Ruckus and iTunes U
Update

One Site, One Login
By Skip Warnick

Have you tried Ruckus yet? Nearly 10,000 UM students have downloaded more than 5.8 million tracks since the service was first adopted in summer 2007!

The Ruckus Network offers undergraduate and graduate students free, legal, and virus-free access to more than 3 million music tracks on up to two unique laptop or desktop computers. For a nominal fee, you can also access more than 4,000 movies, television shows, and music videos. Other benefits of the service include the ability to download albums in less than a minute, to get new music every week, and to check out exclusive artist and music label spotlights, interviews, and photos.

Last year, OIT also facilitated the arrival of iTunes U (www.umd.edu/iTunesU) on campus, giving faculty members and students easy access to educational content such as podcasts and providing iPod users and members of the Macintosh community with additional sources of legal audio and video content. OIT and University Relations have been working together to provide access to both public information and private academic content through iTunes U. The site is currently under reconstruction and will be released as two sites to give the university community and the general public easier access to appropriate information.

For more information about the university's legal digital media service offerings, please visit www.oit.umd.edu/musicservice.

E-mail, Testudo, ELMS (powered by Blackboard), resources you use on a daily basis, each requiring you go to a different Web site and log in using the same set of credentials. Wouldn’t it be nicer to visit one site, log in one time, and have access to all these applications and more? Well, you can with the university’s MyUM portal!

Simply point your browser to www.my.umd.edu, log in using your Directory ID and password, and voilà — e-mail on the landing page, local weather, a news reader you can point to your favorite feeds, a whole tab filled with Testudo applications along with all of your ELMS courses, another filled with resources that enhance life after classes.

Sounds good? How about adding a personal calendar that contains your class schedules? Manage your time, your academics, and your personal life all in one place, with one login. Take some time to visit the site and check out the resources available. Something’s not there? Use the suggestion box to communicate with the portal staff. It’s your portal — help us make it all you want it to be.

Check Out the Results of Course Evaluations Campus-Wide!   By Renee Baird Snyder

CourseEvalUM, the university’s online course evaluation system initiated last fall after University Senate approval of a Student Government Association proposal, has additional features this year for students who want to see how one course compares to another. The results of the evaluations from fall 2007 and spring 2008 are posted through the CourseEvalUM Reporting link at Testudo. By mid-fall, summer 2008 results will also be available. New students and any returning students who completed all of their CourseEvalUM evaluations for spring can see all posted results. (Hint for new students: Be sure to complete yours in the fall if you want to keep this access.)

Students can use the new search features to search for any courses taught by a certain instructor, to search any course by prefix (for instance, “Math140” or even “Math1” to get all 100-level math courses listed to help you decide what to take), or to search by term to see results for courses taught fall, spring, or summer.

Results display responses to the items available for student review, a comparison of the responses for a given course with others at the same level in the same college (e.g., Dr. Smith’s Math 140 compared to all 100-level courses in CMPS), and also the percentage breakdown of grades students earned in the course.

In the spring, three colleges — the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the Robert H. Smith School of Business, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences — added college-specific evaluation items to the university-level standard ones. This summer, the College of Education also added college-specific items. For fall semester evaluations, even more colleges will add customized items, helping them address issues specific to their courses and programs.

Check out the results, and be sure to complete your own evaluations this fall. Spread the word to your friends and classmates! The more students that participate, the greater the number of courses and instructors that can be displayed in the online reports. At least two years of results will be live for you to view to help you decide what courses and instructors you want to choose.

You can find more information, including periodic updates and FAQs, at the CourseEvalUM info Web site: https://www.irpa.umd.edu/Assessment/
CourseEval/stdt_faq.shtml.

(No access to results? You must have missed completing one or more of your spring 2008 evaluations. Be sure to complete all of your fall 2008 evaluations so you can see all of the results in the spring!)