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Instructional Support

Fall Quarter EEE Activities

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UCI’s Electronic Education Environment (EEE) team is working with interested instructors on a pilot program to evaluate the WebCT web-based course development package (see http://www.webct.com). WebCT provides faculty with a set of web-browser software tools for developing course web pages. WebCT also provides a wide array of additional features that can be added to a course, including a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, grade maintenance, and other tools.

EEE introduced a variety of new workshops during fall quarter including “Using EEE Tools to Compliment Class Instruction”, “Introduction to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)”, and “Creating Images for the Web.” Seehttp://eee.uci.edu/doc/workshops for schedules and registration information; send queries about EEE to EEE@UCI.EDU.

Filed Under: EEE Tagged With:

Instructional Computing Lab Summaries

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With the help of campus lab managers, NACS has created two summaries of UCI open-access instructional computing labs. The first is a summary of classroom labs that can be scheduled by faculty for classroom use. The summary lists the location, hours of operation, number and type of computers, available software, and reservation contact information for each lab. The classroom lab summary is available in the Web as follows:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/clc/instruct-labs.html

The second summary lists the instructional labs at UCI open to students of all majors and available for drop-in use. The hours of operation, location, type of computer, and a summary of software available is listed for each lab. The summary is especially useful as a reference to provide students to ensure they are aware of facilities available to them; it is available in the Web as follows:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/clc/open-labs.html

NACS’ Indirect Support Team plans to work with campus lab managers to keep both of these documents current — this will be a bit of a challenge due to the constant growth and change in UCI computing labs.

New Open-access Graduate Student Lab

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Note: The GradEA Lab is no longer in operation.

NACS is pleased to announce the new “GradEA” Graduate Student Computing Lab, located in Engineering Gateway room 1141C. GradEA was created to provide UCI graduate students access to an expanded set of computing resources for their research and instructional activities.

The 8 DEC UNIX workstations in the GradEA computing “cluster” were brought online earlier in the summer to provide graduate students additional remote computing access for e-mail and other uses. NACS has now added additional software to the cluster, opened the lab for local access, and created a study area in the lab. Software applications can now be run remotely over the network, or in the lab facility itself. Local access is especially useful when doing display-intensive work. Manuals and other forms of documentation are also available in the lab, which is open to UCI graduate students 24 hours a day.

NACS plans to add to GradEA in the future and would like input as to what graduate students need in the way of software, computers, peripherals, manuals, and other computing tools. Please send your input via e-mail to NACS@UCI.EDU, or contact Allen Schiano, Manager of NACS Core Services, at 824-2829.

For more information on GradEA, please see: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/gradea

NACS Humanities Instructional Building Lab

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Dell Pentium II

Dell Pentium II

This fall, NACS opened the “NACS@HIB” drop-in instructional lab in the new Humanities Instructional Building. This lab has thirty 266Mhz Dell Pentium II PCs running Microsoft Windows NT. Each system has the standard NACS Lab configuration plus 64MB of memory and a 100MB “Zip” removable disk drive. Several 1000MB “Jaz” removable disk drives are also provided for higher-capacity storage needs. While NACS@HIB is especially convenient for students in Humanities and the Arts, it is available to all UCI students, staff, and faculty. Currently, the lab is open during the day, but in the future NACS hopes to expand lab hours into the evening.

Fall Quarter Electronic Activity

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With the arrival of Fall quarter come the usual changes on campus – quiet campus walkways turn into bustling thoroughfares, parking spaces once plentiful are full by 9 AM, large crowds are found at eating establishments at mid-day. Similar changes occur in the mostly-invisible world of electronic communication.

Over 4,000 new students have initiated their UCI network access (“activated their UCInetIDs”) since the beginning of the summer. “Activation” is the process by which students learn what UCInetID they have been assigned, agree to follow UCI’s computer use policy, select private passwords for use with personal UCInetIDs, and receive EA (Educational Access) computing/e-mail accounts. UCI students are very well connected – 95% of UCI undergraduates have active UCInetIDs. In fact, only 40 of the sophomore class of 3,000 students have not activated their IDs.

In the past, the activation process occurred almost entirely at the beginning of the new school year. The process began in June this year, as new students attending summer programs were given the opportunity to activate early. As a result, over half of UCI’s new students activated their IDs before Orientation Week. This is an indication of the growing importance of network services among UCI students.

There are other signs of fall quarter activity – over 175,000 e-mail messages were processed on the student EA systems during the first week of class. Over 300 courses had active EEE Course Mailing Lists, and 1,212 messages had been delivered to subsets of 14,198 student subscribers of those lists.

The EEE (Electronic Educational Environment) Web server had links for 155 course web pages as of October 4th, an all-time high for UCI (establishing a UCI class Web page is at the sole discretion of UCI faculty, unlike other campuses recently in the news). The EEE server fielded 94,343 requests during the first week of class.

There are more visible signs of electronic activity as well, as NACS, Information and Computer Science, Biological Science, Library, E-Link, and other computer labs become very popular places on campus. As electronic activity continues to increase, NACS and campus computing supporters strive to keep up with it. This takes time, money, and patience, all of which are particularly precious commodities as the new school year begins.