboration with your students.
- Slack training materials—including basic navigation, use cases, training materials and key communications to help you use Slack in the classroom—are available on keepteaching.usc.edu.
- Information to help your students understand and use this new channel of communication to its fullest potential are also located on the keepteaching.usc.edu site.
What to Do
- Review the materials on the Digital Campus Toolkit on the keepteaching.usc.edu site.
- If you wish to opt out of the auto-generated Zoom meetings, complete this request by Thursday, August 13.
- This request must be approved by your school’s dean.
- Note: If you are opting out of the auto-generated Zoom meetings it will be your responsibility to communicate with your students about how they will access your course.
- If you wish to opt out of the auto-generated Slack channel(s) for your Fall course/section, complete this request by Thursday, August 13.
We are here to support you. If you have any questions on the adoption of these new technologies, contact the ITS Customer Support Center at 213-740-5555 or send an email to consult@usc.edu.
Thank you for all that you are doing during this time to ensure our students have an engaging and exciting Fall semester. We are grateful for your efforts.
Sincerely,
Charles F. Zukoski
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Douglas Shook
Chief Information Officer, Vice Provost, Professor of Data Sciences
cc: Office of the President
Academic Deans
President’s Senior Leadership Team
Provost’s Leadership Team
Academic Senate
Staff Assembly
GSG President
USG President