The IT Staff and graduate student employee's at the School of Information have a long history of pioneering academic and educational technology at the University of Texas. Staff and students at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science started what became the first WWW server for a College or School on March 22nd, 1994, the sixth Web server in the State of Texas. A PhD. student and a MLIS student created the first online Web-based course at UT, "LIS312- Information in Cyberspace" first taught in the summer semester 1999. Streaming audio and video, screen video tutorials, searchable video, learning management systems, high-definition videoconferencing and web conferencing, and video content management systems were pioneered here first before being adopted across UT and beyond.

This rich legacy of experience with online education as well as managing classroom technologies leaves us well-suited to support faculty and students with academic and educational technologies.

Services We Provide:

Consulting

If a student needs it for a class, we can help. If it can help improve your teaching or make it more efficient, we can help you find a way to realize your vision.

Classroom and conference room support

We maintain our classroom and conference room technologies, and constantly seek to improve them, while retaining a heightened sense of awareness of usability and accessibility issues.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

An effort to make education affordable for all, we are a member of the UT OER Working Group, and produce all of our materials either as standalone OER resources, or as Canvas Commons courses that can be imported into any Canvas course. We can help you do the same, and more!

Interactive Web conferencing

it's no surprise that UT used Zoom, Panopto, and Canvas to move online during the worst of the Covid-19 Pandemic, we used that combination here for years in our undergraduate online courses. Zoom has a lot of features, and we try to stay current with all of them.

Digital Portfolios

We are part of the pilot team working to implement "UT Creates" for UT students to use to create digital portfolios using a Wordpress Multiuser site. This is a joint effort between the Information Technology Services, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the College of Liberal Arts, and the School of Information. This also has the potential to provide faculty access to a wide variety of Platform as a Service (PasS) applications for teaching and research that  are not supported at UT.

Lecture Capture

UTA 1.208 is setup for programmable lecture capture,  we can setup recording for your courses for the entire semester, and they will appear in your Canvas course. Lecture capture availability for other classrooms coming soon!

Multimedia Content Creation

The Information Commons operates two "sound rooms" outfitted with a Mac Studio, PC workstation, professional grade microphones, and audio I/O devices that can be reserved for a variety of multimedia uses including tutorial creation, podcastpodcasts/audio recordings, or specialized audio/video multimedia presentations.

UT Educational Technology Coalition, Center for Teaching and Learning, and ITS Technology, Learning, and Collaboration

We represent the iSchool on a variety of collaborative efforts across campus to support the use of academic and educational technologies. If we don't have an answer, we know where to find it.

Software We Support

Canvas

We administer our departmental Canvas courses, and can create practice courses, consult on and engage extensions and LTI modules for Canvas, and either answer or find the answer to your questions.

• Canvas Resource Center

Canvas Commons

We have created and maintain several OER Canvas Commons courses that are available to all Canvas users world-wide.

• Panopto Made Easy
• Microsoft 365 Made Easy
• UT Creates Made Easy

Microsoft 365

Interactive Web conferencing, and a whole lot more!  The A5 agreement made by UT System gives us access to the large majority of the Microsoft software ecosystem. The Commons staff are currently creating tutorials for Microsoft Teams in a OER Canvas Course, and helped create tutorials to move us from Google Desktop to Microsoft 365.

• Microsoft 365 Made Easy
• Campus Microsoft 365 Guide

Panopto

From the integration with Canvas to your students creating video projects inside of Canvas using their mobile phones, we have more experience with Panopto than anyone on campus. Whatever your need is for video, Panopto can help. We maintain an OER Canvas course called "Panopto Made Easy" that can be imported into any Canvas course. Panopto also serves as the video content management system (VCMS) for all class Zoom recordings via the Zoom>Panopto integration.

Zoom

Zoom is the original two-way interactive web-conferencing application initially adopted here at the School of Information, but is now facing serious competition from Microsoft Teams. We can help with both, and extend Zoom with the 360 Owl Meeting Cameras, as well as help you access campus Zoom resources like shared webinar licensing for large audiences.

Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps

Students, faculty, and staff can access Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps licenses on the Commons collaboration stations, as well as the multimedia content creation rooms.

Camtasia

Camtasia is a full-featured screen video capture toolset that we use to create tutorials and training materials. It is available for students, faculty, and staff in our multimedia content creation rooms. It now features a direct export to Panopto for video distribution.