News

Over the past year, we have put many new IT protocols and safeguards in place to protect UMD accounts and data, as many of us continue to work remotely. We must continue to improve these systems to ensure the safety of our data over the long term.

UMD Zoom offers the ability to provide live Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts in real time for meetings and webinars. Once enabled, the feature provides the ability to show in-session ASR transcriptions of all spoken content, based on the session audio. The transcriptions appear during the meeting in a side panel visible to all participants.

The Division of IT is upgrading Wi-Fi equipment in South Campus Commons, Graduate Hills, and Graduate Gardens apartments begininning in January 2021. We recognize that high-quality W-iFi is essential for remote learning during COVID-19, and we have worked over Winter Break to acquire equipment and make plans for these improvements. When complete, residents will experience the following enhancements:

Beginning on January 5, 2021, all new UMD Zoom recordings will be hosted on UMD Panopto servers instead of Zoom servers. UMD Panopto is the institutional platform for lecture capture and media management. This new process enhances security levels of these recordings and consolidates the storage of instructional media.

Beginning Monday, January 11, 2021, UMD community members will no longer be able to access systems that use the university's Central Authentication Service (CAS) from computers running Windows 7 or Macintosh operating systems older than 10.13 (High Sierra). Major university systems that use CAS include UMD Google email, PHR, ELMS, Testudo, Terrapin Express, Box, MyDRL, MyUHC, and library services.

Eight One Button Studios are now available across campus! These are simplified recording studios that allow you to create high-quality video projects without having to know anything about lights and cameras. You only need to bring a flash drive with you and push a single button to start the recording.